Part 1: Return on Investment – 16 points You have been asked to calculate the Re
ID: 3717528 • Letter: P
Question
Part 1: Return on Investment – 16 points
You have been asked to calculate the Return on Investment (ROI) for a project whose development will be accomplished during a single calendar year with the go-live date of Jan 1st The project, to develop a new Web-based ordering and fulfillment system, has already been conceptualized, and the team has provided estimates and a partial resource plan. Labor Operating expenses in years 2 through 5 are projected to be $57,000 annually. Miscellaneous expenses in years 2 through 5 are projected to be $6,500 annually. The benefit is projected to be $225,000 the first year of operation, increasing 11% each year. Hardware cost that would be installed for development is $100,000. You’ll need to complete the resource plan, the 5 year planning sheet, and calculate a 5 year ROI. Please finish filling out these tables and answer the associated questions.
Development Team
Quantity
$/hour
Hours/each resource
Total Hours
Total Dollars
Program Director
1
95
500
Project Manager
1
95
1000
BA
1
95
750
Development Lead
1
80
1000
QA Lead
1
80
1000
Off-Shore Developers
6
25
750
Off-Shore QA
4
25
750
Total
Expense
Year 1
Year 2
Year 3
Year 4
Year 5
Labor
Hardware
Misc
Benefit
Year 1
Year 2
Year 3
Year 4
Year 5
Benefit
Question 1 [2 points]: What is the total labor cost of development?
Question 2 [2 points]: What is the total expense of this project projected to be for the first 5 year period?
Question 3 [2 points]: What is the total benefit projected to be for the first year?
Question 4 [2 points]: What is the total benefit projected to be for the first five years?
Question 5 [2 points]: Given ROI % = ((Benefit – Cost) / Cost)*100, what is the 5 year ROI for this project?
Question 6 [2 points]: If the company could just put the money to cover the project expenses in the bank (instead of doing this project) it could make a investment gain of 7% over this same 5 year period. Should the company invest in this project, or put the money in the bank? Why?
Question 7 [4 points]: Describe in your own words BRIEFLY why APO05 and APO06 are important to project funding selection based on ROI calculation.
Development Team
Quantity
$/hour
Hours/each resource
Total Hours
Total Dollars
Program Director
1
95
500
Project Manager
1
95
1000
BA
1
95
750
Development Lead
1
80
1000
QA Lead
1
80
1000
Off-Shore Developers
6
25
750
Off-Shore QA
4
25
750
Total
Explanation / Answer
Loss of control. Change interferes with autonomy and can make people feel that they’ve lost control over their territory. It’s not just political, as in who has the power. Our sense of self-determination is often the first things to go when faced with a potential change coming from someone else. Smart leaders leave room for those affected by change to make choices. They invite others into the planning, giving them ownership.
Excess uncertainty. If change feels like walking off a cliff blindfolded, then people will reject it. People will often prefer to remain mired in misery than to head toward an unknown. As the saying goes, “Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t know.” To overcome inertia requires a sense of safety as well as an inspiring vision. Leaders should create certainty of process, with clear, simple steps and timetables.
Concerns about competence. Can I do it? Change is resisted when it makes people feel stupid. They might express skepticism about whether the new software version will work or whether digital journalism is really an improvement, but down deep they are worried that their skills will be obsolete. Leaders should over-invest in structural reassurance, providing abundant information, education, training, mentors, and support systems. A period of overlap, running two systems simultaneously, helps ease transitions.
Ripple effects. Like tossing a pebble into a pond, change creates ripples, reaching distant spots in ever-widening circles. The ripples disrupt other departments, important customers, people well outside the venture or neighborhood, and they start to push back, rebelling against changes they had nothing to do with that interfere with their own activities. Leaders should enlarge the circle of stakeholders. They must consider all affected parties, however distant, and work with them to minimize disruption.
question 2
Establish a Sense of Urgency: Examine market and competitive realities; identify and discuss crises, potential crises, or major opportunities
Create the Guiding Coalition: Assemble a group with enough power to lead the change; get group to work together as a team
Develop a Vision & Strategy: Create a vision to help direct the change effort; Develop strategies for achieving that vision
Communicate the Vision: Use every vehicle possible to communicate the new vision and strategies; have Guiding Coalition role model the behavior expected of employees
question 3
Initiating
? Other managers endorsed the idea (e.g., "Sounds like a no brainer .. do it!")
? Sarah was assigned to the evaluation and implementation (i.e., infrastructure).
Diagnosing
? The diagnosis was tool-based.
? No one investigated the needs of the range of users.
? No one conducted scenario analysis.
? Sarah evaluated 5 products and talked with a friend.
? No clear selection criteria were defined.
Establishing
? Priorities were identified (also overlaps with Diagnosing phase).
? The approach consisted of: (1) training IT hot line experts first (2) in-house training (1st live then video) (3) hot line support.
Acting
? Training was built in.
? The hotline staff was trained as a pilot.
? The software was 2 months late. It couldn't meet user demand.
? Employees were not trained in a timely manner.
? Sarah discovered the MailX problem.
? Sarah discovered the message center problem.
Learning
? It's not clear that any learning occurred.
part 5 question 1
Beginning with a Simple Framework
At VMware, we’ve been using a simple framework to look at the key components of a Big Data system and help our customers work through many architectural decisions as they explore the world of big data. Big data often brings four newer and very different considerations in an enterprise architecture:
Data sources have a different scale – while the most obvious, many companies work in the multi-terabyte and even petabyte arena.
Speed is critical – nightly ETL (extract-transform-load) batches are insufficient and real-time streaming from solutions like s4 and Storm are required.
Storage models are changing – solutions like HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System) and unstructured data stores like Amazon S3 provide new options.
Multiple analytics paradigms and compute methods must be supported:
Real-time database and analytics: These are typically in-memory, scale-out engines that provide low-latency, cross-data center access to data, and enable distributed processing and event-generation capabilities.
Interactive analytics: Includes distributed MPP (massively parallel processing) data warehouses with embedded analytics, which enable business users to do interactive querying and visualization of big data.
Batch processing: Hadoop as a distributed processing engine that can analyze very large amounts of data and apply algorithms that range from the simple (e.g. aggregation) to the complex (e.g. machine learning).
part 6 question 1
Copyright is a form of protection provided to the authors of “original works of authorship” including literary, dramatic, musical, artistic, and certain other intellectual works, both published and unpublished. The 1976 Copyright Act generally gives the owner of copyright the exclusive right to reproduce the copyrighted work, to prepare derivative works, to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work, to perform the copyrighted work publicly, or to display the copyrighted work publicly.
A trademark is a word, name, symbol or device which is used in trade with goods to indicate the source of the goods and to distinguish them from the goods of others. A servicemark is the same as a trademark except that it identifies and distinguishes the source of a service rather than a product. The terms “trademark” and “mark” are commonly used to refer to both trademarks and servicemarks.
A patent for an invention is the grant of a property right to the inventor, issued by the Patent and Trademark Office. The term of a new patent is 20 years from the date on which the application for the patent was filed in the United States or, in special cases, from the date an earlier related application was filed, subject to the payment of maintenance fees. US patent grants are effective only within the US, US territories, and US possessions.