Question:
Assignment Task
You have been appointed by senior management as project manager for a key project within your organization. Your project board has asked for a project plan that will be used as a baseline against which to monitor project progress and to cost stage by stage. They are also concerned that all the key stakeholders should be identified and an appropriate plan formulated to deal with their expectations. The board has also asked that you fully justify your approach at each stage based on current best practice as indicated in the academic literature.
In order to address the assignment requirements, you may choose a project from your organisation or, where you do not have a current project, either use a project you have worked on previously or create your own project. It is important that the project you choose is suitable for dealing with the set tasks: neither too simple nor too large and complex.
Solution:
Part 1:
Project Overview
Project Background
The project of focus in this research paper is the blockchain project that is used as an approach to identifying bank check fraud in Barclays bank. This would be used as a security feature in different payment options such as cheques and bitcoins. Apart from boosting the security, the blockchain would be used in the provision of standardized messages flow between the transacting parties and simplifying the network architecture for the best practice of the bank operations.
Objectives
According to Ika (2009) project objectives should be phrased in a manner they can have specificity, can be measured, achievable, having relevance and ideal timing. This is since the objectives of a project represents the specific aims to be achieved by a project within their set time-frame. The relevance of project objectives in project planning could be attributed to its effectiveness in informing the tasks, milestone, schedule, risks, communication, quality and ultimately provision of a plan which project team can make reference in the execution phase. The company objectives are SMART since they are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time. The objectives of the current blockchain project in Barclays Bank include:
- To decrease cyber-crime rates in Barclays bank from the current 20% to 5% in 2018
- To increase the customers using Barclays bank in cryptocurrency transactions from one million annually to five million by January 2019
- To reduce the cross-border infrastructure costs accrued by the bank from with more than 50% by the end of 2018
- To ensure a comprehensive inclusion of all stakeholders in the blockchain implementation from the current centralised structure to a more decentralised operation factoring on the social, political, technological, formal and informal governance layers in UK banking system
- To increase the current two bitcoin labs in London currently open for different bitcoin and blockchain entrepreneurs, coders and businesses to at least five at the end of 2018
Project Scope and Exclusions
According to Mirza et al. (2013), project scope can be identified as a tool adopted to describe significant project deliverables which is normally and inclusive of the set milestones, high-levels of demands assumptions and project constraints. Primarily, this is used as an instrumental technique to make decisions for future of a company when the modifications of a project scope are relevant and a necessity. In this case, for the sake of enhancing a successful eliminations of the existing cybercrimes exercised in the online world contrary to the financial organizations. This necessitates the need to implement the blockchain project in Barclays bank will have to upgrade its ledger account to incorporate blockchains with timestamps, identify all areas of innovation, understand the regulatory and data security implications and scale their transactions. This project will facilitate an increased rates of transaction, the inclusion of all stakeholders in the banking industry, and most importantly eliminate some of the current crimes being perpetuated online today against the financial institutions. The project scope will, however, exclude the development of smart contracts which ate part of the blockchain projects in some banks. Also, not all parts of payments will be considered since only the area of enabling an increase in security and lowering costs for banks in processing payments between organizations and their clients and between banks would be considered.
Project Deliverables and Constraints
According to Kerzner (2013), any project is supposed to offer their stakeholders with specific outcomes commonly termed as project deliverables. In this case, successful implementation of this project would lead to a decrease in the infrastructure costs of a bank to the cross-border payments, secured banking, and regulation of issues of compliance. Also, the security of the banking process would be improved through proof of ownership of digital content and improved customer services delivery. The rationale for this project can be attributed to the intensified investment by commercial banks, central banks, stock exchanges and significant technologies providers such as IBM and Samsung in development of distributed ledgers. All these deliverables are in scope based on the aforementioned SMART objectives of the project. In regard to constraints, they will include having participants in the banking sector who lacks institutional trust in one another (scope/performance), for a successful transformational application of blockchain to areas such as payments or inter-bank reconciliation, this is only possible after R&D and innovation are adopted (cost and time). These constraints are ideal as they establish how the project is managed.
Part B: Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) WBS can be visualised as multiple building blocks that definition of entire project scope. As noted by Devi and Reddy (2012), the WBS……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………Please contact our team to receive guidance, support and tutorial services on this assessment in full
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