Week 3 Assignment 1 Essay

Assess Organizational Readiness

Chanel N. Oliver

Professor Steven Englehart

Project Risk Management BUS519

January 25, 2015

Analyze how the Critical Success Factors (CSFs) apply to the facts of the case study. Provide examples to support your analysis.

According to Kim Heldman, PMP, critical success factors are those requirements or deliverables that must be completed (and completed satisfactorily) to consider the project a success. Critical success factors aren’t necessarily more likely to have risk associated with them. However, since they’re critical to the project, risks that improve or impact critical success factors can have a more significant impact – or benefit – than other risks (Heldman, K. p.101). There are a few critical factors that should be considered when analyzing the critical success factors of any project. The first is agreeing on the project goals or having a supportive organization. It is important that the management team, sponsors, and other stakeholders are on the same page, and all have the same goal(s) in mind. Everyone should work together to determine what problem the project will solve, what the desired results are, and what need the project will fill. Those goals must also be measurable to help define the project scope (Hughes, S. 2010). In this particular case study, Flayton Electronics learns that the security of its customer data has been compromised, and they face tough decisions about what to do next. Their first project at hand is to determine exactly what happened. There were many questions to be answered, such as: Could the card readers have been hacked? Could the data lines between the stores and the bank have been tapped? Was the stored data secured? Might someone have inserted code into the company’s software to divert certain information to a remote computer, or even a computer on the premises? Could it have been an inside job, or perhaps the work of someone who had been fired? Everyone agreed that finding the answer to these questions was the most important task at hand. Second, would be developing clearly defined plans with assigned responsibilities and having a simple, scalable process. When developing a plan, you must define all deliverables and the tasks necessary to produce them. You must also determine any risks that may be associated. Each task should come with a set of responsibilities and each deliverable should have an exact due date (Hughes, S. 2010). In our case study, Brett has already taken the initiative to delegate the individuals that are responsible for taking care of each task. Laurie, vice president of loss prevention, was responsible for finding out exactly what happened. Sergei, the CIO, was responsible for finding out how everything happened. The third factor is making sure you have competent people. When faced with a problem, it is reassuring to know that you have someone working for you that you can put your trust in who is competent and capable of solving the problem for you. It is highly important that those sponsoring the project, managers, team members, and stakeholders are trained in applying the process, participating in it, or both. When training those individuals, it is important to ensure that the training is at the proper level and depth for each job responsibility. Proper training allows for a shared understanding of key concepts and principles of risk management (Hilson, D. & Simon, P. p.18). In this case study, it appeared that no one seemed to be on the same page when the breach occurred. Everyone was scrambling trying to figure out what was going on and how to fix it.
Determine the project benefits, organizational readiness, and risk culture of the company in the case study. Provide justification for your response.

With any project, benefits can be either tangible or intangible. Those tangible benefits are measurable and objective, where as the intangible benefits are more subjective and

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