Westower Communications IT Project Management Scenario Working as a senior project manager for the British Columbia-based telecommunication tower design firm Westower Communications., my team and I have focused exclusively during the last year on overseeing the installation of an information technology (IT) system capable of merging the company's three primary client-based services and the associated server processing power used to perform them. In my role as director of the project management team, and as a crucial component of the project planning process, I would begin by holding a meeting of key stakeholders -- including Westower's CEO Michael A. Jarvis, COO Ray Zeldenthuis, project point person Don Klausing, the department heads for the Sprint, AT&T and T-Mobile divisions, and the company's internal IT supervisor. This introductory phase of the project planning process is indispensable to the overall objective of ensuring that implementation of a trifold IT system occurs on schedule and under budget, as project management experts have observed that because "team meeting processes are usually established early and are essential for well-focused, productive work & #8230; the team meeting is where the behaviors and personality of the team are developed and reinforced" (Wong, 2007). The following project plan includes a summation of the project's overall scope, a detailed Work Breakdown Structure, and an analysis of budgetary limitations and other external risk factors.

Every experienced project manager can attest...

When budgets slowly begin to balloon and an unending stream of employees are added superfluously to a project's staff, the scope of a project, or "all of the work involved in creating the products of the project and the processes used to create them" (Schwalbe, 2011), has experienced scope creep despite the project manager's best intentions. The five-pronged process of project scope management currently advocated by industry experts includes (1) the collection of specific requirements, (2) a precise definition of the project's scope, (3) the creation of a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) document, (4) verification of scope via inspection and acceptance of deliverables, and (5) the ongoing effort to control scope throughout the life of the project. Utilizing project scope management "includes the processes involved in defining and controlling what work is or is not included in a project," and this skill is especially important for business operations because "the project team and stakeholders have the same understanding of what products the project will produce and what processes the project team will use to produce them" (Schwalbe, 2011).
In order to maintain strict scope control throughout the duration of a project's life, it is important to utilize an important tool known as variance analysis. This technique involves…