Project Management Paper

In today's job market, project management is becoming a major practice in today's work force. In this paper, I will describe what a project is and its life cycle using examples of a project I am currently working on. Then, describe how this project assists our organizations to accomplish our company goals and the positive and negatives of the Oracle project at Diebold, Incorporated. Let's start by looking at what is a project.

A project is a complex, unique one-time effort that is limited by time, resources and performance specifications. It has characteristics that differ from a work done by the day to day operation of an organization. The first characteristic of a project is that it has a defined objective. A project I am involved is the conversion of our inventory management system from a Baan operating system to an Oracle system. The next characteristic is the beginning and an end date, the start date was March 2003 and being completed by October 2004. The third characteristic is developing a cross functional team with several different professionals. Our company hired an outside consulting firm and assigned different associates from different organizations to develop and implement the new system. The fourth characteristic is that it hasn't been done before. This project will for the first time bring all organizations with-in Diebold on the same system. Later, I will discuss the final characteristic which is the specific time, cost and scope requirements which serves as the measurement of performance. These are defined during the life cycle of a project.

The project life cycle has goes through the following four phases of defining, planning, executing and delivering. The defining stage is where the project objective is defined and the teams are established and major responsibilities are assigned. The objective in the project I am on is to convert our company to one system on a Global scale and the teams have been formed. We have completed this phase of the life cycle. The next phase that has been completed is the planning stage this answers the have been more defined. Such as target implementation dates and which organizations will be brought up first. We are currently at the executing stage where the major portion of the project work is taking place. The last stage is the delivering stage which involves the delivering of the completed project and redeploying the project resources. This will keep control of the resources needed to complete the project.

In many companies, there are