1.Explain the triple constraint and its importance in project management.The triple constraint involves making trade-offs between scope, time and cost for a project. It is inevitable in a project life cycle that there will be changes to the scope, time or cost of the project.
—Increased Scope = increased time + increased cost.
—Tight Time = increased costs + reduced scope.
—Tight Budget = increased time + reduced scope.
2.Describe the two primary diagrams most frequently used in project planning
1.PERT chart – a graphical network model that depicts a project’s tasks and the relationships between those tasks
1.Dependency
2.Critical path
2.Gantt chart – a simple bar chart that depicts project tasks against a calendar
3.Identify the three primary areas a project manager must focus on managing to ensure success.
1.Managing people
2.Managing communications
3.Managing change
Managing people is one of the hardest and most critical efforts a project manager undertakes. Resolving conflicts within the team and balancing the needs of the project with the personal and professional needs of the team are two of the challenges facing project managers. In order to manage communications, a project manager must plan what or how he/she will communicate as a formal part of the project plan. Successful people and organizations learn to anticipate and react to change appropriately.
4.Outline 2 reasons why projects fail and two reasons why projects succeed.
There are several differing reason why projects fail and why they succeed. The reasons why projects fail include:
1.The failure to align the project with organisational objectives.
2.Unrealistic expectations
Two reasons why a project may succeed include:
1.Excellent communication between those involved in the project
I believe customer relationship management is very significant in business. Relationships between businesses and their customers must be built and maintained in order to experience customer loyalty and repeat business. Loyalty cards and special discounts for customers are a couple of schemes which can improve loyalty and maintain a good consumer and business relationship.
2.Compare operational and analytical customer relationship management.
Operational customer relationship management supports traditional transactional processing for day-to-day front office operations or systems that deal directly with the customers. Analytical customer relationship management supports back-office operations and strategic analysis and includes all systems that do not deal directly with the customers. Operational customer relationship management 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.
3.Describe and differentiate the CRM technologies used by marketing departments and sales departments
Marketing departments often use CRM technologies to understand and utilise the characteristics of their customers. List generators, campaign management and cross selling and up selling are just a few examples of operational CRM technologies used by marketing departments. In sales departments, CRM technologies are used for sales management, contact management as well as opportunity management.
4.How could a sales department use operational CRM technologies?
It is important for a sales department to keep track of customer information. Therefore there are three ways a sales department may utilise customer relationship technologies. These include:
1.Sales management CRM systems
2.Contact management CRM systems
3.Opportunity management CRM systems
5.Describe business intelligence and its value to businesses
Business intelligence is the applications and technologies used to gather, provide access to, and analyse data and information to support decision-making efforts. Business intelligence includes simple MS Excel Pivot tables to highly sophisticated software that fetches data from the different front-and back-office systems. Many Businesses are finding that they must identify and meet the fast-changing needs and wants of different customer segments in order to stay competitive in today’s consumer-centric market. BI can tell companies things like;
—Determine who are the best and worst customers thereby gaining insight into where it needs to concentrate more for its future sales
—Identify exceptional sales people
—Determine whether or not campaigns have been successful
—Determine in which activity they are making or losing money.
6.Explain the problem associated with business intelligence. Describe the solution to this business problem
Companies can have a lot of data, however they are not able to benefit from levering this information and turning it into useful data for analytical and strategic decision making. The issue most organisations are facing today is that it is next to impossible to understand their own strengths and weaknesses, let alone their enemies, because the enormous amount of organisational data is inaccessible to all but the IT department. The problem: data rich, information poor.
7.What are two possible outcomes a company could get from using data mining?
Data mining is the process of analysing data to exact data not offered by the raw data alone. Data mining is the primary tool used to uncover business intelligence in vast amounts of data. Using data mining, product line specialists and marketing specialists ‘drill’ into trends of each retail store chain. Their goal is to find buying trends that help them determine which advertising strategies to implement, resulting in an increase in sales. Data mining can provide businesses with important information, such as, new correlations, patterns and trends.
Operations management is the management of systems or processes that convert or transform resources into goods and services.
2.Explain operations management’s role in business
Operation management has an influential role in the functioning of the enterprise. The roles required by the operations management’s team are:
ØForecasting
ØCapacity planning
ØScheduling
ØManaging inventory
ØAssuring quality
ØMotivating and training employees
ØLocating facilities
These responsibilities are largely relied upon by the business to ensure the enterprise obtains a competitive advantage amongst its competitors and receives a growth in business profits.
3.Describe the correlation between operations management and information technology
There is a strong relationship between operations management and information technology as the tasks required by operations management can be organised and completed with the utilisation of an information system. By automating the most important business practices, business will be able to work more efficiently, reduce overhead, increase agility and improve insight into business processes. An integrated system is the only way to have a consistent view of the data and provide up to date results, on a company wide basis. Organisations have saved millions of dollars by replacingout-dated technology and paper-based systems, andintegrating previously disparate systems to eliminateduplication of effort and increase consistency of information.
4.Explain supply chain management and its role in a business
Supply chain management involves the management of information flows between and among stages in a supply chain to maximise total supply chain effectiveness and profitability. In other words, it is a network of organisations and facilities that transforms raw materials into products delivered to customers.
5.List and describe the five components of a typical supply chain (exam)
·Upstream, where sourcing or procurement from external suppliers occurs.
·Internal, where packaging, assembly or manufacturing takes place.
·Downstream, where distribution takes place, frequently by external distributors.
·Tiers of suppliers, a supplier may have one or more subsuppliers, and the subsupplier may have its own subsupplier(s) and so on.
6.Define the relationship between information technology and the supply chain.
Organisations greatly benefit from the integration of information technology into the management of the supply chain. Information technology has significantly improved companies’ forecasting and business operations. It also provides enterprises 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 organization.
