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CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background of the Study 

In recent years, there has been a rapid growth in infrastructures and project executed in the country, which in turn has created a need to build an application that will address most of the issues address in this research work. This research work will be of paramount importance to these sectors as it will be design to address most of their challenges.

Project Management Software easily automates the whole process of project creating, adding team member to the project, allocating task and creating project milestones as well as setting time frame for each project. System users are created by the system admin where each staff is able to login in with the provided authorization and manage his/her account. Clients are register to the system to view and input necessary details on his/her project, the users/staff all form the project team member, where staff can be added to as many projects he/she so desire. The admin has the sole authority over the system.

System development is a huge and extreme investment project for organization seeking competitive advantage edge in this dynamic global market. In order to survive in this market, many organizations develop information system to enhance efficiency and profitability. This usually makes organizations to commits considerable time, resources and funds to information system development with the expectation of receiving efficiency and profitability in return. However, many organizations usually make the mistake of valuing technology over the organization process (Drucker, 1998). This usually leads to investment in technology that goes beyond their needs and resulting to inefficiency and wastefulness. Likewise, it might even result to abandonment or failure of the development of the information system. Information system on its own cannot create the gains and advantages that organization need to survive the dynamic competitive global market. The need to explore project management in information system development becomes desirable to ensure successful and effective organization gains and advantages in the global market. Hence the combination of project management and information system development will provide a better philosophy and method for planning and managing successful IS development.

Project management system can be defined as the tools and techniques used in the management of projects whether simple or complex. It can also be described as an electronic information system used to plan, schedule, control, report, communicate, forecast and handle cost for most aspects of a project. According to (Project Management Knowledge, 2010) PMIS are system tools and techniques used in project management to deliver information. Some PMIS tools include Micro-Soft Project, dotProject and Primavera. The major challenge of Project Management is to achieve all of the project goals and objectives while honoring the preconceived project constraints of time, budget, quality and scope as well as optimizing the allocation and integration of inputs needed to meet pre-defined objectives while mitigating any risks. Ahleman (2009, cited in Caniels et al., 2011) notes that PMIS have become comprehensive systems that support the entire life cycle of projects, project programs and project portfolios. They can support project managers in their planning, organizing, control, reporting and decision making tasks while evaluating and reporting at the same time (Raymond et al., 2008).

Powerful PMIS have become a prerequisite in the management of projects more efficiently and effectively while aiding the project manager in decision making and communication of information among the project team and the stakeholders. According to Raymond et al., (2008) a successful project management information system (PMIS) should have individual impact in terms of satisfied users and effective use of the system and organizational impact i.e. impact on project success in terms of respecting the budget, schedule and specifications. Some factors that determine whether a project manager will use PMIS in the daily running of the projects include; the quality of information it will generate, the ability of the PMIS to provide them with the appropriate level of details in relation to their needs, ease of use of the information generated and easy to share it with the project team members. It cannot be ignored that PMIS have become an important block towards the success of a project. Just like any other Information System (IS) or computer software PMIS has evolved tremendously to cater for more and more of the project’s aspects. Initially they were just deployed as a scheduling application but with time they have been upgraded to cover most of the projects aspects like planning, controlling, evaluating just to mention a few of these aspects. The use of PMIS is advantageous to project managers in that it improves effectiveness and efficiency of managerial tasks (planning, scheduling, monitoring and controlling) as well as the productivity in that decision making is timelier (Ibid).

Parks (2005, cited in Lee et al., 2011) argue that for efficient work performance among the project team members; PMIS supports three basic functions namely communication (PMIS delivers related knowledge and information promptly between members of the team via either external or internal networks), collaboration (PMIS supports an active cooperative management system among the members) and community (PMIS supports accumulation of related information and data through information sharing). Availability of high quality information in PMIS is essential since it assist the project manager to make sound and timely decision thus improving on his/her performance.

The use of these systems not only gives the firms competitive edge against their competitors but also enhances the effectiveness of construction projects throughout their life cycle and across the different construction business functions. According to (Kaiser et al., 2010) the use of PMIS is based on the belief that their cost will be offset by the benefits that come along with it. They continue to say that the broadening of PMIS scope enables organizations to not only manage individual projects but whole project portfolios. These PMIS support most of the project life cycle phases from the idea generation, risk management, stakeholder management to the management of knowledge created long after the project completion.

1.2 Statement of the Problem

This research work was undertaken to uncover some of the problems with conventional project management systems. Where project team member meets on regularly basis to discuss the progress made on the project team members are not permitted to travel or engage in activities outside the cities as work progress is review by physical presence. Using these conventional methods pose lots of constraint on team member as no team member can focus on other business activities except these is completed. Thereby slowing the growth of the establishment.

1.3 Objectives of the Study

In view of the problems mentioned above, this project is aimed at implementing a project management system which will exclusively:

1. Automate every project carried out in the establishment such as registering a project , keeping track of project milestones, projects updates and Asynchronous transfer of message between project team members.

2. Efficiently handling of project files and secure channel through which projects will be store, sorted, updated and retrieved.

1.4 Research Justification

This research work will provide a reliable way of handling Pentouch projects effectively and eliminate the lag time in file recovery and also with an inclusion of an asynchronous system. Furthermore, it will aids structural document representation and eliminates the tedium of performing monotonous transaction. This research will also contribute to existing literature in this area and will serve as a guild or blueprint for an undergraduate student. 

1.5 Research Methodology

This research work “design and implementation of an interactive project management system” will be a web-based application and will be implemented on a relational database system(MySQL). Html(hypertext markup language), css(cascading style sheet) and Jquery will be used to design the web-user interface, php (hypertext preprocessor) will be used as the serve- side script language to link the interface and the database. 

1.6 Scope / Limitations of the Study

This research work is to develop a system capable of handling all Pentouch Academy task such as creating project, setting time frame for a project, adding team members to each project, adding project milestones to each project and asynchronous messages between team members. The system will also incorporate in its design a feedback layout between project team an d client as well. The system will not incorporate in its development all the functions of a project management system but will focus only on the aforementioned functionalities. The system will not be responsible for any loss of data if its environment (network/system installed on) is corrupt.

1.7 Chapter Layout

This section was put in place to explain what each chapter does, chapter one introduces the project to the reader by explaining the problems the project is supposed to solve, objective of the study and research justification is to describe to the reader the purpose and the importance of researching on this topic, research methodology is all about the method used in implementing the research work, scope and limitation describes the boundary of the research work and where the project work can be put into use.
Chapter two deals with the literature review and state-of-the-art.This chapter discusses literature review, what people have published related to this research work and their shortcoming, how this present research can improve their shortcomings.
Chapter three deals with the system design methodology i.e. collection of tools methods and practices for achieving a task; the requirement specification states the expectation of the system analysis, and design which is the blueprint of what the system would carry out.
Chapter four has to do with the implementation, system testing strategies, target computer system requirement, software maintenance etc.
Chapter five discusses the recommendations and conclusion part of the research work and how this work can be applied to the problem domain.

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