Objectives of the project

A statement of work (SOW) is a document that describes the deliverables, services, and products that a project is anticipated to produce. Therefore, s statement of work outlines the work that is to be carried out and accomplished by a project and regardless of the size of a project it should have a statement of work (Braglia, and Frosolini, 2014, p.21). Therefore a statement of work describes the project’s vision, scope, objectives as well as deliverables in simple terms these are the tasks that the project is supposed to achieve. Also, SOW outlines the different roles, stakeholders and responsibilities within the project which means the individuals that will take part in the project in addition to the financial resources, personnel and quality plans that is the manner in which the project will be performed. The statement of work is developed once the project initiation process is completed. Accordingly, the statement of work is crafted by the service provider and then presented to the project sponsor for an agreement prior to the formal appointment of the project team (Corvello, Javernick-Will, and Ratta, 2017, p.24). As a result, in the case of Pashendale Holding Ltd (PHL) the purpose of its statement of work is to describe deliverables, roles and responsibilities, constraints, assumptions, application development process as well as the project management methodologies that shall be applied to improve its marketing and customer service. Indeed, the primary gaol of Pashendale Holding Ltd is to redevelop its websites to see to it that it is in the position to market its construction services to a broader market share, gain new clients.

The Pashendale Holding Ltd website redevelopment project intends to realise the following objectives:

• To enhance its marketing strategies and customer service
• To be able to win new clients and expand its market share
• To develop a more dynamic website that will consists of sufficient content about the company’s latest building progresses, the company’s most recent news, customer testimonials, and affiliate network platform using a simple and user-friendly interface.    
• To develop a website that will aid Pashendale Holding Ltd to work closely with its customers by enabling a timely delivery of feedback to prospective clients and generally enhance the company’s interaction with its clients.              

The Pashendale Holding Ltd project scope statement include planning, designing, execution, implementation as well as training for the new website. Consequently, the scope of work will enable the project manager together with the project supervisors to be in a better position to allocate the right amount of work that is sufficient to successfully accomplishing the website redevelopment. Project scope management involves three major components that is planning, controlling and closing (Bingham, and Gibson 2016). The planning phase illustrates the attempts by the project manager and the team to define the work that is to be undertaken throughout the project life cycle. In this case, the project manager shall be required to make sure that there are enough resource for designing, building, testing in addition to implementation of new website. Since the scope comprises three phases it is an indication that in order to accomplish the website redevelopment process, there are various tasks that will have to be performed by the website design contractor. The control phase involves monitoring and controlling of the website redevelopment process which exclusively focuses on scope creep, documentation of the tracking, approval and disapproval of changes in the project (Ye, 2018). On the other hand, closing comes as the final process. Thus, this phase entails auditing of the project deliverables as well as assessing of the produced results against the initial plan.    

Statement of work

Table 1: Project scope information

The planning phase of the website redevelopment the contractor will be expected to create and present a detailed project plan which consists of the work breakdown structure, schedule, implementation plan, testing plan, training plan as well as transition plan. Accordingly, the constrictors presents the project plan to the project sponsor (Pashendale Holding Ltd) for review and approval. In the essence of this case study, so that to be in a position to define the project requirements at the design phase, the project contractors will have to work closely with the Pashendale Holding Ltd staff especially the Marketing Chief Officer (MCO) Sennveasna Naveen at the initial stage. Certainly, this will enable the project constrictor in the collection of the project requirements, which will be of great benefit in establishing project metrics. The creation of Pashendale Holding Ltd website demands that the contractor design the web application based on collected requirements for the project plan approval. Also at the planning time and designing stage it is the responsibility of the project manager to provide Pashendale Holding Ltd with a documented status update through weekly meetings that are to be carried out by the project.  

On the same note, project scope include controlling. Control calls for the project contractor to monitor all the processes involved in the website redevelopment activities such as coding, execution, testing and implementation of the project product. For effective monitoring and control the project manager (contractor) will have to carry out product testing both using the iLab test and in a restricted beta release to debug any coding as well as other issues find out during the time of testing. After that, the contractor will then compile a testing report of the product being delivered for presenting to the Pashendale Holding Ltd for review and approval. During the implementation phase the project manager will first be required to implement a newly designed website on the server of Pashendale Holding Ltd before it commence it offer of 24 hours a day and seven days a week website support. It is the role of the project manager to make sure that the contractor provide the Pashendale Holding Ltd staff with training according to the initial training plan that was approved at the kick-off of the project.           

A project milestone is a management tool used to outline a point in a project schedule, which notes the commence time and the completion date of a project. Accordingly, project milestones are used to define the start of a project all through to the completion of a project mainly through the use of a scheduling tool. Therefore, milestones are powerful elements of a project plan since they illustrate the major events by mapping a forward movement. According to Too, Le, and Yap, (2017) milestones acts as signposts throughout the entire project, thus, they help to make sure that the project manager stray on track (p.1126). Minus a project milestone track, the project manager will only but be monitoring tasks and not maintaining the right project path. Milestones, do more than only showing the progress of a project as they aid in communicating all the things that take place within the project. In this context, the project contractors will use milestones all the way from the initiation and planning phase progressively until the last phase of the project (Wade, 2017). Project managers make use of the Gantt chart to include all the milestones chart features in a project management software. In the case of Pashendale Holding Ltd the initial milestone of the project is the release of the statement of work which is coming on 5 Septemebr 2018. The next milestone shall be the designing of the website and process of selecting of the project contractor. This milestone is expected to take at most three weeks. These two activities fall under the project initiation phase. The following milestone is project kick-off, then website design review. After that the website contractors shall move to the implementation milestone which is schooled to take six weeks from the time of project commencement. Once the implementation millstone is over the next milestone shall be project training whereby the contractor will he tasked with training the company’s employees on how the website works. The training process shall take at most one week and lastly but not least is a review of the project completion process which is estimated to take one week.  

Project scope management

Table 2: Project Schedule/Milestone

Milestones plays a major role in project planning in a range of ways such as:

Monitoring of deadlines. Research has shown that no plan can be complete minus a list of deadlines (Aleong et al., 2016). Thus, the most suitable way to make the plans of a project noticeable is by use of the technique of project management milestones as well as deliverables. As a result, the project contractor will use a project milestone to represent all the events and activities involved in the redeveloping of the company website together with the dates when each project face shall be completed.

A project schedule is a toll that is used by project managers to communicate which tasks project task should be carried and the organisational resources to be allocated for doing the work. Similarly, the schedule determines the timeframe for completing a specific task (Rad et al., 2016, p.59). A project consists of different tasks which have to be completed within a given period having a definite kick-off data and due date to ensure it is accomplished on time (Ghoddousi, Ansari, and Makui, 2017, p.781). Since a project comprises various moving parts, which are frequently changing, a project scheduling software is used to automatically keep on updating the project managers about the tasks that rely on each other. Therefore, a project schedule allows for the systematic workflow of events (Jeong, Bae, and Jeong, 2015, p.832). For the case of Pashendale Holding Ltd case the project contractor will use a project schedule to be in a better position to complete the project on time. The schedule has to be developed at the planning phase so that to ensure all activities are factored in the project such as initiation, planning, designing, execution, implementation, testing, and closure (Golini, Kalchschmidt, and Landoni, 2015, p.653). Project planning includes several activities such as defining a project activities, estimating the cost of each activity, determining dependencies, and resource allocation.

The defining of activities enables the project manager to understand the type of activities involved in the project. For example in the case of Pashendale Holding Ltd website redevelopment some of the activities that need to be defined include determining the suitable software application to be used in developing the website platform among others.

Activity estimation. Once the activities of a project have been defined and split into small manageable tasks, the next step is to determine the time as well as effort required to complete these tasks (Martinelli, and Milosevic, 2016). Accordingly, this is a vital requirement when it comes to project scheduling.

Project milestones

Determining dependencies. It should be noted that project tasks are not island and in most cases a new task cannot be started until the prior one is accomplished, which is referred to as task dependency (Joslin, and Müller, 2015, p.1379). Therefore, any project has to echo connected tasks. Thus, this can be attained through creating a clack in the project schedule to cater for such unrelated tasks. In the case of Pashendale Holding Ltd the project contractors will have to ensure that there is dependency in the website development activities so that to allow the contractor to be in a better position to accommodate tasks which are related such as planning activities are related to initiation process.               

Pricing

The total cost allocated for the website redevelopment project is $265,000, which is structured on a fixed cost base. The project planning phase is estimated to cost $30,000; the definition and designing phase to cost $145,000; implementation cost $60,000 and finally the conversion phase to cost $30,000.   

Acceptance criteria outlines the specified as well as defined list of conditions that ought to be attained before a project is considered as complete whereby the set deliverables are all met and accepted by the assigning party. In the case of Pashendale Holding Ltd the acceptance criteria that shall be assigned to the company’s Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Sennveasna Naveen. Naveen will be tasked with the acceptance responsibility by ensuring that all project deliverables from the website design contractors are met (Heravi, Coffey, and Trigunarsyah, 2015, p.990). To make the process a success the CMO shall have to appoint three advisors to ensure every project task has been well-done. Therefore the contractor will have to provide a report of each project phase which has to be satisfied by the assigned supervisor.       

At the completion time the website design contractor will provide the CMO with a project closure report as well as project task checklist. Once the Chief marketing officer and the team satisfy that the project is in accordance to the defined project list, the project will be sign-off as complete (Shirazi, Kazemipoor, and Tavakkoli-Moghaddam, 2017, p.397).

References

Aleong, R.W., Bosco, P.C., Bert, A., Ebner, D.F., Ficery, K.L., Kiene, B.P., Mcgogney, C.G., Dailey, J.S. and Lila, A., Accenture Global Services Ltd, 2016. Merger integration toolkit system and method for milestone tracking. U.S. Patent 9,406,034.

Bingham, E. and Gibson Jr, G.E., 2016. Infrastructure project scope definition using project definition rating index. Journal of management in engineering, 33(2), p.04016037.

Braglia, M. and Frosolini, M., 2014. An integrated approach to implement project management information systems within the extended enterprise. International Journal of Project Management, 32(1), pp.18-29.

Corvello, V., Javernick-Will, A. and Ratta, A.M.L., 2017. Routine project scope management in small construction enterprises. International Journal of Project Organisation and Management, 9(1), pp.18-30.

Ghoddousi, P., Ansari, R. and Makui, A., 2017. An improved robust buffer allocation method for the project scheduling problem. Engineering Optimization, 49(4), pp.718-731.

Golini, R., Kalchschmidt, M. and Landoni, P., 2015. Adoption of project management practices: The impact on international development projects of non-governmental organizations. International Journal of Project Management, 33(3), pp.650-663.

Heravi, A., Coffey, V. and Trigunarsyah, B., 2015. Evaluating the level of stakeholder involvement during the project planning processes of building projects. International Journal of Project Management, 33(5), pp.985-997.

Jeong, E.J., Bae, J.H. and Jeong, S.R., 2015. Guidelines aimed at reducing the risks of user acceptance delay in the context of an IT service project management plan. International Journal of Electrical and Computer Engineering (IJECE), 5(4), pp.832-839.

Joslin, R. and Müller, R., 2015. Relationships between a project management methodology and project success in different project governance contexts. International Journal of Project Management, 33(6), pp.1377-1392.

Martinelli, R.J. and Milosevic, D.Z., 2016. Project management toolbox: tools and techniques for the practicing project manager. John Wiley & Sons.

Rad, M.S., Jamili, A., Tavakkoli-Moghaddam, R. and Paknahad, M., 2016, January. Resource Constraint Project Scheduling to meet Net Present Value and quality objectives of the program. In Industrial Engineering (ICIE), 2016 12th International Conference on (pp. 58-62). IEEE.

Shirazi, F., Kazemipoor, H. and Tavakkoli-Moghaddam, R., 2017. Fuzzy decision analysis for project scope change management. Decision Science Letters, 6(4), pp.395-406.

Too, E., Le, T. and Yap, W., 2017. Front-end planning-The role of project governance and its impact on scope change management. International Journal of Technology, 8(6), pp.1124-1133.

Wade, F.E., 2017. B827 Chemical Synthhesis Project-Industrial Control System Integration-Statement of Work & Specification with Attachments 1-14 (No. LLNL-SR-729705). Lawrence Livermore National Lab.(LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States).

Ye, S., 2018. Implementation of Project Management System Based on Project Management. Information Engineering and Applied Computing, 1(1).