6. Durations and estimates

The scope and planning phase of the project is expected to take about 12 days and as it’s starting on 4/15 will be finished in early May. Management should already have an idea of the scope of the project and sponsorship secured. The project manager will likely have experience in determining the resources needed to complete the project. Due to the scope and importance of this project, it is likely to take priority over existing work and therefore the project manager should not have difficulty procuring the resources and personnel needed to complete; however, this task will take the longest to complete in this phase.

It will take almost 22 days to conduct a software requirements and analysis as there are several tasks and multiple personnel involved. Starting this phase right after scope and planning will have a finish date of early June. A draft of preliminary software specifications will need to be written, a needs analysis conducted, as well as a budget and schedule established.  Procuring required resources will take the longest to complete.

The design phase will take about 25 days due to the complexity of the work involved and be complete sometime in early July. The UI/UX Design will take the longest at approximately two weeks, but because most of the functionality and features are already in place, it will not take as long as a program built from scratch would take. The rest of the phase is spent incorporating user feedback into design specifications, which could take anywhere from one to five days depending on the volume of requests.

The development phase will take up most of the project schedule at an estimated 71 days from early July to mid-October. Migration to a cloud-based solution will take the longest to complete (about one month) because it involves a certain set of risks, requires lots of programming and consists of developing a comprehensive migration plan. Patient file integration will take about three weeks because “to build a video chat app you can just make use of the APIs available in the market, but the one that you build from scratch can only give you more flexibility, but will take a long time to come into reality” (Manoharan, 2022). Therefore, additional time has been allocated to allow for this build.

It will take about a month in total to develop test plans and perform unit and integration testing. Testing module integration takes about a week, and integration testing will not begin until unit testing is complete. Determining a deployment strategy, securing deployment resources and deploying the software should take a little over a week and will round out the project for a December 1^st completion date. Training IT support staff should only take about two days as they will already be familiar with the overall system and will know which new functions and features were added.

Finally, the development team will meet with the project manager to go over a post-implementation review which should only take about a day to complete.

7. Task dependencies

In agile methodology, there are fewer tasks and phases that will be dependent on each other than in other methodologies.  The scope and planning phase will need to be completed prior to the analysis and requirements phase to secure project sponsorship and identify the resources need to proceed. Once the scope and planning phase is complete, the project and software requirements analysis can proceed where formal approvals are obtained and resourced are secured.

The design phase must be completed before the development phase because during this phase is when the design specifications are created that will help in the development of the system.  The design document specification also needs to be approved by the stakeholders prior to proceeding with development.

Because the project follows an agile methodology, the tasks in the development phase are independent of each other and can be completed simultaneously, personnel and resources permitting. For this project, the Gantt chart is assuming there are at least two engineers or developers working on a task at any given time. The start dates for tasks are staggered and developers will test their code throughout the development phase.  The development phase will end whenever the last task is completed and tested by the development team.

The testing phase will occur after the development phase so that they can determine how well the software interacts with other software applications and to ensure it operates according to client specifications. Once the testing is thoroughly complete and any bugs are fixed, the deployment phase can begin. The tasks identified in this phase will depend on each other and must be completed in sequence.

8. Performance monitoring

One method to monitor system performance is in the form of user feedback and help desk tickets to understand user experience with the system during everyday usage. Even the best IT professionals cannot always meet user needs on the first try and therefore user feedback is important. Agile methodology is especially useful in incorporating user feedback because even though a feature or functionality is deployed does not mean it cannot be modified later.

In addition to user feedback, the database administrator will monitor the general state of the database and look for performance issues and workload issues. “Effective database monitoring also gives you the opportunity to enhance or optimize your database, to augment overall performance” (DNStuff, 2020). Database monitoring tracks performance of hardware and software using performance indicators, which helps to pinpoint when and where issues occur.

The system administrator will monitor the networks and perform routine maintenance to ensure no issues arise.  They typically use tools that help them monitor network traffic and performance over time to look for any irregularities. They might also use tools that will apply patches to systems.