Assignment task:
ACME is a large US accounting firm based out of New York (NY) with offices in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, New York, and Los Angles. Your team has been hired as external consultants to help ACME upgrade their existing enterprise accounting system from a legacy version to the most updated version X available in the market and also implement a analytics reporting tool. Please note that currently all offices are running version 3 which is approaching the end of support from application vendor and LA running on an unsupported version 2 platform
Your high level capital budget is $4,500,000 and operating budget of $2,000,000. Your project is to be delivered by June 1st 2021. Some of the key stakeholders from New York, Toronto, and Los Angeles offices are also pushing for the addition of the Work Force Management (managing personnel) module to the implementation.
Each site has a site manager who can act as your key stakeholder but there are other individuals at each site that you need to continuously collaborate with. Each of the sites have the following departments: Human Resources department, Accounting services internal and external consulting division (account receivable, payroll, audit, and tax), IT service desk and application support services. Toronto, Los Angeles, and New York also have a legal department. Vancouver, Toronto, and New York offices have technical staff who were either involved in the previous upgrade project as subject matter experts or had a similar experience from before.
Your Task:
Currently the Project Charter is to be signed and dated by July 10, 2023 and you are asked to deliver a fully tested and working solution to your client ACME by June 3rd, 2024. One of the challenges is that the Los Angeles office was recently acquired and is running on an even older version of the accounting software than the other offices (version 2). Also the upgrade project needs to ensure involvement from local offices while minimizing impact on their daily operations in particular the tax season from March 1st to April 30th.
The project has a fixed cost, schedule, and scope, and you are to deliver a fully tested solution for all sites.
Your job is to first come up with your team approach in managing this project for your client. (assignment #1). There are many correct approaches, but it needs to make sense from a project management perspective. You will need to include all the key components as per your scope, purpose/business objectives, governance, team RASI, project approach (needs to be very specific and not general so don't copy and paste), specific milestones (initially a high level roadmap, communications, assumptions budget, risk management, change management, and decisions and as we approach assignments 2 and 3 more and more specific.