Target E-Commerce Expansion: Project Plan and Risk Analysis
This paper presents a project management plan for expanding Target Corporation's online presence and e-commerce capabilities. It outlines the projected capital budget of $300,000, including web development staffing, infrastructure, and ongoing marketing costs, while excluding concurrent cybersecurity investments already planned. The paper details a three-phase work breakdown structure spanning approximately one year — covering pre-development, development, and post-development evaluation — along with key milestones, potential obstacles such as scope creep and resource constraints, and risk mitigation strategies centered on budget control, operational oversight, and clear role definitions.
- Project Costs and Budget Overview: Capital budget, staffing costs, and financial rationale
- Work Breakdown Structure: Three-phase plan: pre-development, development, evaluation
- Key Milestones: Four major project milestones and their significance
- Potential Obstacles: Scope creep, resource limits, and communication risks
- Risk Mitigation: Budget controls, operational oversight, and role clarity
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper follows a logical, professional project management structure — costs, then work breakdown, then milestones, then obstacles, then mitigation — making the argument easy to trace from planning to execution.
- It distinguishes clearly between incremental and sunk costs, demonstrating awareness of financial analysis principles relevant to capital project decisions.
- Risk is treated as both quantitative (budget overrun statistics) and qualitative (scope creep, communication breakdowns), giving the analysis practical depth.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper effectively applies project management frameworks — particularly the work breakdown structure (WBS) and milestone mapping — to a real-world corporate case. By grounding each phase in cross-functional team responsibilities, the author shows how theoretical PM tools translate into actionable organizational planning.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with a financial overview establishing the capital budget and its rationale. It then moves through a three-phase WBS, identifies four major milestones, catalogs potential obstacles with organizational and technical dimensions, and closes with three concrete risk mitigation strategies. Each section builds on the previous, culminating in an integrated risk management picture.
Project Costs and Budget Overview
Expanding Target's online presence will require work on several fronts. First, the company will need to expand the size of its web team. The current team is built mainly to maintain the existing website and social media, but this new project is a capital project that requires new incremental investment. The total cost for the needed team is expected to be around $200,000, hired on a contract basis, along with the redeployment of existing resources, in order to ensure that the project does not create any problems for the existing web infrastructure. There will also be ongoing needs for two marketers at a cost of $80,000 per year total.
In addition, Target is building some other functionality — including new cybersecurity measures — into this project. The company has already made massive cybersecurity investments in the wake of the 2013 data breach. The new cybersecurity investments will be implemented concurrently with the expansion of the company's web presence, but since they were going to be implemented regardless, they do not count as incremental expenses. The total capital budget will therefore be $300,000 — the other $100,000 being allocated to infrastructure — along with ongoing $80,000 needs for operating the website and the redeployment of some existing resources to maintenance of the expanded web presence.
As with most web development projects, there are significant risks associated with timeframes. Because the company is relying on contract labor, the ability of that contract team to deliver on time and on budget is unknown. Target has faith in the project management capabilities of its in-house team, but is also aware that web development projects can have a high level of variance between the expected and actual completion times. The downside risk of web projects in particular has been fairly well documented — 27% run over budget, with average cost overruns exceeding 200% (Hazrati, 2011).
There are several benefits to operationalizing this idea. The first is that there are significant opportunities for Target in terms of building a better e-commerce experience. The company lags behind rival Walmart in terms of its e-commerce business, and several factors have been identified as potential causes — areas of the user interface and core site functionality, for example, that needed to be modernized. A reinvented web presence also provides additional opportunity to build content marketing into the company's overall marketing strategy and to implement much-needed improvements to cybersecurity. Being able to tackle these multiple issues simultaneously is one of the major benefits of this project. These benefits will be weighed against the potential costs, which include the risk of the project going over budget and underperforming in terms of deliverables.
Work Breakdown Structure
The work for this project will be done in three phases: pre-development, development, and post-development. The pre-development phase will be carried out by an in-house team comprised of members from the marketing and IT departments. The timeframe for this stage will be four months, as team members integrate the project into their daily workflows. During this phase, the marketing team will work with IT staff to determine the scope of the project. Establishing an appropriate scope and adhering to it is an essential component of bringing a project in on time and on budget (Hazrati, 2011). This first phase will also include assembling the team that will work on the site — including back-end, front-end, and UX/UI professionals.
The marketing team will identify the opportunities that this project can position the company to exploit and set targets for post-implementation functionality and metrics, in order to determine whether the project was a success. By determining up front what the project will achieve, this cross-functional team will be able to map out a scope of work for the contract developers.
The second phase of the project will be the development phase. During this phase, one marketing person will provide oversight, in addition to the in-house head of technology. The contract developers will work within the framework of the current website, making a number of enhancements included in the work breakdown. The development phase is expected to take approximately two months. While most of the heavy lifting will be outsourced, there will still be roles for Target's in-house marketing team — especially on the content creation side (photographers, graphic designers, writers, and videographers). Their work will not be included in the budget, as they are full-time employees and their wages constitute a sunk cost. This phase will be considered complete once the website has undergone quality control and been deemed acceptable. At the end of this phase, it is expected that most contract workers will be relieved of their duties.
The third phase of the work breakdown will span six months. This is the post-development evaluation phase. When the expanded web presence is complete, Target will task its in-house teams with operating the website — including ongoing maintenance and development work — and populating the new web presence with content. The digital marketing department will be responsible for the ongoing maintenance of this heightened web presence through content creation and the application of digital marketing strategies. One key responsibility of the digital marketing team will be to monitor the ROI and other metrics for the enhanced presence. Thus, the marketing team will play a significant role in measuring the success of this initiative through the data they gather and use to evaluate performance.
All told, these three phases will last nearly one year, and the post-development phase could stretch out even longer. The work breakdown structure is divided into three phases determined by which internal teams are involved. The first phase involves a cross-functional team of IT and marketing staff. The second phase is driven almost entirely by the IT team, and the third phase almost entirely by the marketing team — albeit with each team maintaining some visibility into every phase.
References
Hazrati, V. (2011). IT projects: 400% over budget and only 25% of benefits realized. InfoQ.com. Retrieved April 15, 2019, from https://www.infoq.com/news/2011/10/risky-it-projects
Teamwork. (2016). 6 obstacles to any project and how to clear them. Teamwork.com. Retrieved April 15, 2019, from https://blog.teamwork.com/6-obstacles-project-clear/
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