Reflection - The Puerto Rico Education Project System Development in an Island Paradise

Reflection - The Puerto Rico Education Project

System Development in an Island Paradise

 

Memo

Dear Gary Johnson,

I had a meeting with the consultants from JAGR regarding whether USCO should continue with the existing team members with few changes in corporate policy or they should send the unhappy employees back to US. Before the meeting, I was sure that this project is becoming a failure because of poor evaluation, planning and administration. This project should be evaluated as international project because of its scope and prevailing conditions in Puerto Rico.

After listening to JAGR consultants’ presentation and Q & A session, I now have a clearer picture of the scenario and I realized that we could have kept those employees away from the hassle and frustration if this project was assessed as international project.

According to weighted decision criteria of JAGR, cost, time efficiency, positive impact on future projects, and morale are the deciding factors among the available alternatives. As a matter of fact, this project is already over the budget and not meeting deadlines.  Therefore, I agree that cost and time are the major factors that we need to work on. Employees’ low morale needs to be addressed at its earliest.

To bring this project back on track, if we send the unhappy employees back to the US and hire the Puerto Rican programmers for their replacement, I think that will affect the morale of remaining employees and their families. It may also cause a gap between native Puerto Rican programmers and foreign US programmers. Puerto Rican programmers are young and may lack the necessary experience and expertise and may take longer to come up to the speed with the project. Also, we’ll have to bear the cost of moving the disgruntled employees back to US and it will become the sunk cost. We may have to grant them severance pay for their settlement in US.

After going though the pros and cons of the above aforementioned alternative, I strongly recommend that USCO should reassess the project as “International Project” instead of domestic project. The policies should be reestablished for governing compensation, taxation, housing, schooling costs, career tracking and many other factors. We should also allocate some time to reorganize the project. Meanwhile intensive language and cultural orientation should be provided not for the employees only but for their families as well.

During the reorganization, employees can also readjust with improved compensation plans along with better schooling facilities. After attending the language and cultural training, their families would be able to better mingle with the local community. This will eventually boost employees’ morale and productivity. Once these changes are successfully applied, we will be able to see the project back on track.

With best regards,

Tom Ballard

The Puerto Rico Education Project System Development in an Island Paradise - Case Preparation

The Puerto Rico Education Project

 System Development in an Island Paradise

The Puerto Rico Education Project (PREP) resulted from a contract negotiated by a division of a large U.S. company (hereafter called “USCO”) with the Puerto Rico Department of Education. The purpose of this project was to benefit the school system and the pupils in Puerto Rico. Gary Johnson was the project manager, who had just completed another major project at Pentagon. Tom Ballard was hired to reorganize the project and get it back on track.

Issue:

Because of the poor assessment and evaluation of the situation in Puerto Rico, various problems surfaced such as difficulty in meeting the deadlines, higher expenditures than the budget, and low morale of some of the employees. A few employees even wanted to return to US due to the problems they were facing in Puerto Rico. The project began just a year ago and now became a near-disaster.

Situation Assessment:

The USCO executives classified it as an offsite, domestic project rather than an international project and deadlines and budget was prepared accordingly.

The volume of data collection was quite large. The project involved more than 2,000 schools with 25,000 teachers and 800,000 pupils. The data entry requirement for the 800,000 records with 40 characters per record required 300 persons’ weeks of effort. The contract estimates had not taken the enormous data entry effort into account. This resulted in reducing the scope of the project to only 200,000 pupils and to postponing the rest until second year.

Dr. Carlos Hamill, who had spent thirty years with Puerto Rico school system, was responsible of this project. He had never involved with a project of such magnitude, and his supporting staff was extremely small and overworked.

None of the system analysts spoke Spanish. Although most of the teachers could understand basic English, but it was difficult to make them understand some fairly complex technical concepts. There was also no system to deliver the printed data collection forms to the schools.

This was a poor assessment of the situation in Puerto Rico. The housing was expensive and the cost of living was 15% higher than US.  The language in Public school was Spanish and majority of the people in general did not speak English. The schooling condition of the area was very poor with inadequate building structure. Some the schools did not have electricity. Another problem was lack of phone service and slower pace of life compared to US. Teachers’ and principles’ salaries were very low and facilities were old.

Because of the above mentioned problem, all of the employees were facing significant difficulties. The families who have kids with them had to send their kids to private school at an average cost of $2,500 per semester. Being a domestic assignment there was no schooling allowance sanctioned so for each employee with school age children, salaries were raised just to cover the schooling cost. It was a source of bitterness among employees.

Houses were expensive and small. It was difficult for the families to adjust in small houses as compared to the ones they moved from. Language barrier had made it more difficult for families to reside there.

Due to these problems, employees were frustrated and wanted to go back to US. In order to resolve the issues following measures are suggested.

Recommendations:

Considering the conditions in Puerto Rico, it is evident that this project should be classified as an international project rather than an offsite domestic project. The policies should be established governing compensation, taxation, housing, schooling costs, career tracking and many other factors. Intensive language and cultural orientation should be provided prior to departure, not only for the employees only but for their accompanying families as well.

Tom Ballard should take few measures in order to deal with the current issue. He should hire local Spanish speaking analysts who are also proficient in English. They should also be familiar with the educational system in Puerto Rico.

Significant costs were involved in moving the employees to Puerto Rico. Rather than moving the dissatisfied employees requesting to return to US, he should resolve their issues. He should make suggestions to USCO for authorizing revised budget and new deadlines as the conditions in Puerto Rico are quite different from US.

Each school should download Google Drive so that data entry forms can be accessed by schools and teachers can fill them without any hassle. It is going to add the cost due to involvement of large data but it will be offset by cost savings for printing and distributing and collecting the data entry forms.  Also, extensive language training should be provided to employees and their families.

All these changes will improve the productivity and morale of the employees. It will eventually enable the management to bring the project back on track.

Business Impacts of Ubuntu and Desktop Virtualization

Business Impacts of Ubuntu and Desktop Virtualization

Ubuntu is an open-source, operating system (OS) that uses Linux Kernal. It is completely free, does not require any paid subscriptions, premium editions or any other paid component. There is very little maintenance cost and it is easy to run and maintain since it requires fewer updates and security patches as in the case of Microsoft. Ubuntu may be installed as the primary OS or as a secondary OS alongside of any other OS such as Windows XP, Vista, 7 or 8. Furthermore, Ubuntu has a small foot-print and it can be installed on a CD or USB media and launched directly from it without making any system changes to the existing environment.

Ubuntu is rapidly increasing its popularity as a fair alternative to Microsoft Windows operating systems in terms of the capabilities. It can be downloaded to PC using a DVD created from the internet. I found Ubuntu easy to download, install, use and manage. It is simple to deploy and you can complete a typical installation of the standard services within 15 minutes. Also it does not include any additional extraneous applications that ultimately slow down the actual services that you want to run, making it fast and efficient. It also has its own programs and applications that are compatible with other popular software such as MS Office, Outlook, Messenger, etc. Ubuntu’s Libre Office provides a package of word processing, spreadsheet and presentation tools similar to the Microsoft Office applications that most of the computer users use.

Ubuntu in itself is a hard-to-hack distribution and frequent updates and upgrades ensure that any further security risks are also eliminated. With Ubuntu’s growing online community, free help is always available online from other users and developers.

The desktop is configurable and provides several options to users. Although by default it uses the Gnome desktop, which is the most popular among Linux users, you can also use the KDE desktop by installing the respective package. The KDE package is popularly referred to as Ubuntu.

At the moment, Ubuntu is one OS that can be considered a best bet for those struggling and thinking of moving away from Windows. Ubuntu’s popularity is a clear indication that users are beginning to accept Linux as a better OS for personal as well as corporate use. Its secure environment, user-friendliness, and above all its ease of installation make it the most favored OS among users.

Microsoft announced that its Windows XP OS is no longer supported and will be demised in April 2014. After the announcement, my company needed to upgrade about 500 desktops and laptops that had XP. Instead of upgrading to Windows 7 for $100 per license, we installed free Ubuntu Desktop OS on 150 laptops and desktops for critical users. Our employees worked in two shifts to support global operations and it was realized that only 50% of the desktops are used at any given time. To maximize the cost savings, we also decided to explore the Cloud Computing options. We installed Ubuntu Server 13.10 edition on 3 servers and created 350 virtual desktops, again with Ubuntu OS. Choosing free Ubuntu over Windows 7 ($100 / license for 500 computers) resulted in savings of $50,000. All of the employees now had had their own virtual desktops that they could access over the internet from any computer including their personal laptops. Maintaining only 3 Ubuntu servers that housed 350 virtual images of the desktops was much easier and cost effective as opposed to maintaining 500 individual computers. This was also a valuable added benefit for the Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Planning.

Four months after we implemented virtual images on Ubuntu desktops our city was hit by a severe hurricane season. During a recent major flood, most of the city was paralyzed and all businesses suffered immensely. With most of the roads inaccessible, businesses were forced to shut down for over a week. The company declared itself in Disaster Recovery mode and our server pool in the data center was transferred to the backup system. All three servers that housed the virtual images were also immediately available via online remote access. All of the employees were advised to connect to their virtual desktops remotely from their homes to support critical operations and clients.

After the flood water receded and the cost of damage was calculated, it was realized that during the 5 days shut down, our company would have suffered the damage of $58,000 per day totaling approximately $300,000. But since the business continued its normal operation in virtual desktop environment, we were able to avoid this cost.

Strategic IT Transformation at Accenture Reflection

Reflection:

Memo

Dear Mr. Andersen,

After having the meeting with consultants from Cosulcube LLC regarding whether Accenture should acquire new IT Governance system through COBIT 5 or maintain its current IT governance system, my vision regarding COBIT 5 has further clarified.  Before attending this meeting I believed that our current IT governance system is sufficient and we should keep it as it is. But I was overwhelmed by the comprehensive but complicated framework that COBIT 5 offers to assist our firm in achieving its objectives.

While clarifying the five principles of COBIT 5 namely; 1) Meeting Stakeholders’ needs, 2) Covering the enterprise end to end, 3) Applying the single integrated framework, 4) Enabling holistic approach and 5) Separating Governance from Management, the consultants pointed out that we have already adopted four of these principles with our current IT governance system. Similar to COBIT 5, our current system is based on principles such as streamlining business goals with IT goals, building an IT strategic plan, Analyzing programmed portfolio and managing project and building IT tactical plans. It may be unnecessary to introduce COBIT 5 since there are not many differences between the two frameworks.

Consultants explained what consequences we can face if we adopt COBIT 5. They mentioned COBIT 5 will increase expenditure in terms of training and material costs and consultant fees. It may also cause loss of productivity and employee dissatisfaction while the COBIT 5 framework is applied.

One of the factors we discussed during the meeting was that none of our competitors such as IBM and HP Enterprise Services have utilized COBIT 5 for their IT governance yet so we cannot realize the real benefits of accredited COBIT 5 framework as our current system of Accenture is built in-house and is not accredited.

After analyzing the aforementioned and factors contributing to decision criteria such as meet regulatory compliance, cost efficiency, effective risk management, business process management, readiness for immediate use and control flexibility, I suggest that we should keep the current IT governance system as it consists of steering committees, project sponsors and ROI analysis and auditing process. The current system is very cost effective and has reduced overall IT costs significantly. This system is specifically designed for Accenture and all of the employees are efficiently using this system and overall company’s productivity and revenue has increased.

With best regards,  

Frank Modruson

Chief Information Officer

Strategic IT Transformation at Accenture - Preparation

Strategic IT Transformation at Accenture

Arthur Andersen accounting firm, established in 1913, provides financial audit services to its clients. In 1989 the company branched off its consulting services division to newly formed Andersen Consulting that eventually formed itself as a separate entity now known as Accenture.

At the time of its inception at a cost of $1B, the world’s largest management consulting company, Accenture had $11 billion in annual revenues, 75,000 employees and more than 50 offices around the world. Immediately after its formation, Accenture’s CIO, Frank Modruson’s main challenge was to replace Arthur Andersen’s legacy IT infrastructure

Issue Description:

Over the span of many decades, the IT infrastructure in Arthur Andersen had spread vastly over the globe and had also become very complex. After the separation from Andersen, Accenture had a one-year time period to plan, design and implement the new IT infrastructure within the new firm. Current technology was deficient in many ways. Over the course of almost a century, Andersen had acquired many legacy applications that did not interconnect with each other. Key systems and databases resided on very old software platforms that could not be accessed easily over the internet without using costly private networks. Financial information had often to be compiled manually. Also, offices around the world had adopted their own individual software systems for accounting and HR systems, dividing information into small, regional reports rather than an “At-a-glance” whole firm’s financial status at any given time.

Situation Assessment:

The enormous challenge that Accenture faced was to build the entire IT infrastructure from scratch, using the latest technologies, software and systems available at the time. Access to information in real-time, from anywhere was an important requirement of the technology system since 75% of employees spent significant amount of their time working outside of their offices, either in travelling or in meetings with their clients.

The management relied heavily on IT governance system to Control Objectives for Information and Related Technologies (COBIT 5) to face the challenge. The adoption of COBIT 5 standards can support the management to do more informed and calculated decisions. COBIT 5 can help implement the numerous regulations and compliance standards across the globe.

The CIO also took this opportunity to bring a conceptual change in the way Technology was viewed in most large companies at that time. Rather than classifying IT as a cost center with an assigned budget, the management transformed it as a ‘business within a business’, responsible for providing IT products and services driven by the needs of internal customers and stakeholders. It must provide measurable service levels for products and services that it offers driven by the users’ needs. The management also changed the way budgeting was prepared for IT. Rather than the traditional approach where the IT department defined its own budget, a panel of C-level executives from strategic, financial, operational and technical areas of the business would set the priorities for the Technology budget. These priorities would be directly related to the economic value or significance of each IT project and value that it brings to the company.

The decision whether to have COBIT 5 certification or not depends on many factors such as training staff for having the system, cost involved in implementing and training. This change will embrace the change in firm’s culture, employees and business procedures globally. COBIT 5 standards should be adopted if it will improve the alignment of IT with firm’s corporate strategies while optimum utilization of the existing resources.

A project approval process was implemented in Accenture in order to ascertain that they were taking right project according to the priority and at the right cost. The basis of this process was business benefits and ROI. It required top management along with IT professionals to work as committee and form the strategic direction of their IT for the next three years. Under this new governance, all projects have to have a senior business sponsor, ROI analysis and annual audit up to three years.

Alternatives:

There were two alternatives such as:

COBIT 5:

PROS:

One approach would be to implement a COBIT 5 framework by altering existing controls, applications and general IT processes. The framework for COBIT is available free online. It would address the governance of the IT with a firm’s prospective. It is based on IT best practices. COBIT seeks to enact is a common denominator of platforms and processes throughout organization. Accenture’s adoption of the one vendor single platform approach has greatly accomplished this objective of our company by overall reducing and streamlining of our applications. It can be used as a complimentary to other practices such as ITIL, ISO 27000 etc. It provides a comprehensive framework that assists enterprises in achieving their objectives of governance, managing the firm’s information, and technology assets. It helps the management in prioritizing the project in right order and cost effectiveness.

Cons:

Employees would resist new system. COBIT is not detail oriented in case of certain functions. It covers the scenario in broader context. There is cost associated with internal training sessions in house, workshops. There could a consultant cost and rollout cost. Cost associated with material is COBIT 5 for Risk $35 for members and $175 for non-members for book, for COBIT 5 information security $ 50 for members and $205 for non-members for book & PDF, for COBIT 5 implementation $35 for members and $ 180 for book & PDF.

Current IT system:

Pros:

There is no additional cost or material required. From 2001 to 2008, Accenture was able to reduce its spending per employee by 60 percent and reduce overall IT expense. Current system is operating efficiently since 2001. It increased customer satisfaction.

Cons:

It is not sophisticated, detailed and complex as COBIT 5. There are gaps in IT system. Measuring tools may or may not be good enough. There is no surety of assessing the accurate risk of different projects.

 Evaluation & Recommendation:

There are two alternatives, while choosing between them, one should consider that which one is the cost effective, user friendly, aligned with Accenture’s decision criteria. Whether COBIT can fill in the gaps of existing IT governance system or it can add value to Accenture in comparison to the cost incurred in training. The after effects in case of adopting COBIT 5 are unknown so Accenture should be very careful while taking this decision.

After analyzing both alternatives, I think that Accenture should keep on using its current IT governance system.  When we combine COBIT 5 training cost, material cost, employee resistance with unknown after effects of this new system on firms productivity, it is not advisable to adopt COBIT 5. When we compare the cost associated with value COBIT can add to Accenture, we realize that Accenture has already achieved greater control over IT standards.

Presentation:

If I were presenting this case as a consultant I would describe the current issue and I would assess COBIT 5 Costs and benefits as well as I would discuss current IT system. I would recommend the best alternative as per stated criteria of the IT system which is according to company’s needs. I would give the presentation through power point slides.