Msc Strategic Project Management

Strategic Project Management C11CP1

Module Assessment: Business Case; Focus on the Future

Submitted By: Jumbo Victor Miriam 091611448 Akinlose Modupe 091595609 Umar Galadima Shehu 091550631 Maryam Ciroma 091548018 Halima Ciroma 091548007

6th of December 2009

Lecturer: Amos Haniffa.haniff@hw.ac.uk

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Table of ContentExecutive Summary

Introduction

Define Phase:

Statement of Opportunity Feasibility Studies (organisation Structure) Responsibility Matrix (Governance)

Planning Phase:

Work Break Down Structure (Time Scale) Budgeting and Costing Risk Assessment

Execution              Evaluation

Recommendation/Closure

Benefits/Impact

Critical success factors

Reference List

Appendix

Executive summary

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One of the key strategies of Heriot-Watt is to play a greater role in Knowledge and

developing human capital in order to improve productivity growth through research and

development [1]. Since Dubai is now one of largest tourist centres in the world with

modern and interesting Architectural structures, it will be a very good area to improve on

Heriot-Watt’s record on Research and development. Establishing a major Research centre

in Dubai for education and research into architectural design to minimise energy, this is

an important Research theme in Heriot-Watt’s School of Built Environment and we

believe would elevate the universities position in the world. Now building a major

Research centre, which is the program in this case involves a lot of projects from

construction of the actual buildings, infrastructures, to recruitment of staffs.

The world of IT is headed toward major shifts in the manner in which its resources are

organized and optimized. The growth and expansion of an organisation entails the growth

in technology, IT infrastructure is one of the most expensive things to deal with. This

project focuses on reducing the negative impacts of excessive fragmentation and

complexity, and the corresponding benefits of infrastructure simplification which will

help in the development of the research centre. The deployment of virtualization in Heriot

Watt University’s IT environment will allow Heriot Watt University to reduce the overall

cost of IT infrastructure needed in the research centre and provide additional capital to

improve actual research. The question now is can virtualization (infrastructure

simplification) yield benefits that would assist in justifying our strategic focus? Is it

simply a case of reducing IT costs and savings for improving other aspect of the

Strategy? This report will help provide answers to these questions.

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IntroductionIn their book, “The E for Everything”, Oblinger and Katz discuss IT leadership strategies

for universities in the areas of e-commerce, e-business, e-learning and research. They

note that institutions must identify the technical building blocks necessary to move

forward without constraining future options and opportunities. To accomplish this within

higher education, we have begun to deploy integrated virtualized systems. To pursue this

further, we need to consider how to integrate these systems into our academic enterprise,

Katz and Oblinger also highlight the need to view our IT infrastructure as a strategic

resource, identifying the requirements for intra- and inter-campus solutions that provide

services across solutions.

But what is Virtualization?

Virtualization is a means by which multiple physical IT resources like server, storage

and network resources are viewed as a single logical unit [3]. With virtualization, many

physical servers, data centres and network resources can be consolidated into one small

and compact virtual pool, that can be easily managed, maintained, administered with far

less financial resources as compared with operating these resources separately, and takes

less space. This will ultimately result in effective utilization of IT resources, giving the

possibility for expanding workload on the infrastructure if needed without expanding

physical hardware resources.

Virtualization can address the institutional goals of

•    Offering on- and off-campus students, faculty and staff twenty four hours access to

online learning resources.

•    Enhancing distance-education students’ experiences.

•    Streamlining our research administration and proposal management process.

•    Reducing the need to acquire extra hardware and manpower resources to

accommodate the increase in online course workload.

The document focuses on the implementation of Virtualization on Heriot Watt

University’s IT infrastructure for the purpose of contributing to the development of its

research centre for Agricultural design and minimization of energy.

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Statement of Opportunity

Research and development is driving higher education to change. The Dubai campus

students, faculty and staff have increased expectations for research into architectural

design to minimize energy due to its increasing importance in the Middle East region,

while it would like to offer a Research and development institute to explore this area of

research. These, amongst other drivers are moving the university’s Dubai campus

towards implementing Virtualization. The other drivers include:

•    Increased need to expand interdisciplinary and inter-institutional research and

collaboration.

•    Increased need to improve on its Research and development area, for the ultimate goal

of improving its current rankings in UK.

•    Changing needs of teaching and learning and providing the need to set up online

teaching environments to run e-learning SCHOLAR courses without overstretching the

current IT resources, the need to go green by cutting down power and energy

consumption.

Moving to a virtual environment helps Heriot Watt University cut capital costs by

reducing the number of physical servers necessary to support its IT infrastructure.

With a virtualized environment, the university can reduce its capital expenditures for

storage devices and network hardware moving towards a virtualized environment means

lesser energy consumption and a “Greener” IT implementation

How are these drivers addressed?  Virtualization can enable these new services while

limiting cost and resource overhead in implementing them.

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Organisational Structure

Heriot Watt University is said to be operating in combination of pure functional and

product organisational structure, a structure based on horizontal and vertical

relationships. This structure attempts to integrate a structure which is project oriented

with the organisations existing structure in place, as seen in the matrix structure presented

in the appendix section where reports and decision making process are passed through a

series of hierarchical authorities in order for greater visibility and management control of

activities within an organised setting while allowing for concise high level expertise in

functional areas.

The table below (fig1.1) represents a technique used to measure the level of influence the

existent organisational structure could have on the proposed project.

Project Characteristics Balanced Matrix

Project Managers Authority Moderate

% of Performing Organisation Personnel Assigned Fulltime to Project Work

45%

Project Managers Role Full- Time

Common Titles for Project Managers Role Project –manager/project officer

Project Management Administrative Staff Part-time

Matrix Structure (Gardiner Paul .D 2005) fig 1.1

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Matrix Structure

Strategic Governance

In line with the University’s focus on the Future which underpins its vision for the next

decade to be the worlds leading university, the success of this project is dependent on the

strategic governance of those at the top to effectively manage the existing programme,

ensuring this Information Technology project ensues an efficient use of development

resources such as business analysts, VMware solution architects, web designers and lots

more whilst going green, minimising cost of duplicate management and support activity.

The executive director or principal in concert

with Board of Directors considers the Universities

long term technological, educational, societal and

environmental future, and formulate policies..

Organisational Structure Fig 1.2

Managing Director

Program Committee{Programme development}

Policy Communicated

The Managing directors or Line Managers represent the Executive Sponsor who consider events external environment of the institute, Consumer responses, Industry & Commerce, Alumni and Community changes and then develop strategies relative to Development, Operations and Programs.

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Principal

Board of Directors

Figure 1.3 simply summarises Heriot Watt’s into a three tier structure, showing three

organisational levels who are directly involved in the effective implementation of the

project through the executive sponsor represented as the managing director which

comprises of people and organisational development and the director of international

development; through whom there is an established link between corporate governance

and project governance. A descriptive representation of the institute’s organisational

structure has been provided in the Appendix section of this paper.

Business Technology Drivers Drivers

External Focus

InternalFocus

Business and Technology Matrix (Smith 2002) Fig 1.3

This project is therefore consistent with the organizations strategies and it’s Focus on the

Future, as the project incorporates technological measures through cost cutting

techniques, to help support the universities vision to be the world’s number one

university in the future. This project is to provide deliverables (VMware) that would

support other sectors such as excellence. As business environment changes (over 900

universities all over the world has invested in the VMware soft ware to cut cost) the

related technology areas must remain synchronized, so also as technology advances to

create new opportunities for organizations, Heriot Watt University must find new ways to

assess, capture and incorporate corporate strategies to exploit the opportunities provided

by certain external changes driven by technology (fig 1.3). A full length organisational

structure of the institutes represented in the Appendix shows clear lines of accountability,

Business Strategy

Technology Strategy

(Cutting cost using VMware)

Business Processes

Technology Processes

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direct leadership and responsibility, judging from the flow of work from the top

(principal/board of directors) and down towards the project level.

Stakeholder Mapping

In light of the university’s structure, it is important to take into account its stake holders,

using the Stakeholder Mapping technique to determine the level of power over interest

which these stakeholders, who are directly or indirectly connected to the organisation

may have on the future decisions made by the organisation.

Keep Satisfied

Students Research council and other

funding bodies. Staff Court

Key Players Alumni Community

Minimal Effort Society Bankers

Keep Informed Industry and Commerce

High Low Level of Interest

Stakeholder Analysis fig 1.4 The stakeholders with high power and interest (students) are most likely to control the

strategic direction of the organisation and also the success of this project.

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Hig

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Pow

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Schedules

Fig 1.5 project time Scale (Gantt Chart)

According to S. Elberk & M. Thomas; project managers may instinctively think that

allocating more resource to a task will reduce the time that it takes to complete this task,

in other words increasing the effort can reduce the duration of the task

Nevertheless what every project requires is the application of adequate effective planning

tools to ensure that the appropriate activity is carried out at the right time in a strategic

and structured manner. Therefore to base our assumptions and judgement we hereby find

the Gantt chart to be the appropriate for identifying and measuring this project in regards

to its time scale

In regards to an assumption that this project has been approved and is dated to

commence on December 4, 2009, the project team has to identify appropriate servers to

assume virtualization between day 4 and day 7, between the 8th and 11th day the discovery

of new server architecture by the project manager is subject to take place. In between

these dates the project team is expected to announce the categorization of appropriate

data centres, which is the 10th to 14th day .More so the recognition of appropriate network

resources within two days (10 & 11) has to be done, along side ensuring that the right

virtualization software is put in place. However the installation of software should not

exceed two days 14th and 15th. Overall is the testing of the new environment between 18th

and 21st.In addition to new change project there should be a deployment of new

environment in the production environment for just one and last day 22nd of project

implementation. As seen by the timescale the project timeline is short term which will

allow proper reviews to measure milestones.

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Budgeting and Costing

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At this stage of the project planning process, a cost estimate is drawn up in order to

provide a structured framework for estimating the total cost of the project and is hereby

subject to changes from a higher power.

In line with the institutes objective for continuous quality improvement by streamlining

service delivery (including assessment of quality, relevance and cost) and to reduce cost

by 10% over a three year period; this project introduces an essential academic support

tool used to reduce cost known as the Virtualisation Mware a products that support

multiple operating systems (such as Windows and Linux) on a single machine It’s

therefore important to note that at this stage of the project planning, financial budgeting

made is only an estimate and the estimate is bound to change as the work begins. This

estimate is done in regards to Castle Computer Services (technician).

Description Cost A (£) Cost B (£)Project Manager -Planning-Reviews-Progress Meetings

4,0005,0004,000 13,000

Interviews & Research-InternationalLegal-International-Returns 17,000Technical-Provider-Support 13,000Report & Presentation-Legal-Research-TechnicalTotal Resource Cost -Equipment Cost - - Capacity Planning

Exercise- - Blade Chasis- - 7 x Blades- - 1 x Storage Area Network (SAN)- - VMware Software 90,000

Estimated Total Project Cost 103,000Cost and Budgeting fig 1.6

An analysis of the financial statement of Heriot Watt University in consideration of

possible investment into this project, the institutes Income and Expenditure account (a

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summary of profits the business had earned over a period of time) which depicts an

increase in Net Surplus of £1,393,000 in 2008, but it’s a 30% decline when compared to

the previous year. This could be as a result of the increase in total expenditure from

108636 in 2007 to 116300 in 2008 and such changes can be traced to expenses in various

sectors of the organisation, judging from the Notes To The Accounts this change is

identified from increased staff cost (Academic Support –Information technology Support)

which rose by 15% from the previous year.

Therefore with the implementation of this project, the institute should be able to cut

cost through savings:

Of over £41000 per year

197,964 kWh on Electricity

In total Staff Cost

Reduction in maintenance cost and depreciation

Fewer IT Servers

The Consolidated Cash Flow Statement which is particularly important when considering

new ventures shows cash increase of £1,452,000 in 2008; depicting a long and profitable

future ahead open for new investments. Through a strategy to tackle our numerous debt

issues we should be able to align Trade debtors with creditors to allow for more

productive investments.

Virtualisation Risks and Response Planning

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It is the means by which a company or organization operates a number of applications or

operating systems on a single desktop or server, A survey carried out by the leading

virtualisation vendor estimates that 50% of organisations are or will employ virtualisation

server and more than 90% of virtualised and consolidated IT infrastructure are in

production environments. All these rush for virtualisation are due to its potential benefits

such as

It creates cost benefits for the organization, by freeing up systems capacity,

improving processes and resource for use by more critical applications and

processes

Greater flexibility to identify and rectify software errors in a timely and efficient

manner

The ability to implement offline hardware and software maintenance and

upgrades with minimal disruption

Significant reduction in lead time for new server upgrades and requirements

A significant reduction in the organization’s hardware footprint, which reduces,

for the first time, the physical space, power and cooling requirements of the

company

As a result, leading companies are adopting virtualisation as an efficient way to improve

processes, cut cost and increase efficiency. For example BT, Nationwide, Prudential UK,

and lots more, and also many renowned universities and schools around the world are

running their mission-critical enterprise applications, database systems, and education-

specific applications such as College NET and the Blackboard Academic Suite in

virtualized environments including Cambridge, Princeton, Stanford, Purdue, the

University of Maryland, etc.

Virtualisation may have proved its mettle in terms of lowering costs and improving

efficiency but its security implications which could put the university at the considerable

risk must be thoroughly looked into before deployment and decide whether it is the right

choice.

Risks Associated with Virtualisation

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There are, however, some risks which come with virtualization. These risks need to be

analysed and decide whether there are ways of neutralizing them without losing the

benefits gained. The risks are:

Loss of separation of duties for administrative tasks

Patching and signature updates and protection from tampering

Limited visibility into the host operating system and virtual network to find

vulnerabilities and correct configuration

Immature and incomplete security and management tools

Restored views into “inter-virtual machine traffic” for inspection by intrusion

prevention systems

Mobile virtual machines and security policy

Risks of virtualization fall into four major categories

1. Server failure: Large scale consolidation may put many key processes,

applications and services in the same proverbial basket. Consequently, fewer

physical servers bear the workload and a physical failure has much more

significant consequences.

2. Over-provisioning: starting consolidation without a clear picture of an

application’s function, workload or profile may lead to infrastructure that are out

of balance and over-provisioned

3. Operational process: Many majors that have deployed virtualization implement

proactive monitoring systems and some formally change control process, but few

have advanced operational processes to manage crucial aspects of a smooth

running virtual environment

4. Service levels: virtualization technology requires new skills, e.g. the ability to

identify whether a problem originates in the physical or virtual environment,

without skilled staff to address problems, service levels may suffer.

Risk Analysis

Serial Risk Likelihood Consequence Risk Level

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Number (Severity)

1 Server failure Likely Major High

2 Over provisioning Likely Major Medium

3 Operational process Quite Likely Major Medium

4 Service Levels Likely Minor Low

Risk Analysis Fig 1.7

The number of servers involved, their importance and identified risks will help to dictate

the resources that are required to manage these risks successfully. The table above is an

estimate risk matrix; however, rigorous risk models, simulations etc. may be used to

determine the risks since some risks have a low probability of occurring or low impacts

on the projects.

Likelihood

Likely = conceivable and could possibly happen

Quite likely = almost certain to happen

Consequence

Major disruption = destroy or damage to the virtual servers

Minor: partial or recoverable damage to the virtual servers

Risk Level

High = urgent action will be required, interim measures must be in place

Medium = action required soon, interim measures must be in place

Low = action is required to reduce the risk

Possible Preventive Measures

A trial of the development or test environment on one of the university's non-

critical applications must be set up to prove that the virtual machines can reliably

meet the university’s aspirations.

It may be beneficial to b ring in a consultancy to have a second opinion, so as not

to overlook cost savings beyond the server hardware and also to ensure that a

validated methodology that assure a range of availability and improved disaster

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recovery capabilities that can provide quick restoration or the ability to failover to

an alternate site.

It will be reasonable to use a combination of vendor and peer-to-peer on-the-job-

training, in order to minimize costs, only a few staff of the university needs to be

trained. Then, those trained can train their peers on the job.

Standardize on a hardware configuration or at least a single vendor will save time

and money, staff will only have to coordinate with one vendor, it will facilitate the

reallocation and reuse of servers.

Risk Response Planning

This is to bring organised purposeful thoughts to the subject of identified risks and to

ensure that they are managed successfully. This plan should include activities to manage

the risk, people to be assigned, completion dates, and periodic dates to monitor progress.

Hence, it is important to choose the right vendor offering the most trusted and reliable

platform as a top reason for investing in server virtualization. The vendor must

demonstrate how to:

Eliminate identified risks wherever possible

Isolate and minimize risks

Develop alternative course of action

Establish time and resources to cover risks that cannot be avoided

Contingency plan

Monitoring plan

Risk Control Strategies

Avoidance: causes of the risks are avoided completely by possible elimination of many

steps from the build process that requires multiple technicians and administrators to touch

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the system and adopt the system that allow use of tested and trusted virtualization

software.

Mitigation: measures that need to be carried to reduce the probability or impact of the

risk, most critical applications need to be protected by business continuity and disaster

recovery solutions that work quite well and provide a much better level of service by

allowing failed systems to automatically restart on new systems and easily can be copied

to another location for disaster recovery purposes.

Acceptance: acceptable level of risks needs to be determined, and then employ a leading

vendor to load and configure applications which may be time-consuming, error-prone and

not consistent so as to reduce the impact of the risks to acceptable level.

Transfer of the risks: due to fact that the virtualization is a new technology, many

insurance companies may be wary of investing on it. Transfer or sharing of risks may be

a possible solution by contracting out to another party that can invest in server

virtualization since any business continuity and/or disaster recovery (BC/DR) investment

is essentially an insurance policy against an improbable but very disruptive event.

Absorption or Pooling: partnership with any major vendor to ensure additional

improvements, backup procedures can be greatly simplified for the staff, administrative

requirements to keep things running smoothly after deployment, and comprehensive

safeguard against hardware failure will be guaranteed

Knowledge and Research: Tests and simulation studies can be used to improve the

prediction of the most likely outcome, in the event of emergency situation. Hence,

simplified contingency plan procedures need to be in place for very fast recovery,

hardware isolation etc.

Project Execution

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This project focuses on the successful deployment of software to be used in virtualisation

of Heriot Watt University’s current IT infrastructure. Current activities related to the

execution phase of this project include:

Planning Stage:

This stage involves planning the server; network and data centre resources to help

eliminate un-necessary investment on resources not needed for the implementation and

execution phase; which will involve selecting appropriate virtualization software, and

deploys the software in the university’s production environment. The project will develop

a set of expert guides to capture knowledge related to virtualization topics so that

knowledge will be available to less experienced staff even after resident experts are no

longer available. Additional supplemental funded opportunities will be identified in this

area to address plant needs. Accurate planning of IT resources need to be put in place to

successfully deploy VMware ESX server. The following steps are to be taken:

Identifying Appropriate Servers:

The servers to be used for this implementation need to be identified. It is possible that not

all servers at the University will be used, but for this deployment, we are going to use a

server that will be responsible for supporting Heriot Watt University’s both present and

future IT programmes.

Capacity Planning:

The goal of capacity planning is to provide satisfactory service levels to users in a cost-

effective manner, currently Heriot Watt University Dubai campus has over 1000 students,

with an anticipated increase in the number of students in future programmes to over 5000

in the next 4 years. So it can be estimated that after 3000 new users are registered, the

server response time will increase from its current value, leading to server performance

problems. Using new and faster server architecture will enable effective support of any

increase in workload without affecting current server performance. For this

implementation we are going to use a Pentium Core 2 Quad processor based server.

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P2V Immigration:

In this stage, several of the University’s current physical servers are migrated to the

newly created VMware server running on the new server architecture. In this

implementation, for each new virtual server, we will move to minimize them to 10

university servers.

   

Virtual Infrastructure Management:

The overall project is managed by a single project manager. The management and

administration of the VMware ESX server is carried out by a VMware certified

administrator. He/she is responsible for ensuring the smooth running of the virtual server,

virtual network and storage resources, and also reports back to the project manager.

The vendor software that will be used in this deployment is the VMware ESX

virtualization software. After the software is installed on the new server, the whole

infrastructure is migrated to it and tested first. If the test is successful with acceptable

results, all the university’s IT services will be brought online for use by its staff, students

and faculty.

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Evaluation

Item Yes No N/A

Comments/Explanations

Does the virtualization project align with and support business directions and priorities?Is the project consistent and compatible with the university’s goal

The project contributes to the university’s goal of becoming a world-leading university.

Is the project consistent and compatible with ongoing or planned initiatives

The project complements other initiatives including Excellence, teaching, risk, etc.

Is the project consistent and compatible with the university’s IT direction, strategies, architectures and infrastructures?

The project contributes to the university strategy which in this case is Research.

Is the project consistent and compatible with government regulations (if applicable) for the delivery of services?

Does the project conform to industry-common IT standards, infrastructures and architectures?

Is the business case based on the full cost of the system from initiation through development, implementation and the estimated annual cost of operation?

Has the project manager ensured that the project team has all the necessary competencies required by the project?

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Item Yes No N/A

Comments/Explanations

Does a deputy or assistant project manager directly manage each sub-project?

There is no assistant project manager assigned for the project

Are all core project responsibilities and functions under the complete control of departmental management?

Where there are several departments involved in the delivery of a project…

Do all departments involved understand and agree with all of the other departments’ objectives, roles and levels of participation?

Has the designated lead university established an overall project office, separate from its project team, with an overall project sponsor, project leader and project manager staffed at a sufficiently senior level to be able to intercede at the appropriate level in the participating departments?

Are project managers developed, and do they work within a corporate discipline?

Did the university perform a preliminary assessment of the project’s scope, complexity and risk before finding and assigning a project manager?

The outcomes were included in this document

Does the assigned project manager have the knowledge, skills and experience required to manage the project’s scope, size, complexity and risk profile?

It is required that the project manager must have necessary skills and experience to manage the project

Are there other project managers in the organization with relevant knowledge, skills and experience from whom project managers can get advice and support?

None required.

Are project management decisions based on risk management?

Is the overall project being delivered via a set of sub-projects, each of which is less than twelve (12) months in duration and costs less than $1 (one) million?

None identified

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Item Yes No N/A

Comments/Explanations

Does each sub-project team consist of ten (10) or fewer people?

Does the project have scheduled review checkpoints when management will decide on its future and, if necessary, take appropriate corrective action?

The checkpoints are a measure of the critical success factors outlined.

Have only the funds needed to reach the next milestone been allocated to the project?

All funds need to be allocated for the project to succeed.

Have the project and any related contracting been structured to avoid incurring litigation?

Is the contractor required to provide complete information on project performance and progress?

Is an option to cancel the project at scheduled checkpoints specified in the contract?

Have contingency plans for potential problems discovered at these checkpoints been developed in advance?

Has a project risk assessment been used to identify and quantify risks?

Results of the assessment are described in the project risk section.

The deployment of middleware virtualized infrastructure supports institutional goals of

offering on and off campus staff, students, faculty 24 hours access to administrative and

academic resources offering distance-education as expanding and improving Heriot Watt

University’s research eliminates the need to hire additional technological or technical

staffs to manage new applications and the entire IT infrastructure.

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Benefits

Moving to a virtual IT environment will help Heriot Watt University cut capital costs by

reducing the current number of physical servers necessary to support its IT infrastructure.

With a virtualized environment, the university can reduce its capital expenditures for

upgrading its current data centres and network resources, and improve the recovery time

of its servers and data centres whenever there is a failure. A virtualized environment

means lesser power, energy consumption and a “Greener” implementation of its current

IT infrastructure.

Provides the university’s Dubai campus with an alternate source of funds it needs to be

able to undertake the implementation of a research and development in architectural

design and minimization of energy in these harsh economic times.

Virtualization will further improve on the security of the university’s IT infrastructure. It

will also simplify the administration and maintenance of the whole IT infrastructure.

Positive Impact

Direct cost savings

Reduces maintenance costs of IT hardware resources.

Reduces cost of obtaining and maintaining IT network resources

Eliminate cost of Disaster recovery of IT infrastructure

Avoided costs

Reducing cost of avoiding costly mishaps.

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Cost-effective simulation alternatives for design, testing, and training during

modifications

On-line monitoring-based predictive maintenance for avoiding unneeded

maintenance

Strategic Decisions

Control room human factors guidelines

Improved information access and visualization

Virtualization enhanced approaches for tacit knowledge capture and training

Negative Impacts

While implementing Virtualization, a number of issues may affect our deployment,

Considerably time and effort to conduct campus-wide planning, review and negotiation

processes, educating the campus and stakeholders on the benefits and implications of

virtualization is necessary for a long-term viable implementation, reallocation in capital

equipment and staffing requirements, the need to plan for new software resources while

using existing hardware resources. As more new applications are introduced into this new

infrastructure, additional guidelines will be needed to learn how they are used.

Decrease in IT service availability would be experienced since the implementation of

virtualization involves re-deployment of all the University’s IT services like email library

services. Moving to this new infrastructure will cause a short term decrease in availability

of the university’s IT services.

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Critical Success Factors These are factors that need to be in place for a successful implementation of the project.

The Project strategy is one of the major factors to be considered in that the strategy is a

match between the institutes capabilities and changes in the external environment, and

that it aligns with overall corporate strategy. From our research into the university

strategy (Heriot Watt University) one of which is cost cutting. The implementation of

virtualization software in its information technology unit is a means of cutting down of

cost so as to enable the organization to acquire and reinvest in other sectors like research,

teaching and learning which will give the school cost advantage to support the price

advantage of the tuition fees and embracing continuous improvement as a way of

working. Nevertheless the stakeholders’ commitment is another paramount area that

would be looked into. Commitment from the top management in terms of provision of

adequate resources likes financial, capable staffs with the necessary skill; infrastructures

such as technical requirements and so on is vital to make the project accomplishable with

effective communication from top management to employees in order to give reasons

why the project is necessary and reward any employee the change project would affect

negatively. In addition there has to be proper risk management in control so as to weigh

the risk and deliverables of the project and also to mitigate, share, avoid, transfer, accept

any uncertain event that could affect the project negatively or positively. Moreover

effective planning and control of the virtualization software has to be in place using a

comprehensive and more reliable metrics like control chart to check if process is in

control or out of control so as to prevent defect in the output/deliverables. However with

the clear goal (cost cutting) of this project should and will give the university a cost

leadership over its competitors such as Oxford and Cambridge University so as to attract

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more international students giving them a competitive advantage with proper portfolio

management in place.

In addition electronic experience of distance-learning students becomes a critical success

factor in their overall perception of the institution, so providing a framework for efficient

allocation of resources for that purpose will most definitely provide instant access to

electronic services like email, library resources and online course work.

ReferencesBooks:

S. Elberk & M. Thomas (1998) Project Management Skills; Prentice Hall UK

Gardiner P. (2005) A Strategic Planning Approach, Palgrave Macmillan N.Y

Johnson, Scholes & Whittington (2009) Fundamentals of Strategy, Prentice Hall UK

Katz, Richard N, Oblinger, & Diana .G The E Is For Everything: E-commerce, E-business, And E-learning In The Future Of Higher Education Jossey-Bass

Websites: Course Estimation http://scholar.hw.ac.uk/courses.html accessed

20/11/09

Focus on the Future http://www.hw.ac.uk/home/dir/16/international-students/focusonthefuture accessed 20/11/09

o Virtualisation http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/ accessed 20/11/09

Virtualisation and Cost Cutting http://www.teamquest.com/pdfs/whitepaper accessed 20/11/09

IT Infrastructure of Royal High http://www.royalhigh.edin.sch.uk 21/11/09

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Risks to be considered when looking at Virtualisation (J. FIELDING 2006) HTTP://BLOGS.TECHREPUBLIC.COM.COM/NETWORKING/?P=136 accessed 15/11/09

Virtualisation security risks being ignored (E. Messmer, 2007) HTTP://NEWS.TECHWORLD.COM/OPERATING-SYSTEMS/8491/VIRTUALISATION-SECURITY-RISKS-BEING-IGNORED/

Virtualisation dangers and how to avoid them (C. M. Burry and G. Darbyshire,, 06) http://howto.techworld.com/operating-systems/3012/virtualisation-dangers-and-how-to-avoid-them/ accessed 16/11/09

The Benefits of Moving to a Virtualised Environment (J. Syrkiewicz 2008) http://webmasterresources.suite101.com/article.cfm/an_overview_of_virtualisation#ixzz0YR86YES8 accessed 17/11/09

Forrester Consulting Report on Behalf of VMware: The Business Value of Virtualization (2009) http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/solutions/Business-Value-Virtualization.pdf accessed 18/11/09

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