E-Courier Company Project Management

MALKEET SINGH (n8991294)

BEN 610 PROJECT MANAGEMENT
PRINCIPLES
ANDREW WILLIAMSON
By
BEN 610 Project Management Principle Assignment Malkeet Singh (n8991294)
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INTRODUCTION
E-courier, founded in 2003 provides courier services with a focus on delivery
transparency and automated costumer interaction. A highly advanced system
called Advanced information Based Allocation (AIBA) is responsible for
managing the overall delivery system of the company.
The services provided to the costumer includes:
Real time tracking of the parcel.
Providing shortest route for the parcel delivery.
Door to door service from pick-up to dispatch.
Email confirmation within after the parcel is arrived.
Online booking and costumer queries.
The company started a new project to introduce new technology in the services.
They faced a number of problems during the overall implementation of the
project. The issues were mainly related to, technology issue, project management,
risk management, stakeholder management. The problems and their impacts are
discussed in the following sections.
PROBLEMS AND CHALLENGES
[1]. The companys position in the market was not good in the starting years.
Companys policies were unattractive for both employees and
customers.
There were stories of fraud and breaches in trust in the media
including security issues.
Company, in the beginning was using traditional ways of
delivery system which was unreliable and untrusted. There were
cases where loss of packages, delays in delivery time, and even
damaged packages were reported.

[2]. The IT solutions that company adopted were difficult to implement
because of the following reasons:
Technology issue: According to research from Royal Academy
of Engineering and the British Computer Society (2004), only
16% of IT projects are considered truly successful. Technical
issues give rise to uncertainty in IT projects, especially those
utilizing innovative technology and practices using technology.
This happened because technology and its use changes rapidly,
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and a technical and competitive mistake can produce severe
financial loses.
E-Courier during the project phase, faced continuing complexity
and uncertainty, as they wanted to be innovative and adaptive
towards new technologies and their possible applications, in
order to ensure that this advantage can be sustained.
Project environment: Problems occurred because there were conflicts
between the organization environment and the project environment.
Within the organization, IT projects find it more difficult to gain
support, either financial or other resources from the senior
management team as they were making extensive use of technology
to manage the entire process of delivery.

[3]. The company had a manual system for costumer service which was
inefficient and a lot of time was spent to done task manually. It was
difficult to respond to millions of customers queries by limited number
of employees.
A ticket was generated for each costumers request and a copy
was saved in system. As millions of complaints were registered
and cleared every day, hundreds of old files, created for each
request logs were floating in the system. This not only took up
the space but also slow down the entire system, a cost of 10
cents per MB.
The company wanted to reduce its dependence on manual
processes to enable employees to focus on critical business
priorities, as well as to realize time and cost savings.

IMPACTS
1) As the companys reputation was not good, competition started to grow
up and number of new small companies started giving competition to
them.
It affected the status of the company; customers and clients
started walking away as new companies were providing better
and secured services for the delivery.
The costumer services that were being provided were not
appreciated by the costumers. Because of the very few
employees meant for the management purpose, the records were
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generally misplaced and hence costumers were unhappy with
the information that was provided to them.

2) As there was uncertainty with the IT solutions, the complexity increased
as a result of which project and the project team needed to cope with
changing client requirements, because of the lack of awareness of
technology and its novel applications. Thus, the scope of project changed
frequently as client requirements emerges and changes.
The cost and risk of technology used was the varying factors.
Because of the nature of IT project, there was no accurate or
reliable prediction of return on investment.
Thus, it was more difficult to obtain outside (venture capital)
funding when compared to a more tangible investment option.

3) The manual system of customer service was too slow and there was no
proper way to keep the records of the customers. No specific software
was installed because of which the overall support system was lacking
perfection.
The employees doesnt have administrative rights on their
computers, thus were unable to make any system-wide changes
Such as routine clean-ups or maintenance tasks to enhance
system performance.
The manual cleaning process also meant that human errors
were introduced, which affects the accuracy and thoroughness
of the cleaning process.
Thus long manual processes were affecting the services
provided to the customers,
The company was not getting any positive feedbacks from the
customers.

RECOMMENDATIONS & SOLUTIONS
Even though the company was focusing on IT solutions, there was strong need to
work in various areas of management sectors which are given below:
I. Change Management: Correct change management procedures,
undertaken at the right can help prevent IT project failures. This would
be prevalent in projects that succeeded based on non-IT related factors,
BEN 610 Project Management Principle Assignment Malkeet Singh (n8991294)
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for example complete requirements specifications and avoiding of late
changes in specifications.
E-Courier had done some accurate and timely market research
and recognize a need of change in industry.
The company founders assigned the help of an academic one of
the worlds top IT experts, to help with the business startup,
thereby identifying a new business mentor.

1.1 People: (Hagel and Brown 2005) stated that the teams should
be assembled with people who have different perspective,
presumably to gain a wider range of opinions and resources,
thereby offering a better chance of success.
E-Courier took extreme measures to assemble a team
with people they believe would bring the most business
and technical benefits to the projects.
They hired people with complementary skills so that
there was no duplication of role within the organization
which may have brought potential issues and conflicts.
This was managed by building a corporate culture that
is focused on providing a good services to the
employees that will allow them to provide good
services to the costumers.
(Beer, Eisenstat et al. 1990) indicated that successful
IT projects are one that focus on the employee first and
foremost.
E-courier focused on employees, acknowledging them
to be a service resource and this has created seemingly
never-ending possibilities for improved customer
service.

1.2 Technology: Software requirements go through a series of
changes before the final version of the project. E-courier
continuously updated their system as areas for improvements
were identified, often by costumers request.
Company implemented technological improvements
like real-time tracked maps, placing real time traffic
information onto the map.
For the purpose to accomplish, a software team was
hired which was flexible and open to change having
extensive relevant experience and tacit knowledge
which could be applied to the specific project.
(Justin 2006) suggested that IT employees should be a
part of body of knowledge to promote best services and
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to ensure they are as skilled and as experienced as the
management team in driving business change.

II. Stake Holder Management: Stakeholders played significant role in any
project because their satisfaction indicated how successful a project is.
(Hartman and Books24x 2000) claims that a successful project is one
that makes all stakeholders happy.
E-courier measures its project success based on end users
feedback about their product.
Stakeholder management was essential factor for the project, as
with the cooperation of stakeholders, project objectives can be
achieved (Cleland and King 1988).
Communication was the key factor for the better stakeholder
management. Managers communicated with their project teams
to ensure the positive growth of project.
E-courier managed external stakeholders by letting them know
the importance of the project and the progress of the project.

III. Risk Management: Risk management is important in overall project
management and helps to improve project performance, reduce threats
and increase successful outcomes and the exploitation of opportunities
and possibilities.
E-courier in the initial stage defined the scope of project, its
limitations, challenging improved technologies which reduces
the risk to great extent.
Project managers carried out risk assessment every quarter,
helping them to refine existing responses and prompt the
development of new responses based on new situations.
They had done contingency planning in order to avoid risks.
They created backups of their backups, considering scenarios
such as power outages by installing backup generators.

IV. Communication Management: Companys communication
management had two goals; first to inform stakeholder about their tasks,
plan and information about the project and second to create supportive
and cooperative culture within the project (Project Management 2013)
Communication with the costumers to deal with their complaints and
queries was also an essential part of the project.
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CONCLUSION
The report is designed to highlight the key problems in courier industry. E-
Courier, one the biggest courier industry in UK started a project and number of
factor influenced the scope of project. Because of the IT nature of the project, it
was more uncertain and complex as compared to other project because of the
changing technology issue.
Based on the research it is concluded that critical success factors (Butler and
Fitzgerald 1999) for IT projects include: project plan, technical issues, change
management, stakeholder management, risk management and communication
management. These factors are important during the whole project cycle, but
may have differing implication during different stages of the project cycle. If
these areas are managed properly, the complexity will be reduced and the
chances of success rates will increase.















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REFERENCES

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Beer, M., et al. (1990). Why change programs don't produce change. UNITED STATES,
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Cleland, D. I. and W. R. King (1988). Project Management handbook. New York, Van
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Hagel, r. J. and J. S. Brown (2005). Productive friction: how difficult business
partnerships can accelerate innovation. United States, Harvard Business Review. 83: 82.

Hartman, F. T. and I. Books24x (2000). Don't park your brain outside: a practical guide
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Management Institute.

Justin, R. (2006). BCS debate identifies change management as key to the progression of
the IT industry. Sutton, Reed Business Information UK: 58.


Project Management, I. (2013). A guide to the project management body of knowledge
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