Project Management Essay At Cruise International, Inc.

Cruise International, Inc. wants to launch a new onboard telemedicine procedure and the project is time-critical. You need to provide project management assistance to Susan Petersen in CII's Marketing Department as well as to Dr. Janelle Black at Corporate Medical Services. Comments from your meeting with Susan follow.

"Hello, I'm Susan Petersen. Here's the project I have in mind for you. We have a new telemedicine procedure ready to be introduced onboard our fleet of ships. This is part of CII's efforts to make passengers feel more comfortable with the onboard medical care and will be featured in our next publicity blitz. It is also much needed help that we have promised the medical personnel working onboard. The procedure requires the acquisition, installation, and marketing of a new telemedicine communications system. Dr. Janelle Black is responsible for its implementation. She has given me a list of activities that need to be completed before the new system can be implemented.

There are four stages:

1. develop the criteria and systems

2. write the simplified operating instructions for using the system

3. order the hardware to support the system

4. Install the system.

5. Training of staff

At that time, the training of the medical personnel needs to be completed. When the equipment has been installed onboard the Friendly Seas I and the medical personnel are sufficiently trained, we will have a four week test period before launching the new system and beginning installation in all of our ships. Take a look at Activities for Telemedicine System Implementation."

"Since we are anxious for the project to be completed as soon as possible, we have the option of paying additional costs to speed up some of the activities. For example, the normal time required for the communications contractor to finalize criteria can be reduced by one week at an additional cost of $1500. Another example is that equipment could be shipped by UPS Ground and save one week. This would cost an additional $2,000. Using FedEx would save two weeks but cost an additional $4,500. The training period for the nurses can be reduced by one week if Human Resources allows the nurses to work overtime at an additional cost of $1,200. For the criteria development, $3,500 in overtime can be saved if this activity is allowed to take five weeks to complete."

1. Determine the absolute shortest length of time in which the telemedicine project can be completed if none of the activities are crashed.

2. Determine the shortest length of time the project can be finished if activities on the critical path are crashed.

3. Calculate the additional cost resulting from crashing all the activities possible.

4. Explain how you can minimize the additional cost of crashing the project while completing the project in the same amount of time as determined in question 2.

Cruise International Incorporated is a cruise line company that serves individuals, guests and travel agents while delivering a leisure tourism experience through luxurious the water transportation. The services of Cruise International Incorporated consist of water transportation, hotel, housekeeping, entertainment service, food and beverages. The purpose of this project plan is develop a telemedicine system for Cruise International Incorporated that will allow the company to deliver a safe and secured journey to their guests. Through these service the operational management of the company can reduce the risk of health hazard during the maritime transport. In this system the company will have enough health support onboard to provide healthcare service to the medically sick guest after diagnose the problem. In case of emergency the company will also able to provide a air medical support to the guest by transporting the guest to the nearest healthcare service provider.

Cruise industry is one of the most dynamic tourism and shipping sectors that involves various types of products and services as well as delivering system. The presentation of the service and the quality of the product are the two major considerations in maritime leisure business. The aim of this project is to develop the appropriate project plan to arrange, install and implement the system successfully in order to deliver the quality of healthcare support service to the onboard guests or customers of the Cruise International Incorporated Company. The following objectives have been made aligning with the aim of this project:

• To develop the criteria and systems for the potential operation and requirements
• To develop the simplified operating instructions for using the system
• To develop the detailed hardware requirement to order the hardware to support the system
• To plan for installing the system
• To plan for Training of staff
• To estimate the minimum time without any occasional failure or crashes
• To estimate the minimum time considering all the possible crashes and failure
• To plan for reducing the additional cost for system failure or for operational crashes 

Cruise International Incorporated follows a mixed network procedure for their telemedicine plan where both chain based data flow and interconnected data flow will be utilised. Chain based data flow will be utilised for consistent telemedicine process as described below:

Health check up: The guests will be under regular basic health checkups procedure during the travelling time. A group of health professionals, practitioners, nurses and caregivers will be present in the marine crew for this identification purpose. They will equipped with primary health diagnostic instruments to conduct several accurate health checkups for onboard passengers on regular basis.

Reporting the health issue:  If any discrepancy in health condition of any guest will be detected, the health support team will immediately report to the healthcare reporting deck for further assistance and required procedures. The report will be documented with the pathophysiological details of the guest along with scop of the treatment.

Health analysis: The health practitioners will decide if any serious support needed for the situation. The analyst will also decide if emergency procedure will be needed. As per the decision, the Heath Telecom Support team will be informed to communicate with the health partners. In case of any emergency health analyst will be the one who will decide to initiate emergency air service procedure for the guest.

Virtual Telecom: Through virtual telecommunication system, the health professionals of supportive partner organisation will communicate with the onboard caregivers and professionals as well as with the guest to execute the treatment procedure. The diagnosis report will be delivered to the head quarter through intranet. The experience healthcare practitioner will  guide the onboard healthcare team with treatment techniques and prescribed medication for the patient.

Operational System plan for telemedicine

Post treatment: After the virtual treatment, the caregivers will provide appropriate services to the guests with prescribed medicines and healthcare equipments. The physical, mental and emotional condition of the guests should be the top most priority. After the successful treatment plan, the caregivers will take special care and monitoring system for the treated guest.

Emergency: For any emergency, an air support helicopter will be mounted on the top of the ship and will be deployed for medical support in case of urgency. The helicopter will took the guest at nearest healthcare organisation for further procedure.  

In this section the required resource material, equipment, workforce, time and budget will be analysed to develop a proper implementation plan of the Telemedicine System.

The following trees shows the executable activities as per their hierarchical distribution. The numerical representation at the up-left corner represents the degree or position of the activities. The number of the days are representing the optimistic estimation. The executable activities have not started yet; therefore, the percentage of competition is 0%. At the bottom of the each node the start and end dates of the activity is specified.

As per the Gantt chart time line and work breakdown structure the given Ship Board Telemedicine System Project Plan will require shortest length of 24 days without any system failure and crash.

As per the Gantt chart time line the given Ship Board Telemedicine System Project Plan will require shortest time length of 29 days if any critical system failure and crash will occur.

Cruise international required verities of hardware and software equipments to implement the Telemedicine System successfully within the cruise service infrastructure. The components are divided in two separate sections, namely components for telecommunication or networking system and components for digital heath detection and treatment system. Telecommunication hardware will be used to communicate with the support team of healthcare practitioner and specialist. On the other hand, the health diagnoses equipments will be used for digitally diagnose the health problem of the onboard guest and deliver the details to the telecommunication system for further procedure. The requirement of all components has been presented bellow along with the required quality of each material.

Telecommunication Hardware

• Local Area Network
• 3 Printers
• 3 Scanners
• 5 Routers
• 2 Base transceiver stations
• 7 Landline phones
• 5 Computers
• 10 Digital Camera

Health diagnosis Equipment

• 2 ECG Transmitters
• 2 Multi parameter Units
• 5 Telemedicine Tool kit2
• 3 Cardio Assists
• 3 ICU Consulting Units
• 5 Electric Medical Record Units
• 6 Non-invasive Pulse and Blood Pressure Units
• 6 Glucometer ad Hierogram analysers
• 2 Digital Microscopes

The following budget plan has been developed to estimate the optimistic operational or instalment cost of the whole system and the additional cost if all the critical factors will fail or crash. The cost estimation has been done as per the number of days required for a particular activity.

Therefore, the additional cost resulting from crashing all the possible activities is 91500$

Risk assessment 

Many risks can be identified throughout the execution and the installation procedure of new telemedicine system in Cruise International Incorporation. In order to eliminate all the risk the potential risk factors have to be identified along with their major internal and external regulators and influencers. The major risk factors are:

As per the risk assessment matrix the risk factors are prioritised and presented bellow in distending order of the risk coefficient (Impact x Likeliness):

Criteria and Systems

The impact and possibilities of occurrence of this risk factors are high that made the risk coefficient highest in all other risk factors. One of the major causes of marketing failure could be occurred due to the lack of knowledge about market trends and acceptation. At the same time marketing and promotional activity will generate the profit margin and consumer volume. It makes this risk factor the most impactful amongst the others.

The workforce required for this system should me higher educated, proficient and experience. Currently, few universities and healthcare organisations are training their students and professionals for digital treatment or virtual healthcare system. Apart from the  salary margin offered by the organisation could be perceived low by the labour market. Lack of workforce supply can result reduced service quality and management issues that consequently could hinder the profitability of the system.

Cruise international has a large stakeholder count who are involved in their own busy work schedule. It will make the communication process more complex and full of constrains during execution. Apart from that communication media or network failure is the common factors. Both the impact and the high likeliness made the risk coefficient of communication issues 4.

Before installing the new equipment, the proper inbound logistics management and supply chain monitoring essential. However, several issues such as delayed negotiation process, equipment loss and other can delayed the logistic transportation for inbound materials and equipments. However, the likeliness of this risk is low and on the contrary, the impact of this risk is high.

Ineffective leadership and training system can extend the operational time of training and development procedure. Currently Cruise International do not have enough existing and proficient workforce to train the new employees about the work process of Virtual Healthcare treatment and Telemedicine System. Therefore the chance of getting this discrepancy is high.

Because of being a part of leisure tourism and transportation industry Cruise International does not have enough knowledge about the vendors and supply chain of the electronics and healthcare equipments. Therefore, as a novice Cruise International may require additional time to negotiate with the suppliers.

The simulation system can crash during runtime failure because of primary installation procedure. The simulation system in system trusting will not have enough time to spend more bug free integration in beta testing mode. The simulation will be executing after the Alfa testing. Therefore, the trainers and trainees could experience lots of bug issue and system failures.

In order to minimise the operational cost the risk management system of cruise line tycoon should develop some contingency plan to avoid the consequences after any failures or crashes.

Cruise International Incorporated can depend on third party Human Resource Consultancy to avoid the recruitment and training related issues. The third party consultancy company can provide recruitment and training procedure to make a compatible and optimum workforce for the company. It will take additional cost, however it will eliminate the risk of recruitment, training and development related failure.

Increase the core investment estimation per equipments:

Cruise International Incorporated can increase their estimation price for each technological equipment. It will give the company additional negotiation advantage during the supply chain selection and purchasing phase. The slightly increased price estimation can increase the investment 2 to 3% however it will reduce the cost of potential negotiation extension time significantly.

Being a maritime company Cruise International Incorporated has the ability to operate their own inbound logistic operation without depending on the other logistics service providers or intermediaries. Supply chain management is the management of flow of resource materials and services and other required process that transforms the row materials into the final product and service. Depending on the self controlled logistics will reduce the chance of logistic failure and safe the potential financial damage up to 50 to 60%  

In this era, Information Technology is one of the most essential drivers of any business organisation that helps the business to manage the internal operations like human resource, training, monitoring and controlling. Consulting with IT Service provider for installation and testing period of the will allow the company to have a beta tested telemedicine system which will have better integrity and efficiency that a Alfa tested network system. The partnership with IT consultancy services can increase the investment slightly; however, the amount of potential damage that can be removed through this strategy is significantly high.

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