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Project Final Report

Project Final Report

Migration to Atlassian JIRA and Confluence

A final review of the details and overall performance of the project to migrate the tickets and wiki documentation from our legacy systems to Atlassian JIRA and Confluence Nate Lindstrom 6/24/2011

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Project Final Report

Jun. 24

Project Final Report

Table of Contents
Project Performance...................................................................................................3 Planning Phase........................................................................................................3 Procurement Phase.................................................................................................3 Deployment Phase..................................................................................................3 All other phases.......................................................................................................3 Administrative Performance.......................................................................................4

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Project Final Report

Organizational Structure............................................................................................5 Project and Administrative Teams..............................................................................6 Alan Factor..............................................................................................................6 Chuck Sumner.........................................................................................................6 Chander Kant..........................................................................................................6 Techniques of Project Management...........................................................................7 Time allocation and usage in project phases..........................................................7 Budget and spending in project phases..................................................................7

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Project Final Report

Bibliography...............................................................................................................8 Bibliography

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Project Final Report

Project Performance
Planning Phase
The planning phase of the project actually took significantly less time than the time shown in the schedule. In particular, developing the vendor selection criteria, which had 2.21 days allocated to it, actually took less than four hours! This was in no small part due to the participants being able to borrow heavily from an existing vendor selection criteria which was found to be more than adequate with only minor

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Project Final Report

modifications. This existing criteria document was unknown to the project planners, so perhaps taking a more proactive stance toward document discovery in the very early stages of project planning would benefit future endeavors.

Procurement Phase
The task of gathering quotes from selected vendors was originally allocated 1.21 days, but ended up taking almost a full week as one of the vendors, Dell, was unable to provide an accurate or complete quote until after numerous conference calls and escalating the issue to the regional sales manager. The project schedule was saved by several resources graciously volunteering to work additional hours to

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Project Final Report

crash the remaining tasks, but it is now apparent that 1.21 days was an overlyoptimistic estimate.

Deployment Phase
A key resource allocated to this project had his employment terminated on May 30th. As a result, the project fell behind. It was crashed and successfully brought back on track to conclude on-time via starting the user training phase early, and by significantly curtailing the quality assurance testing performed after the existing data was migrated to the new system. This ultimately proved to be a poor choice, as reports of missing or incomplete data continue to come in from the users of the

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Project Final Report

new system, and the IT department estimates that it will need to dedicate some 30 man hours per week for the next month to resolve these complaints.

All other phases

All the other phases of the project proceeded as planned with the exception noted above, in the deployment phase section.

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Project Final Report

Administrative Performance
One practice which proved to be inadequate during the course of this project was that of a 10 oclock morning stand-up meeting, which suffered from such poor attendance that it ultimately proved futile. This situation was made worse by two different department heads who expressed a lack of interest in encouraging their direct reports to attend the stand-up meeting. It was ultimately canceled toward the end of the migration phase.

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Project Final Report

The canceled meeting was replaced with sending out a daily summary in the morning of upcoming tasks for the next eight hours. However, it appears that this email had little effect and was not often read. Another practice which proved to be particularly successful was a once-per-week meeting between the PM for this project and the PMs for other projects. This meeting allowed them to coordinate resources between projects, and to compare notes, as it were, about both administrative practices and what is working and not working in their individual projects. Several potential pitfalls within this project were successfully avoided thanks to this exchange of knowledge, and it the problems with obtaining an accurate quote from one of the vendors was mitigated thanks to another PMs knowledge of a contact point inside the vendor organization.

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Project Final Report

Organizational Structure
This project was conducted under the functional organization model, with several different department managers allocating resources to the project and working to insure the necessary work was executed. Overall, this structure succeeded, as the project was accomplished on time and within budget. However, as was mentioned earlier, some aspects of the projects administration encountered difficulty with department heads reluctant to enforce full resource participation in project meetings.

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Project Final Report

Project and Administrative Teams

On the whole, the team members who participated in this project worked together well. There were a few notable exceptions to this, as well as a one team member who deserves special mention:

Alan Factor
Alan did not communicate well with his fellow team members, leading to several incidents where other resources came to the PM and other managers with

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Project Final Report

frustrations surrounding not knowing the status of Alans tasks, and complaints of Alan withholding and miscommunicating key information. Needless to say, this issue was resolved when Alans employment was terminated on May 30th.

Chuck Sumner
Toward the middle part of the project schedule, Chuck often began to exhibit antagonistic and aggressive behavior toward several specific team members. In particular, Enamari Roque-Vizzini found his behavior toward her to be abrasive. She has made it clear that she does not wish to partner with Chuck on future projects, and it is this PMs opinion that Chuck works best as an individual contributor and not part of a project team.

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Project Final Report

Chander Kant
Chander went above and beyond in this project with adjusting his training schedule and getting the curriculum assembled far earlier than planned in order to accommodate the crashing of the schedule. He was also highly and universally praised by the users after the training was completed for his patience, lucid explanations, and grace under fire when the first problems arising from the curtailed data migration QA began to surface. It is this PMs opinion that Chander be used whenever possible for user training in future projects, as he was a great asset to this projects success.

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Project Final Report

Techniques of Project Management

Time allocation and usage in project phases Budget and spending in project phases

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Project Final Report

Bibliography
Atlassian Pty Ltd. Atlassian Collaborative Software. n.d. 06 02 2011 <http://www.atlassian.com/>. Cisco Corporation. Enterprise Networking Products & Services. n.d. 06 02 2011 <http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/switches/index.html>. Dell Corporation. Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking. n.d. 06 02 2011 <http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/enterprise-products>.

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McMurrey, David. Brooklyn College of New York: Technical Writing. n.d. 06 02 2011 <http://www.io.com/~hcexres/textbook/otherep.html>. Meredith, Jack and Samuel Mantel. Project Management: A Managerial Approach. NJ: Wiley & Sons, 2009. Project Management Institute. A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge. PA: Project Management Institute, 2008.