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Project Scope, Cost, and Quality Planning Report | Project Management

The focus of this project is time-to-market and quality over cost, so while we want to keep an eye on the budget, we need to have a quality system in place to gain a competitive edge on our competition. The scope of the project has been completed, the budget and timeline are in place, we have planned costs and controls, and we completed a quality plan to measure and define the quality objectives. Part of planning scope relates to managing and planning the risks of a project before they occur. "No amount of planning can overcome risk, or the inability to control chance events. In the context of projects, risk is an uncertain event or condition that, if it occurs, has a positive or negative effect on project objectives. (Larsen, 2013)"

Scope Planning

The business requirements are clear, which are to gain a competitive advantage with a quality system that quickly receives information from vendors, collects it in a database, and informs customers about changes to their plan. There are often changes to plans that need to be tracked and sent to each member. Part of the system requirements will involve creating a list of members that are affected by changes, so the vendors and members need to be connected in the database in order to determine who will be notified. Here is a list of requirements involved in the project along with the person(s) responsible for completing it:

• The IS Manager and Business Owner will be involved during the beginning and end of the project. They already spent about 10 days creating and approving the Project Charter and budget. At the end of the project they will both be needed again to create a method of supporting the system.


• The Project Manager will create the project plan and develop lines of communication between everyone involved. The PM will have to be a leader more than a doer in order to stay on time and on budget.


• The Stakeholders will all be involved once the Project Charter is completed and approved. They will want to see the project plan and lines of communication before they approve it.


• Now the Database Administrator, Developer, and Business Analyst will be heavily involved by creating the physical database. The PM will focus on the scope of the project during these stages to be sure the resources are staying on task.


• Finally, the Quality Assurance, Report Developers and Architect staff members will be creating reports and testing the system for bugs.


• Once the system is tested, approved and live, the IS Manager, Project Manager, and Business Owner will all create a solid support structure to maintain and update the system.

Cost Planning and Control

The Project Manager essentially manages the cost by controlling the hours and days spent on each task. Since 95% of the project is labor based it's imperative that I control the amount of hours each resource spends on a task and move on to the next task immediately. "Prior to erecting a new plant or taking on a new project, prudent managers will conduct a cost-benefit analysis as a means of evaluating all of the potential costs and revenues that may be generated if the project is completed. (Investopedia, n.d.)" The cost of the project is current estimated at $230,000 and it wasn't a major concern as mentioned in the Medical Informatics case study. Quality and competitive edge were both mentioned as top priorities.

Even though cost isn't a major concern, is the result worth the investment? The initial idea of having a database collect vendor information and automatically associate the information to plan members is most definitely worth it. It will save the employees the time of gathering the changes to policies, finding the appropriate plan members, and notifying them manually. The amount of time it takes to complete those tasks is further multiplied by the amount of growth in future years.

The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) involves the costs of support and maintenance after spending $230,000 to plan and create the system. A car, for example, might have the same price tag as a truck, but the truck will pay more money for gas over the next 5 years creating a higher TCO. General maintenance will need to be done on a monthly basis, updates will need to be made, and as the company grows and technology advances, more updates and requests for changes will undoubtedly come up. Therefore, the estimated TCO of the project is double, $460,000, including 5 years of additional server space, labor, and updates to adhere to new company processes and procedures.

Our budgeted costs are $230,000, or $460,000 TCO, including wiggle room in many areas of the project. Putting less than tight tolerances allows for some areas of the project to take extra time because all projects have those situations. If everything goes exactly as planned the actual cost will be far less than budgeted.

The earned value of the project can be estimated based on the time saved by reviewing changes from vendors and finding the appropriate members to alert. Since the company is growing we can also calculate the amount of money we would have spent hiring new employees to handle the additional work load for the manual process that needs to be completed. The TCO costs will be recouped in 5 years and the employees will be happier at work when they realize that their jobs just got a little bit easier.

Quality Planning

It's popular to say "quality before quantity" while managers whip employees like a horse to move faster. As the new project manager I can assure you I put quality before quantity, especially when the project memo states that quality comes before cost. I need to learn more about each staff member included in the project so I plan to use key performance indicators (KPI). The results will be twofold because I get more acquainted with the staff and use the information to continue managing the project timeline. "Since KPI is also a metric, we can have KPIs in the form of numbers and ratios. So we can have number KPIs and we can have ratio KPIs. (Sharma, n. d.)"

I want to measure how each employee pays attention to detail, finishes their task in the time allotted, and completes the task with the upmost quality. If these criteria turn out to have negative reviews by me then I will take action quickly, so that the project doesn't suffer for it. These are important aspects of defining quality. Sometimes you might hear, "It's worth the wait because of the high quality," but it's not worth the wait when we have a specific budget in place. If, however, a piece of quality can be added to the task for additional time as an expense, then we'll have a meeting about it and discuss the addition to the project with the stakeholders. They will determine if it's worth it or not.