CASE STUDY:
The Cobden Golf Club, provides a widely acclaimed golfing experience, and a wonderful club atmosphere for patrons of all ages. From the course, to the lounge and bistro to the social activities, the Cobden Golf Club is the premier community facility in the Corangamite Shire. Open every day from 10 am.
The Cobden Golf Club is widely regarded as one of the hidden gems along the Great Ocean Road with pristine santa ana (type of grass) fairways and bent grass greens. Until recently the course laid claim to the best 9 hole course in the region, that was until the progressive club purchased more land and set about a transition to a full 18 hole layout. At present, there are 14 holes in play, with the design and early stages of construction taking place to bring the plans to fruition. The course is not long in length but the santa ana fairways are narrow and tree lined with the greens guarded by strategic second cuts and sand filled bunkers. During the summer months when the santa ana fairways come to life, the course truly stands alongside the nearby Warrnambool and Port Fairy courses making this a must play venue in the South West of Victoria.
Cobden Golf Club Pty Ltd is managed by director (and pro-golfer), Adam Scott. Currently Scott promotes the Cobden Golf Club via community website, community noticeboards and advertising in local newsletters. Scott wishes to tap into a wider market including great ocean road tourists through the creation of a mobile app designed to promote and grow the Cobden golf course, membership, club room facility hire and range of other services such as golfing lessons, mentoring, membership and sales of golfing apparel at their pro-store.
You have been working for Sports Software Inc. casually for the last three months in their mobile app development department. As a virtual team specialist, your company has applied for a tender to develop the app for Cobden Golf Club Pty Ltd. Due to the importance of this project the CEO of Sports Software Inc, Karrie Webb, and the Director of Mobile Development Minjee Lee have both made this project a priority.
The initial investment in the project is estimated to be $80,000 in year 0 of the project, $10,000 in year 1, $10,000 in year 2, and $5,000 in year 3 a total of $105,000. Sports Software Inc. requires a discount rate of 7%. It is anticipated project future cash inflow as follows (Years 0 to 3): $0, $80,000, $120,000, and $140,000, a total of $340,000 The project will be expected to make at least a 28% ROI, to conform to the Sports Software Inc, business model.
The goal of the project is to propose an app, which is optimised for iPhone and Android devices. The app should allow golfers and tourists and golf enthusiasts to subscribe and pay for access a database of golfing tips, including explanations of the various golfing games and scoring approaches. Users will be able to book individual or group golfing clinics and lessons. Readers should be able to subscribe to the Cobden Golf Club newsletter and related upcoming events. There should be access charts detailing the course and greens, and videos showcasing all modern golf techniques. There should be a built in scoring system. The app should provide users with an ability to provide an overall ranking of Cobden Golf Club in terms of quality of information and services. Management believes it will take about three months (12 weeks) with a budget of $105,000 for this important project. Webb aims for a budget contingency reserve of approximately 10%.
Karrie Web and Minjee Lee have formed a search committee to find the best candidate for managing the Cobden Golf Club App Project. After reviewing many strong candidates, they decided to appoint you, to put together the business case for this critical project. Your previous job was with a consultancy firm where you successfully implemented several android application development projects for medium sized enterprises, using virtual teams. Since this is a high priority project that
should be completed in four months, they felt it was appropriate to get the best candidate to put together a quality business case and project management plan. They are offering a base rate for your contract at $80 p/hr for 1 d/wk, but a lot is at stake, Cobden Golf Club and similar businesses are likely to request further mobile app development projects. Webb and Lee propose to be joint project sponsors, and have handpicked Stacey Peters, to be the main internal IT liaison and Jason Day to be the Cobden Golf Club liaison. They will let you as the new project manager form the rest of the project team if the tender bid is successful.
In order to get the app developed in the time frame you propose to use Royce’s well known waterfall development approach. It is anticipated the requirements and operations phases will take one week each, while the analysis design and testing phases will take 2 weeks each, and the coding phase approximately 4 weeks. Your team consists of two programmers and a digital image specialist. The three team members will spend the equivalent of half a day a week on project management related activities (e.g. completing status reports and attending meetings etc.) and the remaining 4.5 days on development. They will be paid at a rate of $57 p/hr. You will also need to access to a golfing consultant (Katherine Kirk). The consultant and liaison pay rates are negotiable and will only be required for a maximum of one week.
You anticipate several challenges if this tender bid is successful. Sports Software originally focused on developing sports based learning apps for kids, but the CEO, Karrie Webb, has emphasised the need to increase profits by tapping into other markets, including sports marketing projects. The type of people who work on kids learning projects are often different from people working on the new sports marketing projects. They often have different educational backgrounds, skill sets, and ideals. Most of the people hired in the past year have been hired to support these new markets. Even though you and the Cobden Golf Club project team tried to do a good job managing key stakeholders, there are some difficulties with several employees who disagree with the company’s new market strategies.
The plan is to roll out review existing information, conduct research and gather new material. Detailed storyboards, a prototype, alpha, beta and final version of the app will developed. The app will need to be tested, and promoted prior to roll out. The project will be considered a success, if it comes in on time, on budget, within scope and key stakeholders have been pleased with the communication and reporting processes.