Sallie Mae Proposal
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Transcript of Sallie Mae Proposal
Project Management Proposal
Prepared by:
Mohammed Almoqhim
Mansour Hawsawi
Rami Gabbani
Team Biographies
Mohammed Almoqhim
Mr. Mohammad Almoqhim has worked as process design engineer in Water and
Environment Technologies Company (WETICO). He was responsible for preparing
design calculations for the Process, Hydraulic, and Mechanical items. Mohammad
worked at WETICO for almost two years, during that time he was able to get the
technical view of the project. He has a Bachelors Degree in Chemical Engineering
and is currently working on his Master Degree in Engineering Management, with
plan to gain the Project Management Professional (PMP) certification in near future.
Mansour Hawsawi
Mansour earned his Bachelor’s Degree in Electrical Engineering Technology in 2013
from Temple University and an Associate Degree in Electrical Power in 2004 from
Technology of Makkah, Saudi Arabia. He worked in Saudi Aramco Company as
Electrical Technician for Three Years. He worked as Maintenance Electrician who
responsible of maintenance of complex electrical installation in the utilities, process,
repair, and maintenance covering electrical equipment to keep factory in a safe and
efficient operation condition. Mansour is currently enrolled in Master of Science
Engineering Management in Wilkes University.
Rami Gabbani
Mr. Rami Gabbani received his Bachelor Degree’s in Civil Engineering in 2011
from Umm Al-Qura University, Saudi Arabia. He worked in Ministry of Higher
Education as a trainee engineer, and worked in National Water Company (NWC) in
Water Project Department in the field. After that, he worked in The Ministry of Hajj
Portal as an engineer. Currently, he is studying for a Master of Science Degree in
Engineering Management from Wilkes University, Wilkes-Barre.
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Background
It’s all began back in 1973, when the Student Loan Marketing Association has
started as a government sponsor enterprise with main purpose to help the students to
achieve their dreams by lending them loans. Sallie Mae began to move to a private
company in 1997, and they have persisted to operate in that capacity. In 2004, Sallie
Mae became a fully private company by cutting all ties with Federal Government.
Basically Sallie Mae is offering low-interest loans to the students with two available
options:
1. Federal Loan
2. Private loan.
Sallie Mae is considered as one of the largest company that provides student
loans. When talking about student loans, the people directly refer to Sallie Mae
because it was leading by the government. Some people refer to paying off the
company, and they mean paying off their loans. Last year, they celebrated 40 years of
helping families around the country to make their education attainable, and their
benefits for their costumers:
Longer repayment period.
Lower monthly payment.
Single servicer.
They Manage $180 billion in education loans and serve 10 million students and
parents. The people can get student loans through any lenders, but they should first
apply for Stafford student loans government guaranteed loans. The interest rate and
the terms and conditions of the loans are affordable. Currently, in Sallie Mae's
website, you will find these loan options:
Private Education Loans: They offer loan option for undergraduate, graduate,
and professional student.
College Saving: They are helping families to earn cash back for their studies
on daily purchases.
Insurance Services: They try to protect students, recent graduate, and adults to
get insurance for their car, life, health, and renters.
Servicing: They help their members to pay their loans, and building their clear
credit.
3
Background
Banking: They help their costumers by offering the lowest interest rates and
lowest fees.
Collection Services: They help to save money for taxpayer.
We were fortunate to meet with MS. Catherine Wotrring, Chief of Business
Systems Support. She was so professional in dealing with our question and
concerns, explained their process briefly and clearly.
4
Current Project Management Process
The project management life cycle is one of very useful tool that may use in
term of understanding, and getting a big picture about a project. The significance of
life cycle of project that is all projects consist of number of different phases for the
life cycle of each project. The teams’ project in Sallie Mae, within the Wilkes-Barre,
PA, currently applies all four stages of life cycle into each project successfully. In the
first stage which related to defining a project, teams get an idea about the project and
they meet together to make sure that the idea fits with goals and objective of the
company.
After that, they move to next step which scope of project. As you know the
scope of project considers being the second stage of life cycle of project. In this step,
teams use “project plans” which helps them to deliver the intended project
management scope of the project, define timeline which allows them to know an
event that receives special attention (milestone). The teams stop until they receive the
cost estimation of project with approval.
In the third stage of life cycle of project, teams in Sallie Mae create the charter
which describes parameters, goals, timelines, and reasonable parties; in order to move
forward in project teams must get approval in charter. Next, validation and mitigating
risks take place in this stage, and teams use “Business Impact Assessment” (BIA)
essential component of an organization’s business continuance plan and planning
element that develop strategies for minimize risks. Then, teams will implement
validation to determine the period time of the project.
The final stage is closing, teams are document detail requirement about the
project and assumptions; in order to move forward, teams need to gain approval.
After, they get approval for previous step; the project reaches the end with
confirmation of implementation.
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Current Project Management Process
Other
Dept.
Project Dept. Management
Idea/Discussion
Define Scope
Cost analysis
Approval
Define timeline
Create Charter
Approval
Document detailed Req.
Approval
Validate/mitigate risks
Implement/Validate
Conformation of Validation
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Current Project Management Process
Fig.1- Process Flow Chart
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Area of Excellence
Scope creep is one the most challenging processes that project managers may
face, so, scope creep is the tendency for scope of project to expand or begins to shift
from its original parameters of the project. In the business process scope creep
happens during a project when project teams or customer begin changing the business
requirement of project deliverables. In reality, scope creep occurs when the business
process does not have enough details during planning stage. Scope creep could have
severed effects on the most of general performance of a project, the relationship
between these performances of work and the organization. There are some areas that
may be affected by scope creep:
Budget
Time
Quality of life cycle
Sallie Mae uses a number of strategies that allows it to keep scope creep from
derailing its projects. Sallie Mae has ability to solve the problem of scope creep
successfully by utilizing the following methodologies:
Manage scope creep through a change control process
Identify what is new, understand the need or advantage
If agreement, then create change request
Validate scope creep can be supported in existing plan or schedule, if not
negotiate on next best solution or data.
As you see in Fig1, it shows that Sallie Mae team uses the functional structure
which provides employee with focused on project. Therefore, company will be able to
lack of change control and they can expect there is a degree of scope creep in most
projects. So, it was a good to design a process to manage these changes. In addition,
allowing the process goes through different department to obtain approval would
control scope creep.
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Area of Excellence
Tracking project performance is one of areas that the company takes in
consideration during the project. Before creating any project, the project management
team must make a suitable arrangement to plan the project. They have to establish
methodology to track the project’s performance. The level of detail for planning
different features of the project would be the level teams could manage, control and
track for the project.
Sallie Mae does a good job in tracking project performance by providing divers
tools that project teams can use to control the performance of the project. In addition,
these tools help to control most of the problems that occur during the project. Control
of the project is one of the most neglected areas of project management. The diversity
of tools allows the project manager to collect data and report progress on cost,
schedule, and specification effectively. The driver tools that are used by Sallie Mae to
track and control their projects:
MS project which has flexibility of entering, calculation, and presenting
project info. Sallie Mae use it as follow:
o Milestone data delivery
o Sequential items
Excel or SharePoint
o Manage action item
o Issue logs
o Documentation management
Quality Center
IT management tool
Traditional SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle) materials
Area of Excellence
Risk management is to think in a system way about all possible risks before it
happens, and how to deal with all risks, and cope with its impact. It is also to evaluate
the level of risk as in the table below:
Every risk should be one from the table, and decide which risks that can avoid
altogether or eliminate, and which ones that cannot be eliminate, but can be reduced
or adjusted to keep all risks in the acceptable limits. There are four elements of risk
management:
1. Plan (Who, When, and What).
2. Assess (identify and analyze).
3. Handle (Mitigate the risk).
4. Monitor and Report (Know what’s happening).
Sallie Mae has several types of risks:
Regulator/ Compliance impact
o Ability to service billion in education loans and billion in college-
saving plans
o Dealing with sensitive financial data
o Responding to industry regulations and standard
Cost to business/ IT
o Have huge budget and resources with satisfying their customers that
require high performance, the company created identity governance
project
o Established an automated, repeatable process
Sallie Mae assesses risks in any project levels by understanding the risk, and
faces all risks by making better decisions and negotiation. Sallie Mae focuses in
specific risks including:
High probability
Low impact
High Probability
High Impact
Low probability
Low impact
Low Probability
High Impact
Area of Excellence
Volume
Cost
Ability to meet implementation date
Quality of code/work
Stability
Likeliness to become a risk vs. item that needs monitored
Risk adversity tolerance
Customer experience
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Recommendations
1- Set Priority System for Selecting Projects
Offset a strong priority system that is linked directly to the strategy, that’s would
help to reduce major problems to the organization such as implementation gap,
organization politics, resource conflicts, and multitasking. In the implementation gap for
instance, the problems usually happen when the top management formulates the strategy
and leaves the implementation to functional managers. The functional managers with the
advantage of broad constraints would develop a more detailed strategy and objectives.
The fact that these objectives and strategies are made independently at different levels by
functional groups within the organization hierarchy causes the following problems.
Conflicts frequently occur among functional managers and cause lack of trust.
Frequent meetings are called to establish or renegotiate priorities.
People frequently shift from one project to another, depending on current priority.
Employees are confused about which projects are important.
People are working on multiple projects and feel inefficient.
Resources are not adequate.
These symptoms of organizations are result of a disconnected strategy and unclear
priorities.
Our first suggestion in this case is to have a meaningful process for addressing the
previous problems. The first action to solve these problems would be if the organization
develop and use a project priority process for project selection. Such an action will help
to address these problems and also lead to reduce, or even eliminate, the impact of the
problems.
Developing a project priority system that ranks projects and weighted them by
their contribution to the strategic plan and others factors like compliance and profit would
help to mitigate the overlapping projects, the shortage in resources, and multitasking. In
addition, it will also provide the following benefits to the organization.
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Recommendations
Builds discipline into project selection process
Links project selection to strategic metrics
Prioritizes project proposals across a common set of criteria, rather than on
politics or emotion
Allocates resources to projects that align with strategic direction
Balances risk across all projects
Justifies killing projects that do not support organization strategy
Improves communication and supports agreement on project goals
The aim of portfolio management is to ensure that projects are aligned with strategic
goals and prioritized appropriately.
An example of Multi-Weighted Scoring Model is listed below in Fig 3
Fig.2 - Multi-Weighted Scoring Model
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Recommendations
The Multi-Weighted Scoring Model use, is several weighted selection criteria to
evaluate projects. This Multi-Weighted Scoring Model will include qualitative and/or
quantitative criteria. Each selection criterion is assigned a weight, scores are assigned to
each criterion for the project, and the project would be evaluated based on its importance.
After weighing the projects and assigning scores for them, all the weights and scores are
multiplied to each other for the same project to get the total weighted score of the project.
Projects now can be compared to each other by using the weighted score. Project with
high weighted score would be considered more important.
2- Set A Projectize Structure for Big Projects
To address cross team/System overlap & dependency, we suggest that it may be
helpful to have a projectized structure specially for the big projects which consume a
more effort, resources, and time. A compliance project for instance, is a good fit for this
kind of structure, where most of the organization’s resources are utilized in the project
work. In addition, projectized structure is the best option among all other options to
complete project with less complications and faster in time. The driving force for the
projectized structure projects is the high level of motivation and cohesiveness, the reason
is because all the participants share a common goal and personal responsibilities for the
project and the team.
In the projectized structure, the project manager has full time project team members
working under him. Usually, all personnel working for a particular project are grouped
together and are often co-located for the duration of the project.
An Example for that, a design engineer, an IT specialist, and a test engineer all work
under the supervision of Project Manager A in order to complete the project A.
Fig.4 listed in page 14 is representing what is the projectized structure look like in the
organization.
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Recommendations
Fig.3 – Projectized Organization Structure
The Characteristics of the Projectized Organization Structure:
The project manager has more authority and power in this type of
organizational structure
Project team member report to the project manager
The project manager controls the budget, resource, and work assignment
When the project ends, project team is disbanded and team members and
other resources are released to other project opportunities
Advantages of the Projectized Organization Structure are as follows:
Clear line of authority.
Strong communication with single reporting system.
Flexibility in trade-offs and decision-making.
Fast decision-making.
Usually responses to stakeholders’ concern are very fast.
Senior Executives
Project Manager A
Design Engineer
IT Specialist
Test Engineer
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Recommendations
From Fig.5 (listed below) we can see how the organization would be affected in the
resource availability when it is running in the functional or matrix structures. While, the
resources availability is high in the projectized structure
Fig.4 – Comparison between different organizational structures.
Another factor that would make the project succeed, is that all the project team
are dictated to one project as full-time job, so all the effort would be focused on that
specific project and that would add the benefit of no more multi-tasking or resource
conflict in the project, which is usually causes the project delay.
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Recommendations
3- Develop a Communication Plan
Develop a communication plan, such a communication plan that facilitates
effective and efficient communications with the various stakeholders involved in the
project. It describes how project communications will occur, who needs what
information, when do they need it and how do they want to receive it. A good
communications among all the project participants is key for the success of the project.
Good communication forestalls surprises, prevents duplication of effort, and can help to
reveal omissions and misallocation of resources early enough to permit corrections.
Once the project deliverables and work are clearly identified, following up with
an internal communication plan is vital. Communication is a key component in
coordinating and tracking project schedules, issues, and action items. The plan maps out
the flow of information to different stakeholders and becomes an integral part of the
overall project plan.
The purpose of a project communication plan is to express what, who, how, and
when information will be transmitted to project stakeholders so schedules, issues, and
action items can be tracked. We have included an example of an IT communication plan
that hopefully might help to mitigate the miscommunication problems and improve the
overall project performance.
The Multi-steps procedure in page 17 would be helpful to create a good
communication plan for your company or project. In order to create this communication
plan you first to understand the project’s objectives, understand the project audience, plan
communications channels, and finally monitor the effectiveness of this communication
plan.
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Recommendations
The following steps will help to clarify what we meant by understand the project’s
objectives and audience.
Step 1. Develop the project overall communication objectives, and make sure that it’s
clear and easy to understand by all the stakeholders. The communication plan must state
the following:
What do you want to achieve, when and why?
Step 2. This step is basically about identifying the audiences and lists them by their
differences. No doubt that will be difficult but by using stakeholder analysis that would
help you to identify who to communicate with and why?
Step 3. Clarify the communication specific objectives for each audience. The best way to
do that is by identify what is the audience’s needs- what do they need and want to know
from you? List the objectives for each audience in the communication plan.
After you have understood the audiences that you need to communicate with and
clarified the objectives, you are ready now to plan how you are going to deliver the
massages that meant to meet your objectives, what are the channels for that. This is what
we meant by plan communications channels.
Step 4. In this stage you can start by listing all the channels that you could use, the list
below might be helpful to create a new communication channels
Teleconference
Notice boards
CEO briefing
Lunchtime meeting
Launch event
Team meeting
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Recommendations
Step 5. To deliver the message for each audience, first you have to categorize the
audiences based on their answers of these questions
What does the audience need and want to know?
When do we need to communicate?
What is the regular or preferred channel for reaching this audience?
For this specific audience and message, what is the most effective way to get your
message across?
The answers should be added up to the plan to meet the audience objectives.
Step 6. Finally monitor the effectiveness of the communication plan from the feedback,
double check that they understand the message that you need them to know. This
monitoring can help you to fill the gaps in your future communication plan.
Fig.6 listed below is an example of suggested communication plan
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Recommendations
Fig.5- IT Project Communication Plan Worksheet
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Recommendations
Directions For Use:
1. Complete the IT Project Communication Plan worksheet.
2. Use worksheet information as appropriate to complete the project scope form.
3. If desirable, attach the completed worksheet to the project scope form.
4. Store completed worksheet with the other project management
documentation in the project document repository.
Project Phases are one of the following:
All (meaning all phases of the project)
Project Initiation
Planning
Executing
Monitoring/Controlling
Closing
Information Type examples include, but are not limited to:
Status report (see "Report Performance")
Approval
Project planning documents (project initiation, project plan, etc.)
Announcement
Documentation materials
Communication Type examples include, but are not limited to:
Reports/Paper
Meeting
Email (status reports, announcements)
Web site
Phone
KB article
Critical dates calendar
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Summary
Our team recognized that Sallie Mae makes a great work to control a scope creep that
considers being one of the biggest problems business management face in nowadays; and
it uses its process effectively when create a new project. Sallie Mea teams have ability to
manage the process by permitting a project goes throughout several approvals to make
sure parameters of the project fits with goals and objectives of company. In addition,
teams go deeply to understand news things comes across the project, and they attempt to
figure out advantages, they gain by modifying the scope of project. Another things teams
approach is making validation of scope which can be supported in current plan and
schedule.
Sallie Mea has ability to utilize several tools that allows project manager to use
information to steer the project. Moreover, the tools will help to monitor time
performance, control cost of project. The significant about diversity of tools will lead to
manage time of project.
The risk management is one of area that Sallie Mea control successfully. Since the
company has a heavy load with satisfying their customers that require high performance,
the company has established a fast automatic response that responds consumers’ needs
directly. The sensitive financial dates for company force it to responds to industry
regulations and standards.
Summary
Based on Sallie Mae biggest challenges and obstacles that they face during the
projects we notices that the shortage in resources, time, budget can be considered as
results from the overlapping projects and cross team/system overlap & dependencies. To
address these problems and solve them we studied the organizational culture and
structure, understand the process and based on that we came up with some suggestion
such as
Develop a priority system for project selection, this recommendation hopefully
would help Sallie Mae to build discipline into project selection process and link it to the
company’s strategy, it will also prevent any non resources adequate by allocate the
resources that only align with strategic direction.
Set a projectize structure for the big projects, which will allow the company to
take the advantage of the flexibility in trade-offs and decision making, faster decision
making, and it has a clear line of authority.
And finally to develop a communication plan, that would help Sallie Mae to avoid
any future surprises, mitigate the duplication of effort, and also prevent the misallocation
of resources in early stage of the project.
Our team would like to thank the members of Sallie Mea for giving us the
opportunity to apply what we have learned into a real world situation. We are so proud to
work with you and hopefully produce some deliverables that would help.
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References
1- Larson, E. W., & Gray, C. F. (2011). Project management: the managerial
process (5th ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill Irwin.
2- Bernhard, S., & Jonathan, A. (2007, March). MOTIVATION IN PROJECT
MANAGEMENT: THE PROJECT MANAGER'S PRESPECTIVE.
3- Micheal, Y. (2011, January 10). The Importance of Motivation in Project
Management. PM Hut RSS. Retrieved , from http://www.pmhut.com/the-
importance-of-motivation-in-project-management
4- Christopher, W. (2001). Project Management Basics- Managing Risk.
TechnologyUK. Retrieved April 17, 2014, from
http://www.technologyuk.net/computing/project_management/managing_risk.sht
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