Research On The Scope Management Of Telecommunication Service IT Projects

With the rise of internet era,communications operators like Telecom are using internet thinking in the management of their enterprises.In recent years,Telecom started many IT projects of service field focusing on user experience and perception.Due to the fact of complicated service rules and widely spread customers,Shanghai Telecom faces two major problems in the process of projects.Firstly,it is difficult to define customer needs.Sometimes,the customers themselves are unfamiliar with their real requirements.They can hardly describe or quantify their needs,making their demand description out-of-order,unorganized or even blur.Sometimes the multiple demands collected were hard to be sequenced and turned into measureable technical requirements.Secondly,it is difficult to control project scope.Demand changes occur during the initiation,planning,execution and closing phase of the project.Frequent demand changes always lead to demand spread and failure of project scope management.Pressure will be brought into project cost and schedules as well.Besides,compared to western countries,we are late in study in information projects.The study data in project scope management of IT projects of service fields is rare.In face of these problems,this thesis analyzed the characteristics of IT projects of service field in Telecom and proposed three unique features of them.For these features,this thesis presented a scope management model applicable to the IT projects of service field in Telecom using tradition scope management theory combing with tools as QFD and AHP in demand analyzing theory.The proposed model consists of four different sub-modules(demand collection module,demand mapping module,scope defining module,change control module).In demand collection module,we sorted unordered customer demands by Affinity Diagram,building a tree of customer-demand.In demand mapping module,the author used judgment matrix to quantify original demand and then a quality house to turn the weight of customer demand into the weight of technical elements.In scope defining module,we use the result of demand analysis in the output of scope statement,work breakdown structure and project task plan.Finally,the author applied the proposed model in the IT project example of Shanghai Telecom to examine the effects.Customer satisfaction and project schedule control were measured and compared with the measureable projects in history.The fact that the model-applied project acquired more than 50% scores in four different assessment items than the compared projects and it completed as scheduled further validated the effect of the proposed model.