Project Management CE00348-3

Case Study

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World General Insurance (Asia Pacific Region) Co. Ltd. (WGI) - Case Study
A project, called the Consolidated Human Resource System (CHRS) was initiated by World General Insurance (Asia Pacific Region) Co. Ltd. (WGI) to provide its various offices within the Asia Pacific with a centralized IT application to manage the various human resource departments. This initiative was due to a need to support and maintain similar human resource applications in one central site whilst it was being used by various offices in the region. The human resource database was located within the office as it contained information of the local employees only. The strategy for WGI Co. Ltd. was not to have many similar human resource applications but a single application to be used by the various offices. The regional head office (located in Hong Kong) was proposed to develop, maintain and house the application and the various databases used by the application will be accessed remotely through the network. The project was a massive undertaking which not only required a good regional IT network infrastructure (within the Asia Pacific) but required the use of good application design and support expertise to ensure the project would not fail. To ensure the project got a good focus, WGIs employees were placed in key project supervisory positions while most of the technical jobs where there were not much prospects for staff promotion or development were contracted out. Overall, the project had a mix of outsourced, contracted and in-house employees. The major milestones for project were developed with a target completion date of twelve (12) months. A project charter was documented and signed-off to formally start the project. The project is now in its third (3rd) month and during a recent project status report meeting it was two (2) months behind schedule and some of the key contract staff have resigned. As the Managing Director of the Asia Pacific regional office, who usually provides a quarterly report to the CEO on all regional major work related matters to the headquarters in the US, you were in the process of gathering information on the project during a recent status report meeting and it became evident that all is not right since the project started. You are in the process of preparing a report and in three (3) weeks time you want to be in a better position than you are now. There were no monitoring reports to review as none were prepared and the stewardship reports of the project were not formally documented. The project manager did not have much support before to manage the project better and now with the importance you have given to this current problem, both you and the project manager are working together to review and implement some options to get the project back on target.

___________________________________________________________________________________________ Level 3 Asia Pacific Institute of Information Technology 201204