Project Charter and Scope

According to Kerzner, & Kerzner, (2017) these scholars describes project charter as an element of objectives in a project, which outlines detailed project roles, goals as well as responsibilities. Similarly, the project charter identifies the key stakeholders in addition to the level of authority of a project manager. As a result, in the case of this project is to plan and design a website for an online retail apparel store for women between the age of twenty years and thirty years. Therefore, a project charter comprises the essence of the project and allows for a joint understanding of the project.

Consequently, a project charter acts an agreement between the project team, major stakeholders and the sponsor of the project. That means that the project charter plays a significant role since it documents the reasons for performing the project, highlights the objectives as well as the constraints of the project (Schwalbe, 2015). Also, a project charter offers a solution to a problem at hand and identifies the key stakeholders of the project. Indeed, a project charter paves the way for good customer interaction and also works as a tool to enhance a project’s management process.   

1. To plan and design a leading apparel fashion online retail store website for women in their 20s and 30s.
2. To design a website that is customer-friendly by clearly showing customers the process of gaining access to the products with ease.
3. To create a website platform that will allow for easy interaction between the customers and the management for easy feedback.

The project scope is a very vital tool to the development of a successful project, which means that regardless of how effective, how efficient or how hard working the project manager can be, it is impossible to succeed without a project scope. The project scope involves the adoption of a clear vision as well as contract regarding the results of the project, which enables every project milestone to stay on target. Therefore, the initial step of setting project objectives and goals is through adopting a project scope (Kerzner, 2017). As a result, a project scope allows the project manager to be in a better position to allocate resources and form a realistic project timeline. The ability to establish a project scope enables the project manager to be able to assign tasks more efficiently and give directions to each project team in order to deliver the project within the set due date and budget and in accordance to the client’s specifications. With the help of the project scope, it will enable the project manager in the planning and design of a leading apparel fashion online retail store website for women in their 20s and 30s to become very easy.

Project scope entails three major aspects of the management of any project such as planning, controlling and closing. The planning process involves making trials to capture as well as define the work that has to be accomplished. For instance in the case of developing an apparel retail website for women who are in their 20s and 30s. The first step in this context is the project manager to make attempts to identify the customer needs and understand the real-time apparel requirements for this age bracket of women. Accordingly, this aid in the setting of groundwork which different that are to follow as well as the manner in which they are to be undertaken. Since the base of a project scope has to involve the goals and objectives to be followed, they have to be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and attained within a set deadline (Schwalbe, 2015). Specific goals and objectives demand that the project manager accurately state the things the project in need of achieving. For instance, in this context, the project would like to create a highly dynamic and responsive online retail apparel that suits women in their 20s and 30s. That means that the website should have an extensive fashion design that exhaustively meets women fashion requirements of the said age brackets.

Strategic Planning for Apparel Website

Similarly, the project manager should ensure that the development of the online apparel website meets its goals and objectives with and can be achieved within the set-out resources. To be in the position of ensuring this, the project manager has to closely work with the project teams to supervise the progress of each task. Accordingly, supervision help to control the project by ensuring that it is moving in in line with the needs of the client.

Strategic planning is essential for the success of any project, which calls for systematic strategic planning that includes objectives and goals of the organisation for a project to triumph. Accordingly, this entails tactical planning and strategic thinking. Strategic thinking concentrates on setting vision, mission as well as objectives of the organisation. In this case strategic thinking will help to develop objectives that will make the apparel website a leading fashion provider in the whole of Australia. On the other hand, tactical planning describes the approaches used in implementing planed actions, resources and individuals in the organisation (Abdel-Basset, Mohamed, & Smarandache, 2018). Therefore SWOT analysis gives a clear environment that aid to make a well-organised strategic plan. When the goals are outlined together with the definition of the vision and mission of the project with both short-term and long-term objectives set alternative strategies should be advanced by selecting the best approach to achieve the set objectives.  Therefore, the SWOT analysis help project managers in analysing both internal and external aspects in a project. The internal factors in a project are analysed by the strengths and weaknesses are internal while the external factors of the project are analysed through the project opportunities and threats. The SWOT analysis should be performed before project initialising to enable analysis of diverse elements for formulating a strong project plan base. Indeed, this approach is significant in the making of decision in project management.                        

The project is supposed to take six months to come to completion

Task Name	Duration (days)
Initiating Developing project charter	7
Planning Scope stamen development	21
Execution Create Edit Finish	112
Control and Monitoring Issue tracking Progress report Quality control Closing	28
Presentation	2

Work Breakdown structure for developing an Online Retail Apparel Website

Stakeholders are a vital component towards the project success. Aakhus, & Bzdak, (2015) notes that stakeholders are individuals who have a great impact on the success of any project. Thus, for the success of a project calls for a strong corporation between the project manager and stakeholders (Dobele, Westberg, Steel, & Flowers, 2014). Indeed, stakeholders are important to the project, and in this case of developing an apparel website stakeholders can be of importance in various ways such as:

Stakeholder Engagement

Giving expertise. Stakeholders are a wealth of knowledge in regards the present, industrial insight as well as historical information on fashion. The reason being that in most cases stakeholders are members who have been in a specific industry longer than the project manager (Binder, 2016). Thus, it becomes important to include major stakeholders in the gathering and documenting of project requirements to avert missing key project deliverables. At the same time, primary stakeholders can help to identify constraints likely to face the project in accordance with information from their industry (Caputo, Evangelista, & Russo, 2016). This is significant to project managers when it comes to understanding project risks and constraints.

Unmasking and reducing risk. The more a project include stakeholders, the more it declines and uncovers risks in the project (Bourne, 2016). During the time of discussion the project initial requirements, needs, risks as well as constraints, stakeholders help to come up with issues regarding how to realise these subject matters. Through uncovering risks and later on discussing the plan to alleviate them before arising of issues dramatically results to project success.   

Specifications are used to describe the manner in which the project manager will fulfil the project requirements in accordance to the scope. The specifications belongs to the Project manager, which is a written project structure plan which offers essential details regarding specific requirements (Morreale, 2009). Accordingly, to be able to understand project specifications it include a top-down structured plan which consists of a Gantt chart, work breakdown structure, dependency network and product breakdown structure.    

Project Closure

Project closure entails auditing of the project deliverables as well as an assessment of the results against the initial project plan (Bourne, 2016). Once all the deliverables align with the project checklist, the project manager will have to issue out a project report to the concerned personnel in the organisation for approval by signing off the project as complete.

References

Aakhus, M., & Bzdak, M. (2015). Stakeholder engagement as communication design practice. Journal of Public Affairs, 15(2), 188-200.

Abdel-Basset, M., Mohamed, M., & Smarandache, F. (2018). An Extension of Neutrosophic AHP–SWOT Analysis for Strategic Planning and Decision-Making. Symmetry, 10(4), 116.

Binder, J. (2016). Global project management: communication, collaboration and management across borders. Routledge.

Bourne, L. (2016). Stakeholder relationship management: a maturity model for organisational implementation. Routledge.

Caputo, F., Evangelista, F., & Russo, G. (2016, September). Information sharing and communication strategies: A stakeholder engagement view. In 9th Annual Conference of the EuroMed Academy of Business.

Dobele, A. R., Westberg, K., Steel, M., & Flowers, K. (2014). An examination of corporate social responsibility implementation and stakeholder engagement: A case study in the Australian mining industry. Business Strategy and the Environment, 23(3), 145-159.

Kerzner, H. (2017). Project management metrics, KPIs, and dashboards: a guide to measuring and monitoring project performance. John Wiley & Sons.

Kerzner, H., & Kerzner, H. R. (2017). Project management: a systems approach to planning, scheduling, and controlling. John Wiley & Sons.

Morreale, R. (2009). The Ideal Project Manager Specification. Retrieved from https://www.projectsmart.co.uk/the-ideal-project-manager-specification.php

Schwalbe, K. (2015). Information technology project management. Cengage Learning.