BUSM1278 - PM Practices
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BUSM1278 – Project Management Practice
Individual Assignment – Case Study
Assignment 2 – 40% of course marks
Assignment task Weighting Due
This assignment has one component:
o
o
Read and understand the enclosed case study
With reference to the case study, PMBOK 6th ed, and good project
management practice, answer the questions located at the end of the
case study.
o Task: Write a management report of no less than 3000 words
o You are a project management consultant employed to report to the
Executive team. The answers must:
o Be in a report format to the Executive management team.
o Address the questions from a management perspective.
o Include the relevant project management theory and suitable
diagrams and models as necessary.
o Include (academic) references to support your argument/answer.
Remember the audience is the senior (executive) leadership team who are NOT
project or technology literate so you should use appropriate business language and
efrain from using technical jargon.
Each question
is valued at
20%
11:59pm,
7th September,
2018
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This case study is an exercise in critical thinking as a project manager
Contents
The Ticketing System ............................................................................................................................... XXXXXXXXXX2
Background ........................................................................................................................................... XXXXXXXXXX2
It Started Off, Finally .............................................................................................................................. XXXXXXXXXX3
Timeline ................................................................................................................................................. XXXXXXXXXX3
Decision................................................................................................................................................. XXXXXXXXXX4
Making It Happen .................................................................................................................................. XXXXXXXXXX4
Questions: ................................................................................................................................................. XXXXXXXXXX6
Assignment marking criteria ...................................................................................................................... XXXXXXXXXX7
____________________________________________________________________________________________
The Ticketing System
The Office of Information Technology (OIT) of the Silicon Forest State University (SFSU) uses
a ticketing system (software) to report bugs across different departments in OIT that maintain
the information system at SFSU level; from the front end (user interface) to the back end
(database, server, network). At some point, Remedy ticketing software was chosen. However,
that decision was somewhat “flawed” in the sense that not all departments that needed the
ticketing system supported Remedy. Remedy is Windows-based client software and it worked
fine with most of the front-end side of OIT, but OIT’s back end was mainly maintained under
UNIX. This led the UNIX team, and several other groups that maintained the back-end resort,
to use a different tool (Request Tracker) which was Open-Source software, and worked under
the UNIX system. This case discusses project communication management, especially
software bugs reporting among multiple departments involving in software development.
Background
The OIT is a functional organization. It is under the supervision of the Vice President of
Technology, Pike Gresham. OIT has four major departments: the Computing and Network
Services Department, which manages the network system at SFSU; the Information System
Department, which manages and implements all administrative systems for the university
including databases on UNIX servers; the Instruction and Research Services Department,
which provides equipment, hardware, software, resources, training, and support to students,
faculty, and university staff; and the User Support Services Department, which is essentially
the interface for users: students, faculty, and staff to the rest of the OIT when help is needed
with technology-related issues. The ticketing system is used throughout these departments to
communicate all the technology-related reports, issues, and requests.
Given that some of the departments use different ticketing systems Request Tracker, or RT,
(UNIX-based) and Remedy (Windows-based) there exists a “gap” in the way information is
eing processed. The front-end side, which uses Remedy, must manually translate/convert
the message from the Remedy format to the RT format in order for it to reach the back-end
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teams. This causes several problems. First of all, the process is time and resource
consuming. It means that someone had to be on standby to do the “translation,” and it took a
lot of time to do, which made the response time relatively slow. Second, Remedy is more of an
enterprise-level tool that provides many features which are not needed by OIT, such as finely
detailed forms that request much information which does not fit with an organization like OIT.
Those features