Case Study on Operational Strategy for an It Organization

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Create Project Management Plan – Overall Monitoring

Create an updated project management plan and distribute it among all the stakeholders for approval. The project management plan will act as an overall point of reference for the key goals, definitions, resource matrix, roles and responsibilities, risk management and final deliverables.

At a minimum, a project management plan answers basic questions about the project (Wikipedia, 2017):

- Why? - What is the problem or value proposition addressed by the project? Why is it being sponsored?

- What? - What is the work that will be performed on the project? What are the major products/deliverables?

- Who? - Who will be involved and what will be their responsibilities within the project? How will they be organized?

- When? - What is the project timeline and when will particularly meaningful points, referred to as milestones, be complete?

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Software Development Lifecycle – Agile

Considering the project is mission critical and with a hard-bound date for delivery, I believe adoption of Agile will work well for the project execution. It will have some of the upfront training cost and distraction of team members but in the longer run of executing the project till completion it will be beneficial.

It will assist in leveraging some key practices which will assist in overall speeding up the delivery timelines and keeping the feedback cycle intact (Versionone, 2017):

- Rigorous, regular refactoring,

- Continuous integration,

- Uncomplicated design,

- Pair programming,

- Sharing the codebase between all or most programmers,

- A single coding standard to which all programmers adhere,

- A common “war-room” style work area.

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Testing Strategy

Time is of the essence and the overall quality must be maintained for all deliverables, keeping the same objective in mind it is better to adapt the following:

- Automated Testing Suite – Selenium

Selenium comes loaded with several features that makes the task of developing automated scripts easy. The various components on offer may be picked and selected, depending on the complexity of the web page or app for which the script is being written. An easy-to-use interface for the development process makes it even easier to create unit tests, exploratory tests, one-off bug reproduction scripts, and much more. It also supports parallel test execution. (Naseer, 2016)

- JIRA for the overall reporting and management of defects

JIRA will provide a 360-degree view of the entire project execution along with the management and maintenance of all the quality related tasks. The software features interactive Kanban and Scrum workflow boards that allow teams to create team and planning structures that take into account sprints and existing and future backlogs. Additionally, the JIRA defect tracking tool comes standard with a number of Agile reporting tools that help provide teams with real-time insights on the progress of debugging initiatives and other related tasks to help them improve day-to-day operations and prevent log jams. (Houpes, 2017)

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Risk Management

Create a formal risk management process which should include at a minimum the requirements traceability matrix and risk/issues log. Each individual stakeholder has a separate level of risk tolerance and needs transparent communication to mitigate the risk from becoming an issue.

With respect to the Agile process recommendation, the same tooling can be used to integrate the related requirements traceability matrix with JIRA and the risk log so that the overall stakeholders owning delivery to completion have a full view. This will assist to re-prioritize any specific issues which potentially could be an impediment for final work completion.

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Success Strategy – Advantages

Key advantages of the success strategy which encapsulates adoption of agile and other automated testing tools:

- Faster feedback cycle

- Early problem identification

- Business value comes first (Dawson, 2015)

- Collaborative team effort which will ensure all the business analysts, developers, testers to work towards common goal

- Regular adaptation to changing circumstances. (Blog, 2017)

- Working software is delivered frequently (Blog, 2017)

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Success Strategy – Disadvantages

Key disadvantages of the success strategy which encapsulates adoption of agile and other automated testing tools:

- Training need arises which will incur cost and upfront time commitment

- There is lack of emphasis on necessary designing and documentation. (Blog, 2017)

- Business value comes first (Dawson, 2015)

- Harder for new Starters to Integrate in the Team, in case of attrition within the team.

- Costs can Increase as Testers Required all the Time Instead of at the End (Haunts, 2014)

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Summary

Overall in consideration of the pros and cons, the original timeline can be accomplished to customer satisfaction with continuous updates and acknowledgment of all the stakeholders for the critical path functionalities and risks.

Key deliverables as part of the agile execution will be phased out to the initial sprints so that incremental rollout can be implemented rather waiting for a full rollout later in