Project Plan, Titans Apparel

Project Plan, Titans Apparel

Background and Statement of Need

The name of this company is Titans Apparel. It is a large clothing manufacturing store with four major branches in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, and Miami. The amount of the business that they are accumulating is growing fast, and the current network that they use is not enough to keep up with consumer demand. This is costing the company major amounts of money, which, in turn, is making the company slowly fail in its mission. The network is becoming slower due to the demands brought on by the lack of networking update. If this networking update is completed the company will run faster and smoother to allow better communication and enable the company to communicate easier and faster between localities and through the consumer. This will help the company make money instead of losing money through there networking upgrades.

Project Objectives

In order to achieve business requirements, several objectives must be realized. We will be looking at the project’s objectives in terms of performance, budget, and timeframe. First the underlying symptom which deemed this project vital was the unacceptable system speeds. Because of antiquated equipment the infrastructure of Titan Apparel has severely limited its ability to do business effectively. As a benchmark for system performance, a two second delay to receive data requested is the maximum allowable wait time. This time extends for all intranet terminals, from the point of sale bar-coding system, through to the inventory tracking and shipping aspects of Titan Apparel. In addition, the system must retain its current functionality and redundancy structure while achieving processing delay acceptability.

This project concerns itself with the entire upgrade of the infrastructure at a pilot Titan Apparel location. Management has allocated a budget for this project of two hundred fifty thousand dollars. This includes all project expenditures, including procurement and personnel compensation.

The time frame for this project is six months, with final implementation realized by June 12th, 2005. Several milestone deadlines will be established to ensure project completion accountability, and will be detailed in the project plan.

Mission and Goals of the Project

Our mission and goals we hope to accomplish include t...

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...in the same field, should be seen as invaluable. Any Cisco relevant courses, and computer networking in general, should be seen as compulsory yearly training for all members of the Network Infrastructure Team. All training and maintenance will be satisfied through personnel reassignment.

Lessons Learned

The biggest difficulty, specifically for the Project Leader, but also for team members, was time management. To properly manage a project of any size takes a considerable amount of time that the project leader severely underestimated. The Network Infrastructure Team is now the smallest team within IT Services and it is very much a “hands-on” team. There is a definite clash between a team members requirement to maintain day-to-day services whilst still allocating a proportion of their time to project activities.

Future projects will need to learn from these experiences, but it may take a complete re-think of our team organization to achieve a more manageable workload. Ideally someone working in a development role should be shielded from the day-to-day fire-fighting tasks, but whether this is realistically possible within such a big clothing apparel team is another matter.