Project Management Proposal

Prepared by:

Mohammed Almoqhim

Mansour Hawsawi

Rami Gabbani

Team Biographies

Mohammed Almoqhim

Mr. Mohammad Almoqhim has worked as process design engineer in Water and

Environment Technologies Company (WETICO). He was responsible for preparing

design calculations for the Process, Hydraulic, and Mechanical items. Mohammad

worked at WETICO for almost two years, during that time he was able to get the

technical view of the project. He has a Bachelors Degree in Chemical Engineering

and is currently working on his Master Degree in Engineering Management, with

plan to gain the Project Management Professional (PMP) certification in near future.

Mansour Hawsawi

Mansour earned his Bachelor’s Degree in Electrical Engineering Technology in 2013

from Temple University and an Associate Degree in Electrical Power in 2004 from

Technology of Makkah, Saudi Arabia. He worked in Saudi Aramco Company as

Electrical Technician for Three Years. He worked as Maintenance Electrician who

responsible of maintenance of complex electrical installation in the utilities, process,

repair, and maintenance covering electrical equipment to keep factory in a safe and

efficient operation condition. Mansour is currently enrolled in Master of Science

Engineering Management in Wilkes University.

Rami Gabbani

Mr. Rami Gabbani received his Bachelor Degree’s in Civil Engineering in 2011

from Umm Al-Qura University, Saudi Arabia. He worked in Ministry of Higher

Education as a trainee engineer, and worked in National Water Company (NWC) in

Water Project Department in the field. After that, he worked in The Ministry of Hajj

Portal as an engineer. Currently, he is studying for a Master of Science Degree in

Engineering Management from Wilkes University, Wilkes-Barre.

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Background

It’s all began back in 1973, when the Student Loan Marketing Association has

started as a government sponsor enterprise with main purpose to help the students to

achieve their dreams by lending them loans. Sallie Mae began to move to a private

company in 1997, and they have persisted to operate in that capacity. In 2004, Sallie

Mae became a fully private company by cutting all ties with Federal Government.

Basically Sallie Mae is offering low-interest loans to the students with two available

options:

1. Federal Loan

2. Private loan.

Sallie Mae is considered as one of the largest company that provides student

loans. When talking about student loans, the people directly refer to Sallie Mae

because it was leading by the government. Some people refer to paying off the

company, and they mean paying off their loans. Last year, they celebrated 40 years of

helping families around the country to make their education attainable, and their

benefits for their costumers:

Longer repayment period.

Lower monthly payment.

Single servicer.

They Manage $180 billion in education loans and serve 10 million students and

parents. The people can get student loans through any lenders, but they should first

apply for Stafford student loans government guaranteed loans. The interest rate and

the terms and conditions of the loans are affordable. Currently, in Sallie Mae's

website, you will find these loan options:

Private Education Loans: They offer loan option for undergraduate, graduate,

and professional student.

College Saving: They are helping families to earn cash back for their studies

on daily purchases.

Insurance Services: They try to protect students, recent graduate, and adults to

get insurance for their car, life, health, and renters.

Servicing: They help their members to pay their loans, and building their clear

credit.

3

Background

Banking: They help their costumers by offering the lowest interest rates and

lowest fees.

Collection Services: They help to save money for taxpayer.

We were fortunate to meet with MS. Catherine Wotrring, Chief of Business

Systems Support. She was so professional in dealing with our question and

concerns, explained their process briefly and clearly.

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Current Project Management Process

The project management life cycle is one of very useful tool that may use in

term of understanding, and getting a big picture about a project. The significance of

life cycle of project that is all projects consist of number of different phases for the

life cycle of each project. The teams’ project in Sallie Mae, within the Wilkes-Barre,

PA, currently applies all four stages of life cycle into each project successfully. In the

first stage which related to defining a project, teams get an idea about the project and

they meet together to make sure that the idea fits with goals and objective of the

company.

After that, they move to next step which scope of project. As you know the

scope of project considers being the second stage of life cycle of project. In this step,

teams use “project plans” which helps them to deliver the intended project

management scope of the project, define timeline which allows them to know an

event that receives special attention (milestone). The teams stop until they receive the

cost estimation of project with approval.

In the third stage of life cycle of project, teams in Sallie Mae create the charter

which describes parameters, goals, timelines, and reasonable parties; in order to move

forward in project teams must get approval in charter. Next, validation and mitigating

risks take place in this stage, and teams use “Business Impact Assessment” (BIA)

essential component of an organization’s business continuance plan and planning

element that develop strategies for minimize risks. Then, teams will implement

validation to determine the period time of the project.

The final stage is closing, teams are document detail requirement about the

project and assumptions; in order to move forward, teams need to gain approval.

After, they get approval for previous step; the project reaches the end with

confirmation of implementation.

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Current Project Management Process

Other

Dept.

Project Dept. Management

Idea/Discussion

Define Scope

Cost analysis

Approval

Define timeline

Create Charter

Approval

Document detailed Req.

Approval

Validate/mitigate risks

Implement/Validate

Conformation of Validation

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Current Project Management Process

Fig.1- Process Flow Chart

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Area of Excellence

Scope creep is one the most challenging processes that project managers may

face, so, scope creep is the tendency for scope of project to expand or begins to shift

from its original parameters of the project. In the business process scope creep

happens during a project when project teams or customer begin changing the business

requirement of project deliverables. In reality, scope creep occurs when the business

process does not have enough details during planning stage. Scope creep could have

severed effects on the most of general performance of a project, the relationship

between these performances of work and the organization. There are some areas that

may be affected by scope creep:

Budget

Time

Quality of life cycle

Sallie Mae uses a number of strategies that allows it to keep scope creep from

derailing its projects. Sallie Mae has ability to solve the problem of scope creep

successfully by utilizing the following methodologies:

Manage scope creep through a change control process

Identify what is new, understand the need or advantage

If agreement, then create change request

Validate scope creep can be supported in existing plan or schedule, if not

negotiate on next best solution or data.

As you see in Fig1, it shows that Sallie Mae team uses the functional structure

which provides employee with focused on project. Therefore, company will be able to

lack of change control and they can expect there is a degree of scope creep in most

projects. So, it was a good to design a process to manage these changes. In addition,

allowing the process goes through different department to obtain approval would

control scope creep.

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Area of Excellence

Tracking project performance is one of areas that the company takes in

consideration during the project. Before creating any project, the project management

team must make a suitable arrangement to plan the project. They have to establish

methodology to track the project’s performance. The level of detail for planning

different features of the project would be the level teams could manage, control and

track for the project.

Sallie Mae does a good job in tracking project performance by providing divers

tools that project teams can use to control the performance of the project. In addition,

these tools help to control most of the problems that occur during the project. Control

of the project is one of the most neglected areas of project management. The diversity

of tools allows the project manager to collect data and report progress on cost,

schedule, and specification effectively. The driver tools that are used by Sallie Mae to

track and control their projects:

MS project which has flexibility of entering, calculation, and presenting

project info. Sallie Mae use it as follow:

o Milestone data delivery

o Sequential items

Excel or SharePoint

o Manage action item

o Issue logs

o Documentation management

Quality Center

IT management tool

Traditional SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle) materials

Area of Excellence

Risk management is to think in a system way about all possible risks before it

happens, and how to deal with all risks, and cope with its impact. It is also to evaluate

the level of risk as in the table below:

Every risk should be one from the table, and decide which risks that can avoid

altogether or eliminate, and which ones that cannot be eliminate, but can be reduced

or adjusted to keep all risks in the acceptable limits. There are four elements of risk

management:

1. Plan (Who, When, and What).

2. Assess (identify and analyze).

3. Handle (Mitigate the risk).

4. Monitor and Report (Know what’s happening).

Sallie Mae has several types of risks:

Regulator/ Compliance impact

o Ability to service billion in education loans and billion in college-

saving plans

o Dealing with sensitive financial data

o Responding to industry regulations and standard

Cost to business/ IT

o Have huge budget and resources with satisfying their customers that

require high performance, the company created identity governance

project

o Established an automated, repeatable process

Sallie Mae assesses risks in any project levels by understanding the risk, and

faces all risks by making better decisions and negotiation. Sallie Mae focuses in

specific risks including:

High probability

Low impact

High Probability

High Impact

Low probability

Low impact

Low Probability

High Impact

Area of Excellence

Volume

Cost

Ability to meet implementation date

Quality of code/work

Stability

Likeliness to become a risk vs. item that needs monitored

Risk adversity tolerance

Customer experience

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Recommendations

1- Set Priority System for Selecting Projects

Offset a strong priority system that is linked directly to the strategy, that’s would

help to reduce major problems to the organization such as implementation gap,

organization politics, resource conflicts, and multitasking. In the implementation gap for

instance, the problems usually happen when the top management formulates the strategy

and leaves the implementation to functional managers. The functional managers with the

advantage of broad constraints would develop a more detailed strategy and objectives.

The fact that these objectives and strategies are made independently at different levels by

functional groups within the organization hierarchy causes the following problems.

Conflicts frequently occur among functional managers and cause lack of trust.

Frequent meetings are called to establish or renegotiate priorities.

People frequently shift from one project to another, depending on current priority.

Employees are confused about which projects are important.

People are working on multiple projects and feel inefficient.

Resources are not adequate.

These symptoms of organizations are result of a disconnected strategy and unclear

priorities.

Our first suggestion in this case is to have a meaningful process for addressing the

previous problems. The first action to solve these problems would be if the organization

develop and use a project priority process for project selection. Such an action will help

to address these problems and also lead to reduce, or even eliminate, the impact of the

problems.

Developing a project priority system that ranks projects and weighted them by

their contribution to the strategic plan and others factors like compliance and profit would

help to mitigate the overlapping projects, the shortage in resources, and multitasking. In

addition, it will also provide the following benefits to the organization.

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Recommendations

Builds discipline into project selection process

Links project selection to strategic metrics

Prioritizes project proposals across a common set of criteria, rather than on

politics or emotion

Allocates resources to projects that align with strategic direction

Balances risk across all projects

Justifies killing projects that do not support organization strategy

Improves communication and supports agreement on project goals

The aim of portfolio management is to ensure that projects are aligned with strategic

goals and prioritized appropriately.

An example of Multi-Weighted Scoring Model is listed below in Fig 3

Fig.2 - Multi-Weighted Scoring Model

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Recommendations

The Multi-Weighted Scoring Model use, is several weighted selection criteria to

evaluate projects. This Multi-Weighted Scoring Model will include qualitative and/or

quantitative criteria. Each selection criterion is assigned a weight, scores are assigned to

each criterion for the project, and the project would be evaluated based on its importance.

After weighing the projects and assigning scores for them, all the weights and scores are

multiplied to each other for the same project to get the total weighted score of the project.

Projects now can be compared to each other by using the weighted score. Project with

high weighted score would be considered more important.

2- Set A Projectize Structure for Big Projects

To address cross team/System overlap & dependency, we suggest that it may be

helpful to have a projectized structure specially for the big projects which consume a

more effort, resources, and time. A compliance project for instance, is a good fit for this

kind of structure, where most of the organization’s resources are utilized in the project

work. In addition, projectized structure is the best option among all other options to

complete project with less complications and faster in time. The driving force for the

projectized structure projects is the high level of motivation and cohesiveness, the reason

is because all the participants share a common goal and personal responsibilities for the

project and the team.

In the projectized structure, the project manager has full time project team members

working under him. Usually, all personnel working for a particular project are grouped

together and are often co-located for the duration of the project.

An Example for that, a design engineer, an IT specialist, and a test engineer all work

under the supervision of Project Manager A in order to complete the project A.

Fig.4 listed in page 14 is representing what is the projectized structure look like in the

organization.

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Recommendations

Fig.3 – Projectized Organization Structure

The Characteristics of the Projectized Organization Structure:

The project manager has more authority and power in this type of

organizational structure

Project team member report to the project manager

The project manager controls the budget, resource, and work assignment

When the project ends, project team is disbanded and team members and

other resources are released to other project opportunities

Advantages of the Projectized Organization Structure are as follows:

Clear line of authority.

Strong communication with single reporting system.

Flexibility in trade-offs and decision-making.

Fast decision-making.

Usually responses to stakeholders’ concern are very fast.

Senior Executives

Project Manager A

Design Engineer

IT Specialist

Test Engineer

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Recommendations

From Fig.5 (listed below) we can see how the organization would be affected in the

resource availability when it is running in the functional or matrix structures. While, the

resources availability is high in the projectized structure

Fig.4 – Comparison between different organizational structures.

Another factor that would make the project succeed, is that all the project team

are dictated to one project as full-time job, so all the effort would be focused on that

specific project and that would add the benefit of no more multi-tasking or resource

conflict in the project, which is usually causes the project delay.

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Recommendations

3- Develop a Communication Plan

Develop a communication plan, such a communication plan that facilitates

effective and efficient communications with the various stakeholders involved in the

project. It describes how project communications will occur, who needs what

information, when do they need it and how do they want to receive it. A good

communications among all the project participants is key for the success of the project.

Good communication forestalls surprises, prevents duplication of effort, and can help to

reveal omissions and misallocation of resources early enough to permit corrections.

Once the project deliverables and work are clearly identified, following up with

an internal communication plan is vital. Communication is a key component in

coordinating and tracking project schedules, issues, and action items. The plan maps out

the flow of information to different stakeholders and becomes an integral part of the

overall project plan.

The purpose of a project communication plan is to express what, who, how, and

when information will be transmitted to project stakeholders so schedules, issues, and

action items can be tracked. We have included an example of an IT communication plan

that hopefully might help to mitigate the miscommunication problems and improve the

overall project performance.

The Multi-steps procedure in page 17 would be helpful to create a good

communication plan for your company or project. In order to create this communication

plan you first to understand the project’s objectives, understand the project audience, plan

communications channels, and finally monitor the effectiveness of this communication

plan.

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Recommendations

The following steps will help to clarify what we meant by understand the project’s

objectives and audience.

Step 1. Develop the project overall communication objectives, and make sure that it’s

clear and easy to understand by all the stakeholders. The communication plan must state

the following:

What do you want to achieve, when and why?

Step 2. This step is basically about identifying the audiences and lists them by their

differences. No doubt that will be difficult but by using stakeholder analysis that would

help you to identify who to communicate with and why?

Step 3. Clarify the communication specific objectives for each audience. The best way to

do that is by identify what is the audience’s needs- what do they need and want to know

from you? List the objectives for each audience in the communication plan.

After you have understood the audiences that you need to communicate with and

clarified the objectives, you are ready now to plan how you are going to deliver the

massages that meant to meet your objectives, what are the channels for that. This is what

we meant by plan communications channels.

Step 4. In this stage you can start by listing all the channels that you could use, the list

below might be helpful to create a new communication channels

Email

Teleconference

Notice boards

CEO briefing

Lunchtime meeting

Launch event

Team meeting

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Recommendations

Step 5. To deliver the message for each audience, first you have to categorize the

audiences based on their answers of these questions

What does the audience need and want to know?

When do we need to communicate?

What is the regular or preferred channel for reaching this audience?

For this specific audience and message, what is the most effective way to get your

message across?

The answers should be added up to the plan to meet the audience objectives.

Step 6. Finally monitor the effectiveness of the communication plan from the feedback,

double check that they understand the message that you need them to know. This

monitoring can help you to fill the gaps in your future communication plan.

Fig.6 listed below is an example of suggested communication plan

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Recommendations

Fig.5- IT Project Communication Plan Worksheet

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Recommendations

Directions For Use:

1. Complete the IT Project Communication Plan worksheet.

2. Use worksheet information as appropriate to complete the project scope form.

3. If desirable, attach the completed worksheet to the project scope form.

4. Store completed worksheet with the other project management

documentation in the project document repository.

Project Phases are one of the following:

All (meaning all phases of the project)

Project Initiation

Planning

Executing

Monitoring/Controlling

Closing

Information Type examples include, but are not limited to:

Status report (see "Report Performance")

Approval

Project planning documents (project initiation, project plan, etc.)

Announcement

Documentation materials

Communication Type examples include, but are not limited to:

Reports/Paper

Meeting

Email (status reports, announcements)

Web site

Phone

KB article

Critical dates calendar

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Summary

Our team recognized that Sallie Mae makes a great work to control a scope creep that

considers being one of the biggest problems business management face in nowadays; and

it uses its process effectively when create a new project. Sallie Mea teams have ability to

manage the process by permitting a project goes throughout several approvals to make

sure parameters of the project fits with goals and objectives of company. In addition,

teams go deeply to understand news things comes across the project, and they attempt to

figure out advantages, they gain by modifying the scope of project. Another things teams

approach is making validation of scope which can be supported in current plan and

schedule.

Sallie Mea has ability to utilize several tools that allows project manager to use

information to steer the project. Moreover, the tools will help to monitor time

performance, control cost of project. The significant about diversity of tools will lead to

manage time of project.

The risk management is one of area that Sallie Mea control successfully. Since the

company has a heavy load with satisfying their customers that require high performance,

the company has established a fast automatic response that responds consumers’ needs

directly. The sensitive financial dates for company force it to responds to industry

regulations and standards.

Summary

Based on Sallie Mae biggest challenges and obstacles that they face during the

projects we notices that the shortage in resources, time, budget can be considered as

results from the overlapping projects and cross team/system overlap & dependencies. To

address these problems and solve them we studied the organizational culture and

structure, understand the process and based on that we came up with some suggestion

such as

Develop a priority system for project selection, this recommendation hopefully

would help Sallie Mae to build discipline into project selection process and link it to the

company’s strategy, it will also prevent any non resources adequate by allocate the

resources that only align with strategic direction.

Set a projectize structure for the big projects, which will allow the company to

take the advantage of the flexibility in trade-offs and decision making, faster decision

making, and it has a clear line of authority.

And finally to develop a communication plan, that would help Sallie Mae to avoid

any future surprises, mitigate the duplication of effort, and also prevent the misallocation

of resources in early stage of the project.

Our team would like to thank the members of Sallie Mea for giving us the

opportunity to apply what we have learned into a real world situation. We are so proud to

work with you and hopefully produce some deliverables that would help.

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References

1- Larson, E. W., & Gray, C. F. (2011). Project management: the managerial

process (5th ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill Irwin.

2- Bernhard, S., & Jonathan, A. (2007, March).  MOTIVATION IN PROJECT

MANAGEMENT: THE PROJECT MANAGER'S PRESPECTIVE.

3- Micheal, Y. (2011, January 10). The Importance of Motivation in Project

Management. PM Hut RSS. Retrieved , from http://www.pmhut.com/the-

importance-of-motivation-in-project-management

4- Christopher, W. (2001). Project Management Basics- Managing Risk.

TechnologyUK. Retrieved April 17, 2014, from

http://www.technologyuk.net/computing/project_management/managing_risk.sht

ml

Attachments

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