Project Management Ethical Issues

Melwin Fernandes 200083225 Ethics and Other Management Issues (CIS 485) Duncan Jeffries Project Management Issues What is Project Management? Project management  is the  discipline  of  planning,  organizing, and  managing  resources  to bring about the successful completion of specific project goals and objectives. It is often closely related to program management (Wikipedia). A  project  is a temporary endeavour, undertaken to meet particular goals and objectives, having a defined beginning and end, usually to bring about beneficial change or added value.The temporary nature of projects stands in contrast to, which are repetitive, permanent or semi-permanent functional work to produce products or services. In practice, the  management  of these two systems is often found to be quite different, and as such requires the development of distinct technical skills and the adoption of separate management. The primary challenge of project management is to achieve al l of the project goals  and objectives while honouring the preconceived project constraints. Typical constraints are  scope, time, and  budget.The secondary challenge is to  optimize  the  allocation  and integration of inputs necessary to meet pre-defined objectives. Project Management Approach There are a number of approaches to managing project activities: 1. The Traditional Approach: A traditional phased approach identifies a sequence of steps to be completed. 2. Critical Chain Project Management  (CCPM): It is a method of planning and managing projects that puts more emphasis on the resources (physical and human) needed in order to execute project tasks. . Extreme Programming: It is used in combination with the process modeling  and management principles of  human interaction management. 4. Event chain methodology: It  is another method that complements  critical path method  and  critical chain  project management methodologies. 5. PRINCE2: It   is a structured approach to project management 6. Agile Project Management: It is based on the principles of  human interaction management  are founded on a process view of human collaboration. Project Management Development StageProject development includes a number of elements: five stages and a control system. Regardless of the methodology used, the project development process will have the same major stages. Major stages generally include: ? Initiation ? Planning or development ? Production or execution ? Monitoring and controlling ? Closing The Use and Misuse of Security Technology The misuse of security Technology is one of the main issues in project management. There are a large number of people over the world with very little or no knowledge of security technology which is why certain projects fail.It is a subject which is under discussed but in today's world with relatively low cost, trusted, security technology is readily available and easy to use. It has become a cult ure among people who are not sufficiently educated with the tools of security technology as it is easy to use and has somewhat become a fashionable trend. Some consider technology to be bad for the society. People have to understand that this is only because of its misuse. Technology does not threaten the society, instead it is humans who are the users who use technology to threaten society.So technology itself is not at fault. In the field of information, technology has increased the speed, quantity and communication with co-workers and clients. Advancements in technology have also contributed to work being completed at home which imbalances their work and life. Lost revenue and productivity has become a reason for an increased need and demand for surveillance techniques to monitor employees. Employers have resorted to creating separate computer security departments or divisions to deal with both the internal and external threats.All companies weather large or small have the pressu re to maintain access to critical information in order to run the business and remain competitive. A corporation with hundreds of offices and thousands of employees would have the same pressure of holding critical information as any other small enterprise. A comprehensive data protection solution is going to involve a lot of consideration and contingencies. There are many things can go wrong with your data and you need to be able to respond to them.There are many companies that have opted to purchase solutions from different vendors to fully address these challenges but can be an extremely expensive approach in terms of acquisition, integration and ongoing management costs. There have also been companies who decided the cost is too high and taken their chances, which is an approach that has often resulted in disaster. In the business world today, the loss of important data can cause significant damage and lead to the demise of your business.The same complex and expensive solutions a s the major players in your industry can be cost-prohibitive and unnecessary. Software and People in Project Management The most comprehensive software solution for assessing security of web application, network systems, end point systems and email users is CORE IMPACT Pro. It allows you to take security testing to the next level by safely replicating a broad range of threats to your organization’s sensitive data and critical infrastructure. You gain extensive visibility into the ause, effect and prevention of data breaches, enabling you to drive effective risk mitigation enterprise-wise. Impact enables you to safely assess an organization's security posture against the attack methods that jeopardize data today. Exploitation of network defenses in operating systems and services, client applications that run on desktop systems, attacks on employees, contractors and other end users via social engineering, manipulation of web applications to access backend data via cross-site sc ripting (XSS), SQL injection and remote file inclusion techniques only.It allows you to utilize penetration testing to assess your information security in such an integrated, comprehensive, in-depth andseamless fashion. CORE IMPACT Pro gives confidence in your security infrastructure by enabling you to validate network vulnerability, end-user threat response and web application exposure on a regular basis. You not only identify but also distinguish critical network vulnerabilities from false positives, identify where your organization is at risk from social engineering threats such as spam, validate security exposure in web applications.With all this you can intelligently plan, prioritize and execute policy adjustments, ensuring cost-effective use of security and development resources while improving overall security posture. Next-generation data protection, or NGDP, is a term that describes a large number of disk-based backup and recovery technologies, including disk-to-disk (D2D), virtual tape library (VTL), snapshots, continuous data protection (CDP), remote office backup consolidation (ROBC), bare machine recovery (BMR), disaster recovery (DR), wide area file services (WAFS) and others.The Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack It integrates to provide organizations with a complete data protection, archive, and retention and recovery solution. It also extends disk-based, block-level incremental data capture to a repository in another location, sending changed blocks of data over a WAN or Internet connection. Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack was designed to be bandwidth efficient to help minimize the impact on other applications that rely on WAN and Internet links.It can be set individually for each location to meet specific needs of the business while avoiding unnecessary costs in bandwidth and storage.. The features also include data differencing (sending only the changes from the previous job run), compression, bundling of small files to help reduce TCP/IP overh ead, bandwidth throttling and multi-threading. There have been a wide variety of industries who have taken Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack to improve backup and recovery performance across a diverse set of support tasks. It helps organizations: Reduce server backup times from hours or days to a few minutes. †¢ Reduce server volume restoration times from hours or days to a few minutes. †¢ Increase backup frequencies from once per week to multiple times per day, without disrupting operations. †¢ Enable rapid recovery of granular Exchange objects that are typically too difficult to recover. With next-generation data protection and recovery solution set at mid-market prices, these solutions can help companies reduce operational risk and costs, increase productivity and resiliency, and improve levels of service.It delivers a common foundation for managing both business and technology requirements and is designed to quickly address most pressing service management needs to changing business demands. The Tivoli portfolio is backed by world-class IBM Services, IBM Support and an active ecosystem of IBM Business Partners. Project Management Software It is a key tool in your effort to consistently finish projects on time and within budget. It allows you to do the critical steps Project Managers must do efficiently.There are a number of benefits that Project Management Software can provide such as spotting problems before it’s too late to fix them, optimizing the use of resources so you can finish early, updating the plan each week so you know where you are and updating everyone’s schedule when things change. These are the basic tools that every Project manager should have. Ideally Project Management Software provides managers with time-saving scheduling and analysis tools as well as archive data for use on future projects.Unfortunately Project Management trainings do not include practical skills in using Project Management Software nor the v alue that comes from archiving data on every project. Tasks like scheduling skills to optimize the use of resources to finish as early as possible and project software to identify problems early are best done with Project Management Software which otherwise can waste a considerable amount of time if done manually. With the appropriate Project Management Software, tracking actual performance in terms of hours of work and completion dates builds a database for estimating on the next project.Practically, there are far too many Project Managers who do not have the training or the tools to optimize their schedule or make efficient use of their resources resulting in projects that are guided by guesses. Project Management Software does not make the managers more effective, it just makes them more efficient. Project Management Software does not teach you how to define scope, communicate to the Project sponsor but just lets you accomplish these tasks more efficiently. There are three genera l classes of software available: Statistical Software: To blend in one direction with relational database software such as Oracle or Sybase. †¢ Mathematical Software: MATLAB in the other direction exhibits not only statistical capabilities flowing from code for matrix manipulation, but also optimization and symbolic manipulation useful for statistical purposes. †¢ Visualization Software: Overlaps to some extent with software intended for exploratory data analysis. The user interfaces common range from command line to graphical user interfaces (GUI) to hybrid drag and drop system interfaces.The Statistical Analysis System is available on PC and UNIX based platforms, as well as on mainframe computers. This modern database technique with queries is very easy to use and also accomplished easily. System for Statistical Analysis among the products are for management of large data bases, time series and most classical statistical problems including multivariate analysis, linear m odels (as well as generalized linear models), and clustering; data visualization and plotting.Users with a need to write an applications program using a matrix language, the product SAS/IML provides the ability to program using matrices as objects. SAS is to a large extent an industry standard statistical software package. The demand for students with SAS skills is greater than with skills other than statistical packages. Other statistical of the same general vintage as SAS are MINITAB, BMDP and SPSS. All of these systems began as mainframe systems, but have evolved to smaller scale systems as computing have evolved.MINITAB Inc was formed more than 20 years ago around its flagship product, MINITAB statistical software. MINITAB Statistical Software provides tools to analyze data across a variety of disciplines, and is targeted for users at every level i. e. Scientists, business and industrial users, faculty, and students. It has broadened the scope of its products to include quality control, designed experiments, chemo metrics and an array of general statistics from the original software that helped faculty to teach basic statistics.MINITAB is available on the most widely-used computer platforms, including Windows, DOS, Macintosh, OpenVMS, and UNIX. BMDP features a comprehensive library of over forty statistical routines and has set the standard for high-end statistical analysis software. It has its roots as a bio-medical analysis package from the late 1960’s and each statistical routine has been thoroughly time-tested based on the most advanced algorithms available. Current versions come in several flavors including the BMDP New System Personal Edition.The Professional Edition combines the full suite of BMDP Classic for PCs Release 7 statistics with the powerful data management and front-end data exploration features of the BMDP New System Personal Edition. SPSS Software products run on most models of all major computers and statistical analysis can now be done on the desktop. It is a multinational software company that provides statistical product and service solution for survey research, marketing and sales analysis, quality scientific research, government reporting and education. e SPSS products are a modular system and includes SPSS Professional Statistics, SPSS Advanced Statistics, SPSS Tables, SPSS Trends, SPSS Categories, SPSS CHAID, SPSS LISREL 7, SPSS Developer's Kit, Exact Tests, Teleform, and MapInfo. S-PLUS is a supported extension of the statistical analysis language. It was originally developed at AT;T Bell labs manufactured and supported by the Statistical Sciences Corporation, now a division of Mathsoft. Some of the code has been contributed by prominent individuals from the academic and industrial communities.MATLAB is an interactive computing environment used for scientific and statistical data analysis and visualization. The basic data object in MATLAB is the matrix with functions for basic data analysis and gra phics which are text files that the user can read and adapt for other uses, giving the ability to create their own M-files functions and script files, thus making MATLAB a programming language. The most useful capability is the tool available for visualizing data. It also provides Handle Graphic and there is a considerable amount of contributed MATLAB code available on the internet.The above descriptions of statistical software cover the most well-established commercially available software packages and among them the most extensively used mathematical packages is MATLAB. MINITAB is used in the educational community for introductory courses. BMDP and SPSS find users among communities in which they originated respectively the biomedical and social sciences community. Mainstream applied statisticians tend to use SAS more extensively whereas on the other hand S-plus seems to be a package that is highly regarded among the more research oriented particularly those interested in computati onal statistics.JAVA is a programming language which represents an extension of the World Wide Web capabilities. Basic documents on the web are constructed using HTML, in the sense that once the server delivers the HTML text to the browser, the server has done its job and the static text is interpreted and displayed by the client’s browser. It is a fully distributed, object oriented programming language which allows for creation of a fully interactive web-based system. The data and tools can be sent to the clients’ browser and allows attributes and methods to be linked together.In particular, JAVA allows applets, small applications or subroutines, to be created and transmitted across the web just as static HTML documents are now transmitted. JAVA is intended to be a secure system although security problems do exist with present implementation. However, access to local data is restricted and the JAVA is a secure environment. JAVA has been declared as is related to stati stical data analysis software of the future because it is a practical implementation of a new paradigm in distributed computing.It allows not only the distribution of text and multimedia but also of computing applications and data. It is a response to the enormous popularity of the World Wide Web and under this framework, new statistical, data analytic and other methodologies could be made available and tried out by practitioners in other research fields on their own data and their own computer. Considering the possibility of extending the web in a natural way to acquire data in the same way we acquire human-consumable information, new mechanisms must be sought to provide for the distribution of that data.Best Practices in Project Planning Project managers deal with sponsors who are organizational levels above them and sign their paychecks so Project Managers can’t really argue about the best way to do the project. Having data to quantify the impact of changes and model alter native ways of solving problems gives them much more credibility to give their executives a solid data on which to make their Project decisions rather than having due dates and budgets plucked out of the air.The ethical issue and its consequences, its resolution and its effect on Management In project management, timing is everything. Justifying, Planning, Activating, Controlling and Ending it the right way is the key to a successful Project. It is a disciplined process and a full circle project management that holds every development project together. The project plan, schedule, budget, resources, risk, scope, motivating the players and launching all project activities with communication play a very essential role in project management.It must be constructed in a way that reaches a busy, important audience with the right amount of the right information, a strategic marketing entity in a tight package that must be backed up with well-researched facts and figures that speak directly to the needs, goals, and problem-solving missions of the business. Present them with the business case report and explain it via a well-crafted, well-rehearsed presentation, accompanied by the sponsors. Starting off with a strong solid foundation of research and a creative solution to a business need do the utmost to obtain approval and present justification for the project.Plan Project produces the detailed project plan, project schedule, project organization, and resources. The approved project plan includes understanding the potential risks and the actions that are necessary to manage them. The goal of every project is to drive it to a successful and appropriate conclusion. Controlling a project is imposed not to create a bureaucratic layer, but to ensure that the project proceeds to its planned and scheduled ending. The activity of the project rests with the Project Manager. He controls, monitors, makes decisions ensuring that the project proceeds as planned taking corrective ac tions when necessary.End Project tasks archive the project materials and release the project resources for use on other projects. Conclusion Project management and project planning processes can contribute to an organization's survival and success, while the absence of project management and project planning processes can lead to an organization's demise. This helps in developing the concept for the project, which in turn is used to secure approvals to proceed to the execution phase of a project. Collectively these five steps form the life-cycle phases of project management, and all steps require adequate attention to ensure that a project is adequately managed.Costs, time-frames, quality targets, and other relevant factors are very essential while considering the planning process. Project management ensures that organizations are able to achieve strategic initiatives that extend beyond normal operations through a recognized process, thus aiding organizations in fulfilling strategic objectives such as new product development, process re-engineering, organizational change or financial growth. In conclusion, project management is needed within organizations to support temporary endeavors that create unique products or services.