IT Projects are typically complex undertakings where requirements, and their gathering from often multiple stakeholders, can often be difficult. The practice of Quality Management during the course of IT Projects should, in theory, lead to better governance and overall outcomes. This paper explores four individual IT Projects and details the methods of qualification gathering, stakeholder engagement and overall Quality Management employed. Following this is a review of the common themes found in each project and a discussion on their application from a Quality Management perspective.

1. ANAG THE DIGITAL FIRM
December 19, 2014
Prepared By:
Andrew Considine | Fegbada Jude
Monzer Alshaikh warak| Paul Ong
Under supervision of Dr. Kamna Malik
FINAL INTEGRATION PROJECT
Enterprise Systems Development

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Contents
INTRODUCTION ......................................................................2
PROJECT 1: DEPLOY A CAMPAIGN MANAGEMENT
PLATFORM FOR DU A MOBILE OPERATOR ........................................2
PROJECT 2: SAP IMPLEMENTATION ..........................................4
PROJECT 3: IMPLEMENTING ERP SYSTEM FOR NONPROFIT ORGANIZATION.7
PROJECT 4: SERVER AND NETWORK MONITORING SOLUTION'S PROJECT.10
THE COMMON THEMES AND ISSUES .............................................. 12
CONCLUSION ....................................................................... 14
REFERENCES:........................................................................ 14

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Quality Management Practice in IT Projects
Introduction
IT Projects are typically complex undertakings where requirements, and their
gathering from often multiple stakeholders, can often be difficult. The practice
of Quality Management during the course of IT Projects should, in theory, lead
to better governance and overall outcomes. This paper explores four individual
IT Projects and details the methods of qualification gathering, stakeholder
engagement and overall Quality Management employed. Following this is a
review of the common themes found in each project and a discussion on their
application from a Quality Management perspective.
Project 1: Deploy a Campaign Management Platform for
Du a mobile operator
In 2013 Emagine, along with its partner HP, was awarded the tender to deploy
a Campaign Management Platform for Du a mobile operator in the UAE. The
Platform, with customisations, was being procured to run multi-step, multi-
channel campaigns to Du's subscriber base with the objective of generating
sustained incremental revenue from the saturated UAE market.
The key stakeholders for the project were:
1. Du the end client.
2. HP the commercial lead and HW supplier.
3. Emagine the technology supplier.
4. Accenture the project lead assigned by Du.
5. Atos the system integrator assigned by Du.
Competing objectives within the Du teams resulted in unclear requirements.
The IT team was focused purely on rapid delivery and the marketing team was
focused on delivering their business objectives. An additional complication
was the differences in skillsets, experience and ability of the 3rd parties
involved. Accenture brought strong experience and skilled resources to the
project while Atos deployed mainly junior resources with non-relevant
experience. Emagine brought 15 years of experience in the Campaign

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Management space (and thus had a clear understanding of both the technical
and business requirements) while HP, though strong technically, had very little
understanding of the needs of the marketing team.
An Analysis and Design process took place with all the parties involved in
onsite workshops to gather the requirements. The process followed was a
Structured Analysis. Data Flow Diagrams, with supporting Entity Relationship
Diagrams, were used to map out the ingestion of data, its processing and
subsequent actioning through workflows, reward fulfilment and
communication channels. There were multiple challenges to the Structured
Analysis approach including the size and complexity of the project, constantly
changing requirements and inconsistency of the tools used by each party
involved.
These challenges had a significant impact on the quality of the SW
development with competing requirements and an inflexible analysis process
meaning that the requirements delivered to Emagine's development team were
difficult to understand and contradictory.
Beyond the intrinsic challenges of stakeholder conflict and team experience
the size and complexity of the project, along with the shifting requirements
would suggest that an Object Orientated approach to the requirements
gathering process would have been more appropriate. An OO approach would
have meant consistency across the modelling tools used, the ability to adapt to
changing requirements and the subsequent output being clearer for the
development team.
The Project, in its first iteration, unfortunately did not deliver a high-quality
product evidenced by critical issues exposed during the integration of the
solution to the Du network. With the risk of the Project failing steps were
taken by Du, Accenture and Emagine to improve the requirements gathering
and development process with a complete overhaul of the underlying design of
the Platform. This effort focused on the quality of the requirements input (and
recording), consistency and agreement on requirements from all stakeholders,
realistic scheduling and robust testing. This revision of the process (with a
reduced number of stakeholders) led to the successful delivery of the Project
with its second iteration.

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Project 2: SAP IMPLEMENTATION
I was involved with the implementation of SAP ERP in my current place of work
(Nigerian Bulk Electricity Trading Plc).
ASAP methodology for the ERP
implementation was used - which
is proprietary to SAP.
Requirements for the project included:
 Provision of standard operating procedures for all businesses.
 Creation of a project steering committee and stakeholders.
 Creation of a project team and members.
 Engagement of a Quality Assurance consultant.
 Provision of an internal Project Manager.
 Provision of a shared drive for effective collaboration and information
access.
 Provision of a Project charter.
 Creation of the project office and project name.
 Provision of Project scope though this information can also be accessible
from the charter.
Stakeholders for the project included:
 Key system users:
 Business and process owners: the heads of every department.
 Project sponsor: This is the key decision maker.
 External partners include the implementation consultants and Ministry of
power which is our parent agency.
 Vendor Project team.
The project steering committee consisted of the following:
 Project sponsor.
 Lead Project team members.

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 Business and process owners.
 Client Project Manager.
 Vendor Project Manager and Director.
 Quality Assurance consultant.
Representative from the Ministry of Power.
Challenges:
 Poor Response to incidents.
Solution:
In my organization, we were able to address this issue by defining and reaching
an agreement on the incident escalation path with incident resolution timelines
based on their level of criticality.
 Staff turnover:
Solution:
Engage more than one member for a particular work function by so doing,
resignation of a team member will not have any negative impact on the project.
 Poor dedication of team members:
Solution
Team member appraisal needs to be based on their performance or input to
the project hence they must be given a terms of reference on what is expected
of them.
 Scope creep in the project:
Solution
To ensure that an agreed project scope is followed from beginning to end, there
is the need for a formal project scope sign off and based line.
 Project work plan and timelines not adhered to

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Solution:
In order to avoid this from happening there is a need for project review
committee (Also refer to project steering committee) to constantly access the
project current state, project health.
Requirements can be gathered using the following medium:
 Presentation
 Project Session
 Electronic communication
Additional requirements can be obtained via mail or telephone communication
between the consultant and the client.
Even though challenges were experienced during the course of the project, we
were able to deliver a quality product based on the following:
Alignment with the business as there was an improved operational efficiency
with system integration - operation that would have taken 1 hour to complete
has been reduced to minutes.
The original business goal of the organization was achieved.

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Project 3: Implementing ERP system for nonprofit
organization.
This Project involved the implementation an of-the-shelf ERP system for a
Not For Profit (NFP) organization, The ERP was Microsoft Dynamics AX
2012 R3.
The stakeholders are detailed in the following table:
Internal Stakeholder External Stakeholder
Chairman of the Board 3rd party Consultant
General Manager and secretary Telecommunications company
HR Manager and team The Software solution’s vendor
Finance Manager and team The Sponsor
Marketing Manager and team Hardware vendors
Warehouse Manager and team Training centre Lead
Purchasing Manager and team The beneficiaries
Collecting Manager and team
IT Manager and team
The requirements were gathered by holding individual 2 day workshops for
each department/stakeholder.
For example: the HR Manager and HR team sat with me and I asked them to
brainstorm and express their thoughts about the software they would require
with their current problems in mind using other systems and capabilities as a
benchmark. We then filtered these requirements and got them to sign off on
them. This process was followed with each department.
The main challenge faced was commitments. As each department’s manager
was required to sit with us along with their team, this proved to be disruptive
to the usual work schedule and as such not all teams were available and
present. To counter this we asked the department Managers to commit to the
meetings and to take a lead with their teams with extra bonuses offered to their
team members to be involved in meetings out of working hours.

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The other challenge we faced was changes to the requirements. To counter this
we followed the PMI change management process and each time a change
request was made the instigator was required to fill out a “Change Request
Form” and then follow this up with approval from their Manager.
Implementation Methodology:
We used Microsoft’s Sure Step Methodology for ERP implementations.
This methodology is based on PMI’s Project Management processes and it has
been proven to increase project success rates. The following paragraphs
highlight this methodology’s phases. The following figure illustrates Sure Step
Methodology.

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I think that the project delivered a high-quality product. Success criteria factors
were set at the beginning of the Project and we managed to deliver to100% of
that criteria.
For example:
 The process of calculating the payroll should not take more than 20
minutes for all the organizations branches without manual data transfer
from the time attendance machines.
 The volunteers must have access to an online portal to read and submit
their tasks and send their requests online without using paper or phone
communications.
 The CEO must have ability to view the up to date dashboards with data
relevant to the KPIs defined in the strategic plan.
 The beneficiaries’ satisfaction must increase at least 70%.

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Project 4: Server and Network Monitoring Solution's
Project.
The lack of centralized and comprehensive monitoring tool for XXX mission
critical servers necessitated us to setup SCOM (System Center Operations
Manager) which identify faults in the system and alerts relevant parties.
Prior to the Project, system health checks were performed periodically
manually. There was no system triggered alert on the breach of system
threshold, i.e. CPU utilization exceeds 80%. There were also instances where
the staff did not do perform their tasks and the system crashed.
The key stakeholders were Head, Ebroking from E-Broking*, CIO from
Group Information Technology (GIT)*, and CTO from Finexasia.com Sdn
Bhd (Finexasia)*.
How were requirements gathered?
An application flow diagram was drafted to illustrate the interconnectivity
between us and the Exchange.
The list of critical servers, equipment and application services to be monitored
were gathered at the working level. Current processes and workflows were
identified and mapped.
This served as the pre-requisite to construct the “Envisioning and Assessment”
and “Vision and Scope” documents for requirements gathering
What were the challenges and how could the process have been improved?
Prior to the project, there was no centralized inventory of all equipment that
form the entire XXX ecosystem. There was no documentation on the
application flow. Additional time was therefore allocated in the Envisioning
Stage to consolidate information from various departments. A central
repository should be maintained to document system design for future
reference and ease the requirements gathering process. This could have been
improved if a proper CASE environment was set-up.

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What approach to modelling, architecture and design was taken?
We adopted the *Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF), which is a five-phase
project approach. Microsoft further enhanced this framework and developed
the Microsoft Services Delivery Methodology (MSDM). MSDM provides
guidance on activities and deliverables that may be executed within each of the
MSF phases. The MSF Phases are defined below and the MSDM activities and
deliverables are defined in the solution approach section.
Envisioning: Create a business vision and define the scope of work necessary
to bring the vision to reality
Planning: Planning continues until we have detailed functional requirements,
system and application architectures, the user interface prototype, and a
detailed project plan for the remainder of the project.
Development: The Development phase begins with the first iteration of
development and culminates with the functionality complete milestone.
Stabilization: The Stabilization phase represents testing and acceptance.
Deployment: The Deployment phase includes final development, release
management, and deployment.
What were the quality issues?
There were no major quality issue. The requirements were well understood by
both customer and vendor, and the deliverables agreed upon and executed.
Do you think the project delivered a high-quality product? Justify your answer
accordingly.
Yes it did, with proven detection and alert on several occasions where there
was breach of system threshold parameters. Visibility was gained on overall

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system health via the solution’s monitoring console and alerts, and reduced
dependency on human personnel.
Historical system statistics are stored and can be queried upon during
investigation of abnormal system behavior. The solution was a mature off-the-
shelf product. There was no issue on stability. The SCOM agents did not
cannibalize critical system resources.
The common themes and issues
By jointly reviewing each of these individual IT projects some common
themes (and specifically issues) surface from a Quality Management
perspective. While these issues seem obvious from the perspective of hindsight
their commonality would presume that these are common themes faced by
most managing similar IT projects despite the prevalence of academic data on
this issues and Quality Management frameworks available to organizations.
The following outlines the common themes that were uncovered by the group
following the review of the individual projects:
1. There was evidence in two of the projects of the following of a process
(i.e. Framework) of requirement gathering and subsequent project
management activities (i.e. change requests). Of the projects these were
the successful ones so it could be opinioned that the following of such a
framework is a factor towards a project’s success.
2. Scope creep (i.e. changing or growing requirements) is prevalent in all
four Projects which would suggest either a lack of complete requirement
gathering – or a changing environment or needs during a long-running
Project. The management of scope creep through a formal process and
framework allayed major impact on the success of the Project.
3. In several of the projects multiple stakeholders were involved and where
this was the case it led to more complex and problematic requirement
gathering which in turn led to a more difficult project delivery.

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4. Surprisingly there is very little evidence of UML modeling following the
gathering of the technical requirements in each Project. Our conclusion
on this point is either:
a. Where the Project involved the delivery of a COTS (commercially
off-the-shelf) Software package this reduced the need to detail the
requirements within the framework of a model. Or;
b. Where the Project did require customization and bespoke Software
development the organization(s) involved were perhaps not mature
or capable enough (such as defined by SEI’s CMMI guidelines) to
use sophisticated UML modeling techniques to accurately define
requirements and outline the design and scope for the
organizations Development team.
Following the identification of these common themes the recommendations we
would make as a group to these organizations would be that implementing a
Quality Management framework as the cornerstone of each Project will
improve their capability and subsequent project delivery outcomes. The
following of Quality Management will ensure that issues around stakeholder
engagement and management, scope creep, competing requirements and
expectations on outcomes are managed effectively and successfully.

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Conclusion
Quality management in IT is best approached as a process. This allows a
desired result to be achieved more efficiently. As such, it comes as no surprise
or mere coincidence that each project above followed some sort of SDLC
methodology i.e. SAP, Microsoft Services Delivery Methodology, Microsoft
Sure step Methodology.
Although each methodology is called a different name, the steps and phases in
the methodologies are somewhat similar. Also each methodology emphasizes
similar important factors e.g. user focus, leadership/management, identification
and involvement of all stakeholders, process approach and some form of
continuous improvement.
All these factors are of critical importance as instead of doing something just
for the sake of doing it or blindly following a process, it is crucial to create an
environment which draws together numerous good work practices etc for its
development and management.
References:
 Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step Methodology, AxaptaPedia, UR: http://www.axaptapedia.com/Sure_Step_Methodolog,
Accessed on: 21/12/2014.
 ASAP Methodology Roadmaps and Phases, URL: http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-8032, Accessed on: 21/12/2014.