Chapter 11: Project Management

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. The three variables are interdependent: you cannot change one without changing the others. There is a high failure rate in IT projects between 30 and 70 per cent due to late delivery, exceeding budget, or not delivering what was agreed upon. A successful project is typically on time, within budget, meets the business' requirements and fulfills the customer's needs.

2. Describe the two primary diagrams most frequently used in project planning.
The two primary diagrams used in project planning include PERT (program evaluation and review technique) and Gantt charts. PERT charts are a graphical network model that depicts a project's tasks and the relationships between those tasks. Gantt charts are a simple bar chart that depicts project tasks against a calendar.

An example of a PERT chart

3. Identify the three primary areas a project manager must focus on managing to ensure success.
A project manager must focus on managing three primary areas to ensure success: managing people, managing communications and managing change. Managing people is one of the hardest and most critical efforts a project manager untertakes. Resolving conflict 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.

4. Outline two reasons why projects fail and two reasons why projects succeed.
Two reasons why projects fail include: failure to align project with organizational objectives, and inability to move beyond individual and personality conflicts.
Two reasons why projects succeed include: good communication and team members are working towards a common goal.

Chapter 9: CRM and BI

1. What is your understanding of CRM?
Customer relationship management involves managing all aspects of a customer's relationship with an organisation to increase customer loyalty and retention and an organisation's profitability. It helps companies make their interactions with customers seem friendlier through individualization. Organisations implement customer relationship management systems to gain a better understanding of customer needs and behaviours.
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. It 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.
Analytical customer relationship management: supports back-office operations and strategic analysis and includes all systems that do not deal directly with the customers. It uses data to provide strategic data about customers. Data mining uses various modelling and analysis techniques to find patterns and relationships to make accurate predictions.

3. Describe and differentiate the CRM technologies used by marketing departments and sale departments.
- List generator: compiles customer information from a variety of sources and segments the information for different marketing campaigns.
- Campaign management system: guides users through marketing campaigns. Looking at the cost of a campaign, who they are going to target.
- Cross-selling and up-selling: Cross selling is selling additional products or services and up-selling is increasing the value of the sale.
Helping the sales people co-ordinate their jobs, using things such as calenders, appointments, meetings, multi media presentations. Particularly interested in contact management.

4. How could a sales department use operational CRM technologies.
A sales department could use operational CRM technologies in the following ways:
Operations is about day to day type of things.
List generators - the ability to provide information on specific aspects of the business.
Campaign management - performing tasks such as scheduling, segmentation etc
Cross selling and up selling - contact points, may be able to sell a complimentary product. a good CRM can tell when you should suggest a particular product. Up selling is selling the same product in large quantities.

5. Describe business intelligence and its value to businesses.
Business intelligence are 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. Some of the benefits of BI include: single point of access to information for all users, BI across organisational departments and up to the minute information for everyone. 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. Business intelligence is valuable for businesses because it can determine who are the best and worst customers thereby gaining insight into where the business needs to concentrate more of its future sales, it identifies exceptional sales people, it determines whether or not campaigns have been successful and it determines which activities are making or losing money.
6. Explain the problems associated with business intelligence. Describe the solution to this business problem.
Companies are data rich and information poor, so much data going around that they dont really know what there compeditors are doing, dont know what the best tactical move to make is, too much data and no tools to see what they need to see to align data and decision making. Business intelligence is the solution. It makes better decisions in teh organisaiton, and not just the IT department having access to teh data, everyone does so can see more data analysis, and reducing the latency.

7. What are two possible outcomes a company could get from using data mining? Data mining is the application of statistical techniques to find patterns and relationships among data and to classify and predict. Data mining techniques emerged from statistics and mathematics and from artificial intelligence and machine-learning fields in computer science.