IT 328 Final Project Guidelines

Overview

The final project for this course is the creation of a risk analysis and mitigation memo.

We all work on projects whether at work, at school, or around the house. Some projects are small and can be completed quickly; however, some take time, planning, and preparation. How can you make sure that a project is completed once it is started? How do projects in information technology really run behind the scenes? Project management provides a structured method to move through a project from the time it is created until the time it is completed and all the steps in between.

In this project, imagine that you are team member for an IT development project. Your team has identified several risks the project faces that could negatively impact its outcome. You have been tasked with selecting one of those risks and analyzing it in order to determine the best solution to mitigate the risk and determine how your solution will affect the overall project. You will write a professional email memo to your project manager, with supporting documentation as attachments. The email will explain your analysis, recommendations, and the impact of those recommendations. Your thorough analysis is critical to the project manager to help him or her make an informed decision about how to move the project forward.

In this assignment, you will demonstrate your mastery of the following course outcomes:

• Explain the relationship between an information technology project’s scope, budget, and schedule to determine how they impact one another
• Develop industry-appropriate messaging for communicating an information technology project’s status and needs to project stakeholders
• Determine key information-technology considerations for informing project risk-management response strategies
• Examine project management documents for key project data to promote successful information technology projects through development, testing, and production

Prompt

Your email memo and attachments should be drafted in a Word document with the project charter, RACI chart, and Gantt charts included in an appendix. In your memo, you will describe background information about the project that you are working on, detail information about a specific project risk, and propose a recommended risk mitigation strategy to your leadership team.

Your memo will make use of the following project scenario:

Regatta University is a leader in both traditional education and career-path development, including in emerging fields. The university prides itself on staying on the leading edge of curriculum and degree programs, learning methodologies and instructional technologies, student services, and demonstrated student success. “The future is here and now,” the university’s president, Martha Yoon, likes to say.

Regatta serves approximately 8,000 students at locations including the original campus in Augusta, Maine, and satellite campuses in Ventura, California; Dayton, Ohio; and Hilo, Hawaii. In a typical term, approximately 40% of Regatta’s students take courses at a distance through the university’s online education hub. Enrollment growth has been strong, increasing by 4 to 8% each year for the last decade.

You are a key member of the information technology team at Regatta, with a core specialization in student services. You are responsible for providing user-friendly interfaces connecting to a flexible, powerful information structure. Now you have a new project—working with colleagues to create a student degree progress tool that students will use for accurate, instant information on their progress toward program and degree completion. As you may imagine, this tool is eagerly awaited by a variety of stakeholders, including Regatta academic advisors and the Office of Enrollment Management, as tracking and communicating student progress toward degree completion is vital for retention. “We need a tool that will be easy to use but also accurate. No misinformation!” your team manager says.

Your memo will analyze and recommend mitigation strategies for one project risk. The risk you choose to focus on must come from the list of project risks in the provided Project Management Documents Excel worksheet. They are located in the tab titled Risk Matrix.