Blog 10, Week 12

Explain the triple constraint and its importance in project management.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGF-FUykln8

Project Management: Project management is the discipline of planning, organizing, and managing resources to bring about the successful completion of specific project goals and objectives.

• Triple Constraint: A projects vision is to be clear, concise and comprehensible. Time, Cost and Scope. The Importance of the triple constraint to project management is, that all projects are limited by these three constraints.

Describe the two primary diagrams most frequently used in project planning

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgdChg5kF1E

• Project Charter: Document issued by the project initiator that formally authorises the existence of a project and provides the project manager with the authority to apply organisational resources to project activities. 
  • Elements:

• Project Scope- defines the work, describes the need, justification, requirements and current boundaries for the project
• Objectives- are quantifiable criteria  that must be met for the project to be considered a success.
• Project Constraints- are specific factors that can limit options.
• Assumption- are factors that are considered to be true, real, or certain without proof or demonstration

PROJECT PLAN: is a formal, approved document that manages and controls project execution.
        Elements:
1. It should be easy to read
2. Communicated to all key participants
3. Prepared by the team, rather than by the individual project managers
4. Appropriate to project size, complexity and criticality
5. Easy to understand



Identify the three primary areas a project manager must focus on managing to ensure success

THREE PRIMARY AREAS:
Communication
Change
People

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLrnJc2Tz44

Outline two reasons why projects fail and two reasons why projects succeed

Fail	Succeed
Inability to communicate effectively with employees.	Reduces costs.
Unable yo respond to change in the business environment.	Concentrate resources on core business

Blog 9, Week 11

What is your understanding of CRM?

1. CRM ( CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT) is a system that manages all aspects of a customers relationship with an organisation.
2. The relationship formed between customers and the business created profitability, customer loyalty and protection.
   - Increase customer revenues
   - Make call centres more efficient
   - Provides better customer service

Compare operational and analytical customer relationship management -

Operational	Analytical
supports traditional transactional processing for day-to-day front-office operations or systems that deal directly with the customers	supports back-office operations and strategic analysis and includes all systems that do not deal directly with the customers
Focuses on organising and simplifying the management of customer information. It uses a database to provide consistent information about a company’s interaction with a customer	Analytical CRM uses data mining to provide strategic data about customers. Data mining uses various modelling and analysis techniques to find patterns and relationships to make accurate predictions

Describe and differentiate the CRM technologies used by marketing departments and sales departments
Marketing Operational CRM technologies:

• List generator - compiles customer information from a variety of sources and segment the information for different marketing campaigns.
• Campaign management system - guides users through marketing campaigns
• Cross - selling and up-selling
  - Cross-selling - selling additional products or services
  - Up-selling - increasing the value of the sale

Customer service operational CRM technologies
Contact/call centre

• automatic call distribution
• interactive voice response
• predictive dialling
• emotion detection

Web-Based self service system

• click-to-talk

Call scripting system

Sales department Operational CRM Technologies

1. Sales Management: co-ordinates, organises, helps sale reps and their accounts.
   Calendars, alarm reminders, document generation are all used for planning.
2. Contact Management: supplemental sales information. Organisational Charts and detailed customer notes are used.
3. Opportunity Management: targets sales opportunities by finding new customers or companies for future sales.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YoeNlFCJCDc

How could a sales department use operational CRM technologies?




Describe business intelligence and its value to businesses

Business Intelligence: refers to applications and technologies that are used to gather, provide access to and analyse data and information to support decision-making efforts.

Explain the problem associated with business intelligence - Describe the solution to this business problem.

• Problem: Most oprganisations are data rich but information poor. The data being generated is increasing at a rapid pace. Different systems hold different data but none of the systems correspond with one another which gives employees the inability to make business decisions quickly.
• Solution: To improve the quality of business decisions, managers can provide existing staff with BI systems and tools that can assist them in making better, more informed decisions.
  For example - Law Enforcement - Tracking Crime patterns locations, and criminal behaviour; identifying attributes to assist in solving criminal cases.

Explain the problem associated with the business intelligence. Describe the solution to this business problem.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-j5J7lXav7Y

Problem: Most organistions are data rich but information poor. The data being generated is increasing at a rapid pace. Different systems hold different data but none of the systems correspond with one another which gives employees the inability to make business decisions quickly.

Solution:  To improve the quality of business decisions, managers can provide existing staff with BI systems and tools that can assist them in making better more informed decisions.


What are two possible outcomes a company could get from using data mining

• Cluster Analysis - technique used to divide an information set into mutually exclusive groups such that the members of each group are as close together as possible to one another and the different groups are as far apart.
• It segments customer info to help organisational identity customers with similar behavioural traits.

• Association Detection - reveals the degree to which the variables are related and the nature frequency of these relationships in the information
• Creates rules to determine the likelihood of events occuring at a particular time.

How could a sales department use operational CRM technologies?

Get their attention

Value their time

Over-deliver

Contact Frequently

Generate a trustworthy mailing list

Follow up

Blog 8, Week 9

Define the term operations management

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeeTy3YaMu0

Operations management is the management of systems or processes that convert or transform resources into goods and services.

     - Information technology is used in operations management to identify and improve the business process.

Explain operations management's role in business -

Managers use IT to heavily influence operations management decisions:

• What resources will be needed and in what amounts?
• When should the work be scheduled?
• Where will the work be performed?
• How will the work be done?
• Who will perform the work?

Describe the correlation (relationship) between operations management and information technology -

The OM has the responsibility of delivering the company's profits by getting a quality product out on time, as efficiently as possible, with the high levels of customer service.

Explain supply chain management and its role in business

Supply Chain Management involves the management of information flows between and amongst stages in a supply chain to maximise total supply chain effectiveness and profitability.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mi1QBxVjZAw

A supply chain involves three segments:

- Upstream, where sourcing or procurement from external suppliers occurs.

- Internal, where packaging, assembly or manufacturing takes place.

- Downstream, where distribution takes place, frquently by external distributors.

LList and describe the five components of a typical supply chain

Plan: This is the strategic portion of supply chain management. A company must have a plan for managing all the resources that go toward meeting customer demand for products or services. A big piece of planning is developing a set of metric to monitor the supply chain so that it is effective, costs less, and delivers high quality and value to its customers.

Source: Companies must carefully choose reliable suppliers that will deliver goods and services required for making products. Companies must also develop a set of pricing, delivery, and payment processes with suppliers and create metrics for monitoring and improving the relationships.

Make: This is the step where companies manufacture their products or services. This can include scheduling the activities necessary for production, testing, packaging, and preparing for delivery. This is by far the most metric-intensive portion of the supply chain, measuring quality levels, production output and worker productivity.

Devliver: This step is commonlyreffered to as logistics. Logistics is the set of processes that plans for and controls the efficient and effective transportation and storage of supplies from suppliers to customers.  During this step, companies must be able to recieve orders from customers, fulfil the orders via a network of warehouse, pick transportation companies to deliver the products, and implement a biling and invoicing system to facilitate payments.

Return: This is typically the most problematic step in the supply chain. Companies must create a network for receiving defective and excess products and support customers who have problems with delivered products.

 

Define the relationship between informaion technology and the supply chain.

 - Technology advances in the fice SCM components have significantly improved companies' forecasting and business operations

- Integrated Systems provide companies with greater visibility over the supply chain inventory levels

- IT's primary role is to create integrations or tight process and information linkages between functions within an organisation.

 

 

Blog 7, Week 8

Chapter 7 Questions-

Explain the business benefits of using wireless technology.
Benefits of woreless technology:

• For people who are on the move and like to access the internet in various places
• It goes where cables and wires cannot
• Access to live data enabling better decision making

Describe the business benefits associated with VoIP

voice over internet protocol (VoIP): enables consumers to make calls over the internet EXAMPLE: SKYPE.

                     

 

CHEAP AND LOW OPERATING COSTS

EASY TO RELOCATE AND MAKE CHANGES

MANY FEATURES AT A LOW COST

EASIER DEVELOPMENT

INTEROPERABILITY AMONG SYSTEMS

APPLICATION INTEGRATION

Compare LANs and WANs

Local Area Connection (LAN) - is designed to connect a group of computer in close proximity to eachother. For example, a school. It is a useful system of sharing resources such as files, printers and other applications. On the other hand a Wide Area Network (WAN) - spans a large geographic area, such as a state or country. They often connect multiple smaller networks; local area networks.

 

Describe RFID and how it can be used to help make a supply chain more effective.

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technologies use active or passive tags in the form of chips or smart labels that can store unique identifiers and relay this information to electronic readers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNPDgudPmXE&feature=related

Identify the advantages and disadvantages of deploying mobile technology -

ADVANTAGES

Transforming how we live, work and play

Continually being upgraded

Additional functionality

Networks are advancing rapidly

DISADVANTAGES

Symptoms of radiation

Addiction may lead to social problems

Cyber bullying