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LifeWings Air You are the Program Manager for a consulting company hired to improve a system for flying patients and/or transplant organs to appropriate hospital destinations. Patients may be those located in remote areas where major hospitals are not nearby, or they maybe emergency patients who just need to get to a different hospital with specialized equipment. As for transplant organs, when a match is made by UNOS, there is usually a very limited time window for getting the organ to the hospital where the patient is waiting. As you may guess, this is important work which is usually time critical. LifeWings Air was established using federal grant funds to help provide medical air transport and help lower medical costs when possible through the use of VOLUNTEER pilots. Certified pilots donate their time and aircraft to do this work. Approved hospitals and clinics make requests for transport, and area pilots are contacted so they can accept the flights. So far, this has all been done via phone calls between UNOS, hospitals, LifeWings staff and the pilots. When there is no available volunteer, the requestor must instead contact an expensive commercial air service. Given the tight time frames for certain situations, the “phone chain” does not have much time to work before the commercial service backup has to be called in. As the Program manager, you have set up two related projects to try and automate and improve the LifeWings systems. One project is to develop the “pilot side” of the system to recruit and assign pilots and planes when there is a transport need. The second project requires integration with a number of established, complex systems used by hospitals and UNOS to accept requests for transportation. The interfaces between them are subject to a number of oversight boards and governmental agencies. You want to use traditional methods on this part of the project because it will allow you to do the kind of progress reporting that the oversight agencies require. Since this is being done with grant funds, and large organizational systems are involved, formal scope and risk management is expected. The project is well into coding and is a bit behind schedule. Your best DBA has been complaining and doesn’t seem happy on the job. Your primary hospital partner has diverted some of its IT staff to some new priorities related to Covid. There has been some confusion and delays related to some of your server equipment, but the vendor says it will get everything straightened out in time as long as the chips can be unloaded at the ports soon. Suddenly there is a new requirement. The CDC now requires medical providers to collect pilot vaccination status and health status, along with contact trace data after each flight, just in case. So now the medical side has a new interface to the CDC, and a need to get additional data from the pilot side. DON’T TRY TO “SOLVE” THIS PROBLEM. What you DO need to do is describe how the project will handle the change in scope and risk. 1) Prepare a risk register for the things you need to watch or prepare for. Include the type of strategy (avoid, mitigate, etc.), the actions to take and their triggers. 2) Describe what you believe will be an effective change request process that will involve all major stakeholders and adhere to various grant reporting requirments. How you will handle the specific scope changes you see in this case. Include any documentation needed to initiate a potential scope change. Depth of Thought will be based on how clearly you convey your understanding of how to handle scope changes and risk events and how well you APPLY these concepts to the details of the Lifewings Air case Tools and techniques will be based on using terms, models, forms and/or tools for managing scope and risk. Risk and Scope Creep Risk and Scope Creep ITC4500 RISK: Knowns and Unknowns General Risk Management for Triple constraints Detect EARNED VALUE to track time and cost variances Scope Control procedure for scope change requests Actions you can take PLAN CONTINGENCY RESERVES and TIME BUFFERS into the project for general unknowns Plan strategically for more specific things General Risk Management Identify Risks General Categories Specific “events” Evaluate Risks What is the Impact? Probability? What will you track/monitor? Evaluate Risks Track Risks: The Risk Log Use a RISK LOG that includes items such as: Identify the potential risk event (Often numbered or given a short name) Give it a relative priority ( Impact/Probability) Assign responsibility for monitoring and taking action Define a “Trigger” that indicates when to take action Describe actions to take Examples of specific things to watch: Sudden disruptions in the work environment Example: Hurricane formation for your Florida facility Changes in external costs (tariffs, embargos, supply shortages) Changes in Assumptions as new information is revealed Strategize your response IN ADVANCE Mitigation strategy – Make negative impacts “smaller” Avoidance strategy – Keep negative impacts from happening at all Acceptance strategy - Change expectations and/or baselines Transfer – fine if you can get away with it. The most common risk on many projects: Scope creep Added requirements that are “Uncontrolled” New requirements can be good, you just need to be sure they are “under control” and truly needed. So Add Control! Require a Change Request form or written “ask” with sufficient detail to understand the new requirement Estimate/Evaluate the impact on current scope, schedule and budget Get Approval for the change that acknowledges the impact! Sponsor, Change Control Board or Project Steering Committee ( whoever has the appropriate authority) Create new Baselines (Gantt chart and budget) Document the change and new baselines on the Change Log Be sure everyone knows the process Keep Records! The Project Management Plan(s) Your final project plan needs to define the PROCESSES and ARTIFACTS related to the things that affect project success! Scope changes Budget/schedule slippage Risk events