Critical Evaluation

Small and medium sized Enterprises or SMEs in the country of United Kingdom or UK are independent organizations in which the numbers of employees are less than usual. The limitation of employees for a standard SME differs in different countries. SMEs are defined normally by financial assets the organization holds and the yearly turnover of the companies. The projects handles in these SMEs are limited in number but they are capable of churning out a huge amount of yearly returns (Uhl and Gollenia 2016). Managing a project in an SME established in UK and the processes behind it would be described in details in this assessment that would reflect on the understanding on project and programme management theory. The organization that has been chosen for this report on the SME project management is the Small and Medium Sized organization based in the country of United Kingdom, called the Ensoft Systems. The Ensoft Systems generally are specialized in the development of ready-to-use software products for the Applications used in the Construction Industry. The company is known to be developing softwares called Ensoft Build master, BarBeQue Software, Road-master and many more. Mostly these are used by reputed contractors and engineers over 250 cities. The organization’s project management skills would be thus thoroughly analyzed in this assessment, with clear review of the academic journals that have been published so far about the above mentioned topics. This will further be followed by the project planning, metric and tools required for the development of a software project that the organization follows as a standard. This will further be followed a project leadership structure, that would clearly define the critical appreciation of the roles of a project manager in contributing to the organizational implementation. Next, the project risk and failures would be analyzed to support the appropriate framework to ascertain the risk analysis of the project developed for Ensoft. The final section will evaluate the literature review on project success criteria and apply the relevant success factors to the organization of Ensoft.

According to the journals that have been reviewed on this purpose focuses on the project management methodologies used by SMEs in and the critical evaluation, recognition, comparison and contrasts the objectives and the characteristics of the project management and strategic management through the view point of an SME.

Critical Evaluation: A small and medium sized enterprise is essential to the economy as it contributes to employment and addition to the national wealth (Turner and Ledwith 2018). The papers state that the Small and medium enterprises are making a significant economical changes where it concerns the employment structure of the country and adding more to the National wealth. These kinds of organisations also work as an innovation for the future growth of economy. This function of small to medium enterprises is further boosted up buy a project management. It is found that the companies that do not depend upon sizes and have built a much bigger company than the small to medium enterprises have roughly spent the same proportion of turnover over the projects. Although, it can be seen that however small the project maybe over 250 countries all over the world uses services from the software Ensoft develops.

Comparison and Contrasting of the Findings

According to Svejvig and Andersen (2015), Ensoft is an SME as well, but it has seen an increasing amount of fair growth in achieving its project deliverables and has satisfied the strategic objectives, finally minimising the impending risk along with the budget. Ensoft has also been using this project management methods which is made them one of the most inspirational small and medium sized Enterprise in the United Kingdom. The development that Ensoft uses has been analysed through a well-developed questionnaire as per the journals to examine the extent of this organisation in how projects are being carried out in how employees are being researched for which they would lead to a successful project. The percentage of turnover that this organisation have spent on project are very little in different and their almost one third of the entire company budget. It is been found that less than 20 per cent of the entire turnover every project has is being utilised for other purposes and 80 per cent is being utilised in developing a new project.

Therefore, it can be seen that some of the journals are suggesting that SMEs do not achieve much in their projects due to budgetary and market reach issues; however, Ensoft have proven them wrong in this regard, with increasing amount of popularity in the United Kingdom with their achievements. Ensoft has completed their software development projects in time with proper deliverables, thus making major organizations ask for their services more and more.

Comparison and Contrasting of the findings: The organization uses the project methodologies to maintain the project planning, the teams allocated for the project, and control measures adopted for the project and also the project management tools. They have meant seemingly utilising the project teams for the planning of their projects prior to the project commencement (Seethamraju 2015). The service companies and software companies like Ensoft who are also small and medium-sized do not invest much time on project management tools and planning in comparison. The journals suggest that this is another reason that Ensoft has made it to the 100 most influential small and medium-sized enterprises in the entire of United Kingdom. From the perspective of a small and medium sized Enterprise it can be said that Ensoft utilizes strategic management skills and proper operational management to proceed with their projects. Since this happens to be a small and medium scale organisation without proper systematic operation and strategic management it would be problematic since handling of a project entirely involves a huge budget. Since the budget for these Enterprises are limited they cannot indulge into too much of spending the capital budget.

Project Plan

However, the papers suggest that SMEs do not go beyond the usual aspects of reaching a major economic and service levels of a large organization in comparison, but Ensoft has proven to be different than most of these organizations. The products and services developed by Ensoft have been widely used by major companies all around the world and this has proven the journals wrong at some point of comparison.

There is a way that project management software jobs down the key capabilities that every small scale organisation considered while reaching out to a project management system. In this case, the organisation has been developing the software called builder master which is currently being used by major companies all over the world. Building any software needs a considerable amount of time and the development goes through a process that is usually termed as Software Development Life Cycle or SDLC. It is required that before developing the software at random, a proper Project Plan and Project Life-Cycle is developed for assessing the amount of time the software development would take. Following would be the detailed Project Plan and Life-Cycle described in accordance to the development of Builder Master.

Project Plan: The process of developing Builder Master goes through the same software development life cycle before it becomes available to the customers for use. The process goes through several internal procedures to finally become available to the customers (Uhl and Gollenia 2016). Through all these processes, the designing of the software, developing and testing of the software aims into producing software that is of a supreme quality that has the ability meet and exceed the expectations of the customer. Due to this development process, the project has been a success and even being developed by a Small and Medium Sized Enterprise or an SME, the software is being used by major countries all around the world (Olechowski et al. 2016). This is because; Ensoft has invested considerable time on the organization of the entire development plan of the software project which has a detailed description of how the software is to be developed. In addition to this, it was also kept in mind that the software should be developed in such a way that it would have the ability of replacing all the existing software used for similar purposes. On the other hand, the development process should also abide by the ethical and legal laws for software development in United Kingdom, that is, it should follow the international standard of software development, which is ISO/IEC 12207 (Bassi 2015). The following processes are included in the planning and development of the software Builder Master for the SME of Ensoft:

• Planning Analysis
• Requirement Analysis
• Project Architecture Designing
• Developing the software
• Software testing
• Product testing
• Market deployment and Maintenance

Project Life Cycle

In this particular case, out of the different software development models, Waterfall Method has been used, which is an irreversible process.

Project Life Cycle: This process of development of a Project Life-Cycle goes through 4 stages, namely, Project Initiation, Project Planning, Project Execution and Project Closure. In the above section Project Planning has been described. The primary deliverables of the work performed by an entire team is further described via a Work Breakdown Structure of WBS as below. It generally is defined as a decomposition of the entire process according to hierarchy that is to be delivered by a project team (Fleming and Koppelman 2016). The Work Breakdown Structure or the WBS thus entirely depends on the project development method and schedule of the entire process as per the Gantt chart and the project charter. The WBS has been created in accordance to the major deliverables and further breaking them down into smaller systems and their sub-deliverables. The decomposition of these structures is further done until a single person can be assigned with a deliverable (Harrison and Lock 2017). This WBS structure for Builder Master contains the to-do list of the specific units of work. From the perspective of the costing for the entire project, specific departments have been assigned with a grouped set of tasks for the final project progression. By integrating all these aspects including the cost accounts, it has been easier for an SME like Ensoft to track the final work progress according to the performance of the project.

Following is the Project Planning time and schedule as well as the Work Breakdown Structure for development of the software called Builder-Master for the SME called Ensoft. This will provide the thorough insight about the complete Project Planning along with the Life Cycle of the Project with the Gantt chart attached with the propagation of the project:

Figure 1: Project Planning Chart with Project Life-Cycle

(Source: Created by Author)

Figure 2: WBS of the Project

(Source: Created by Author)

Although an SME like Ensoft is not a huge enterprise, but this those not imply the fact that the Project Manager should regard as the leadership quality to be low to guide the business in a successful manner. Ensoft uses these promising ideas and professional qualities over delivering leadership qualities that it converts to successful projects for even a small business organisation (Olechowski et al. 2016).

The company uses the visionary prospect in their projects. It is a justified fact that any leader should have a visionary quality to foresee the valuable prospects of a project at large and end up with the significant following. It is a significant combination of personal and professional qualities that helps in making a project manager much stronger with creating a team that would protect the deliverables of the company on time for the clients. The organisation also has intelligent and motivated person who works for the lookout of the next project opportunity while working on the current one (Fleming and Koppelman 2016). This quality makes other organisation be interested in the products that the company manufactures or provide services for. It utilizes talent as much as a raw material and with the right kind of leadership quality it institutionalize people who do not correctly perform the task while given a particular job. However it has been worried that choosing the best for a project might intermediate a highly talented or motivated individual involved in the project but actually unsolicited suggestions may cause harm to a project which will in turn work as a disadvantage for the organisation.

Ensoft has been criticized so much yet the project managers have channelized is criticism into boosting up of the project management techniques through effective communication. Maintaining of communication with employee and workforce in the organisation and makes the employees to act on the feedback (Harris 2016). Successful executives in this organisation has kept a casual type of connection within the company and write on the particular time and build a team that has high motivation and achievement skills producing good results like the successful software development for builder master and produced effective results.

It can be found that when a new process is applied on any organization by replacing the old ones it can bring about positive changes but it may also have some perilous repercussions that have the potential of bringing about further risks in the organization. Carrying out a risk management process is not a difficult task. This process follows a specific Risk Assessment Framework or RAF that strategizes the prioritizing of risks associated with the project (Binder 2016). Therefore, the process that would be included in managing the risk should have the ability to process the information about the risks and use it in order to generate a feasible decision while addressing to it following their priority (Rosemann and Brocke 2015).. The ways that the risk in the project of developing Build Master for Ensoft has been developed in several steps by the RAF is as follows:

Identified Risk	Description	Severity
Estimation and scheduling	Time and budget estimation may go wrong in the Project Planning which may further hamper the software development process	High
Sudden and immediate requirements	The client may ask sudden change in requirements or total elimination of a previous requirement altogether	High
Employee Turnover	It may suddenly happen that due to various reasons employee turnover occur at random	High
Specification breakdown	It can happen that proper specification breakdown may not be conveyed to the developers, further hampering development methods	Low
Productivity issues	The team implemented for the development may not be productive enough and the development may take more time than estimated as a result	Medium
Design Compromising	Due to budget or other constraints, it may happen that some implemented designs during planning are compromised	High
Procedural Risks	The follow up of the project may depict procedural risks regarding the development process, and modifying the procedures may take more time than planned	Medium

Failure of the project: If the analysis results to low or trivial risk, the task can be progressed further. If the identified risk proves to be moderate, the task should either be carried on with extreme caution or should be aborted. However, if the risk is proven to be extremely harmful, it is better to completely abort the proceedings of the task (Kerzner 2018). If this protocol is not followed, the project will have a potential to be heading into the failure of the entire project, so it has been found that Ensoft takes extreme good care about the Project failure risks and produces quality tasks.

• Social collaboration in task management: The small and medium sized business organisations have a structured workforce but they are not as organised and concise as huge Enterprises that also have remote employees working all around the globe. Their food the communication and collaboration all over the web is a critical process. Like in this project for Ensoft the software of builder master require handling them from remote servers when needed (Kerzner and Kerzner 2017). This is because the software is paid amount more than 250 countries in the entire world. Providing service to any corner would require an employee who will take Service Management instructions from the headquarters. Therefore the software agency has roped in for collaboration tools like sharing of video conferences and other accessible tools for the transformation of a project.
• Tools for Project Management: Business organisations like Ensoft normally chooses cloud based tools over the traditional project management software and tools. These are characterized by simpler project demands and often these tools offer the simple task management functionalities like as easy using a calendar or a spreadsheet (Verzuh 2015). The cloud based tools offers at solutions that collaboration functionalities like file sharing video conferencing and editing of documents in real time can be less time consuming and more effective. Since the business organisation which are small scale do not have much budget to amplify their projects relying on cloud office tools helps them to perform the project management in the right approach of business but at a much lower cost.
• Automated Project Management: As per predictions about the small and medium sized organisations it has been found that the artificial intelligence Power Tools have helped the small businesses much more than the large Enterprises and especially Ensoft. They utilise chatbot tools that are especially designed to benefit the small scale businesses. Another reason for it is that the chatbots unable to lend themselves of for a much more Agile and iterative project management methodologies that become much more easy going for small business to handle then handling a waterfall model (Schwalbe 2015). Chatbots help with the project management by being virtual customer assistants. This helps in automating Customer services much more effectively which further elaborates the efficiency and productivity of employees. This is another reason that the changing and increasing automation behaviour in the business processes are including project management like Ensoft.

Conclusion

Thus, it can be concluded that the Project Management that Ensoft has been using, is delivering proper client’s needs and the company is known to be developing software called Ensoft Build master, BarBeQue Software, Road-master and many more. Mostly these are used by reputed contractors and engineers over 250 cities. The organization’s project management skills are thus thoroughly analyzed in this assessment, with clear review of the academic journals that have been published so far about the above mentioned topics. It has been further followed by the project planning, metric and tools required for the development of a software project that the organization follows as a standard. A leadership structure, that clearly defines the critical appreciation of the roles of a project manager in contributing to the organizational implementation has been analysed along as well. Next, the project risk and failures have been analyzed to support the appropriate framework to ascertain the risk analysis of the project developed for Ensoft. The final section has evaluatedthe literature review on project success criteria and applies the relevant success factors to the organization of Ensoft. This has clarified that Ensoft, being a Small and Medium-sized Enterprise or SME, has utilized its resources well to present a successful project management mechanism.

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