Context:

During project execution, project managers ensure that project work is completed as specified in the Project Management Plan and according to project requirements. Requirements may change throughout the course of a project. Changes need to be controlled, ensuring all of their impacts upon the project are managed effectively and are incorporated into existing management plans and project baselines.

The process of directing and managing project work requires project managers to take on numerous responsibilities and to exhibit characteristics such as attention to detail, constant communication and effective leadership.

Instructions:

For this Assessment refer to the assessment case study found in Key Learning Resources.

There are two parts for this assessment: 1 Discussion Forum (Part A) that prepares students to write a Change Management Plan (Part B).

Each student will construct an initial response in approximately 500 words to the following questions and post on the Module discussion forums. Students will be graded individually on how students demonstrate/share project change management theories and contribute to the general discussion of the topic over weeks 2, 3 & 4 as well as their 250-words written response. The initial and responding posts must be submitted by the end of Module 2 (Total 750 words).

Part A: Module 1-2 Discussion Forums

Managing Project Changes

Why is change management a necessary component of project management? Consider the given case study, critically analyse and identify key issues that could lead to any necessary changes in the project. What processes or strategies do you think would work best to perform the identified change requests from the case study?

Output:

Part A – Complete your posts by the end of Module 2.

Part B: Change Control

Based upon the given case study, in groups or as an individual, develop a report on change control. In the report:

1. Identify changes required for the case study. Critically analyse their impact on scope, time, cost, quality of the project and the techniques used to manage them.
2. Explain what processes are involved in submitting a request to deal with the changes necessary from your analysis of the case study.
3. Identify and discuss options to satisfy each change request and any risks associated to the options.
4. Complete the change request/control form provided or one that is used from a workplace.

The written part of your change control report should consist of 1500 words/student.

If you work in group, nominate a group leader and this group leader will submit the assessment on behalf of the group.

Output:

Complete and submit your change control report by the end of Module 3.

Case Study

Smart City OS - Hull’s journey to becoming a programmable city

The fifth challenge paper, smart cities, urbanisation and connectivity from Projecting the Future explores major changes that will inevitably affect project management.

Here’s how Hull is racing to become the UK’s first smart city.

For a city to become smart, it takes a combination of technologies and disciplines, seamlessly integrated, with an understanding of how a huge number of customers – the population of your city – with interact with it. In the UK, several cities are racing to become the nation’s smartest city, from London to Manchester to the country’s current leader, Bristol.

Against those larger cities, Hull might seem like the underdog, but it’s been making considerable in-roads over the past 12 months or so. In May last year, it was awarded £55,000 for smart solutions to reduce traffic congestion. Later in the year, it started a more ambitious project – to create a purpose-built, smart operating system (OS) for the city.

The project, Smart City OS is being delivered by Hull City Council, technology company Connexin and Cisco. Connexin has been working with cities such as Newcastle Upon Tyne to deliver smart city technologies, impacting on everything from lighting, mobility, security and waste.

“Developing Hull as a Smart City will give us the opportunity to work with public and private sector partners to deliver real benefits to communities, businesses and

visitors to Hull,” says Councillor Daren Hale, Deputy Leader of Hull City Council.

The objectives

Hull has been quietly upgrading itself over the past five years. Its small size – with a population of around 260,000 – has allowed it to make changes at a comparatively quick pace. This has allowed Hull to become the UK’s first full-fibre city – it has the fastest broadband of anywhere in the UK, according to broadband choices.

Hull City Council had already worked with Connexin on a long-range wide area network (LoRaWAN), allowing for better business connectivity and the facility of Internet of Things devices. Creating its own OS seemed the next logical step.

The aim of the project is to increase and enhance data sharing and decision-making, allowing the Council to deliver more effective services across the board, from traffic management to health and social care.

“The system pulls together information that currently sits within separate council computer systems to enable city-wide management of the city’s public assets in real- time using state-of-the-art technology, says Hale. “Residents will receive better information to make choices about transport, traffic and parking. But this will be just

the beginning of what is possible.”

Over the course of the project, it will drive new demand for a digitally skilled workforce, which will then boost Hull’s economy. The Council is investing in skills for its young people as a result.

The methodology

The OS uses Connexin tech, built on Cisco Kinetic for Cities platform. It will pull together 12 separate council IT systems. Each system will process data from a variety of sources, including city-wide sensors and Internet of Things devices. This data can be used to help facilitate various services. Connexin, with its experience in implementing smart city solutions, is taking a five-step process to the installation.

The first step is infrastructure: having the right level of area-wide connectivity to be able to deliver smart city services. This is a combination of high-speed fibre networks and LoRaWAN networks. Hull had a head start in this area – local telecoms company KCOM had invested £85m in the city’s full-fibre network, and Connexin’s LoRaWAN was already in place.

Second is the installation of sensors across the city, to collect real-time data. This is where the 12 systems come in. Connexin’s Smart Bins is one of them. The others include the Siemens Stratos platform for traffic management; the Bartec Auto ID system for managing waste; and the Datek streetlighting system.

The Vaisala IceCast program will help to predict the weather and plan road maintenance. The Teletrac Navman provides GPS technology, and the Citilogik system will monitor people movement. Pitney Bowes is providing asset-management software for street furniture.

Elsewhere, Defra’s air-quality database, the Environment Agency’s flood monitoring platform, Hydro-Logic flooding alert sensors and the Astun iShare GIS web mapping portal – provide the rest of the data.

Stage three is the implementation of the platform and bringing all of the systems onto the OS. This is expected to take around a year. This allows for stage four – gathering insights. Stage five is about determining outcomes based on those insights.

“Our platform will enable Hull to become a “programmable city” and move from outdated siloed service driven technologies to a central platform to improve service delivery, reduce costs and to make the most of new technologies such as IoT, AI and machine learning algorithms,” says Furqan Alamgir, Founder and CEO of Connexin.

More about the project

Hull City Council says it’s got the perfect basis for tying together its many nascent or pilot Smart City projects - a ‘Smart City operating system.

The plan: create a platform to integrate, view, manage and respond to information from a range of council services, sensors and systems, using a single intelligent dashboard. Information from current and future data-producing Council work - from Smart lighting, parking and traffic to waste management and wi-fi projects - are to be integrated into the “single pane of glass” software platform, which in a year will be open to residents and businesses.

In terms of cost to do all this, as the city has a claimed “100% fibre” to every residence and every business in Hull, a lot of the bills for are already covered, as it has an extensive low-power wide-area network technology (LoRaWAN) network as the basis. As a result, says the Council, the SmartCity OS is being seen as “relatively inexpensive for the benefits it will give”.

According to the City Council’s Deputy Leader, Councillor Daren Hale:

Developing Hull as a Smart City will give us the opportunity to work with public and private sector partners to deliver real benefits to communities, businesses and visitors to Hull.

Noting that the aim is to enhance data-sharing and decision-making, which will enable the authority deliver more effective services, including everything from traffic management to health and social care, Hale adds that this will be just the beginning of what is possible:

As the project develops, it will create a demand for new digitally-skilled workforce in the city - so we will need to invest in skills and training for younger generations so they are prepared for the new types of jobs that will be created in the digital sector.

Bold

A bold claim, perhaps - but who can blame a civic leader’s enthusiasm about the potential of new technology? In terms of what’s actually happening on the ground, Hull is partnering with a local firm called Connexin, which has built the ‘Smart City OS’ on Cisco's Kinetic for Cities platform.

Bringing together over 70 ‘out of the box’ Cisco certified integrations, Kinect for Cities is Smart City software that normalises and aggregates data from a range of IoT sensor types into a set of urban service domains such as waste, lighting and parking. Essentially, this gives Hull the ability to manage sensors from multiple vendors in one place, removing the reliance on legacy systems and their associated costs.

Putting all this in context, Assistant Director of Digital and ICT, Mike Kenworthy explains:

We've been doing elements of Smart Cities - I would say small Smart City developments. So, for example, we've got an area called Stone Ferry Road, where we're introducing smart cycle lanes that will sense whether somebody is getting too close to the traffic and light up, and if the traffic is getting too close to the cycle lane, it’ll give priority to public transport by recognising the vehicles. We’re the fourth most congested city in the country, so we link that data into our traffic management system to move the traffic around more freely and identify where there is congestion.

We're doing a piece of work on air pollution, so if you link the stuff we're getting from air pollution to traffic management, you can then see how we can move traffic to reduce air pollution in certain areas and control it. Linking it to pieces of work that we've already kind of started, we'll then be able to utilize it for much more effective results across the city.

The idea is really to get a cohesive way of handling data, whether it's from IoT (Internet of Things), traffic data, traffic camera information - and deliver all this data in all its various forms in a uniform way.

But collating all these first-generation Smart City ‘developments’ is just part of the Smart City OS idea, it turns out. The system will also pull together information that currently sits within separate Council computer systems to enable city wide management of the city’s public assets in real time, Kenworthy states:

We'll be integrating about 12 of our back office systems around street scene, traffic management and waste. Then, there'll be a publicly-facing dashboard where people, initially, will be able to see things like air quality, traffic flow and that kind of thing within kind of around a 12 month period, we’re estimating.

But there'll be things that come up during that process that obviously we'll look at and say ‘OK, actually the benefits of this are such that maybe we should accelerate it.’ But we need to get the building blocks in place first, and it's a bit of an unknown quantity on where it'll eventually end because the technology is changing so fast.

The eventual point of all that data collection, he adds, has to be that it helps the people of Hull:

If you look at the developments in things like assisted living, we’re going to be asking how can we use IoT can help us. For example, a motion sensor that detects whether a fridge door is being opened or closed, and if there's movement in the house. Now, if you think you've got somebody who is elderly and living at home and wants to stay at home, you have a great new opportunity to be able to monitor what's going on, and then be able to if, for example, say the fridge hasn't opened for 24 hours, you send someone around to check whether they're okay. It may be that they'd gone away, but you may find they're actually in some form of distress, but you've intervened early. You've known about it before it becomes a major problem. One of the biggest costs within council is adult social care or children's services, so you can see how avoiding those costs in the future and keeping people living at home, which is ultimately where they want to live, would be really beneficial.

Ultimately, we are there to deliver the best we can for our citizens and taxpayers. While most, well probably all, local authorities are under really, really tight financial pressures, we've got to find ways to continue to improve the services we deliver, and that's where technology like this comes in, as it is giving us opportunities to look at new ways of delivering services, new ways of finding out how we're best going to target our tight resources - and if we can make decisions that make sure that what we do is actually really effective, then we're doing the right thing.

Engaging the public and managing stakeholders

While the data will be used by Hull City Council to improve its services across the board, the aim is to provide insights to businesses and the public too. As the systems are integrated with the OS, they will be exposed to Hull’s business and private residents. This, it is hoped, will encourage start-ups to create new technologies that the city can then pull into its Smart City OS.

“For us, it is not just about smart cities,” says Mike Kenworthy, assistant director of digital and ICT for Hull City Council, who is managing the project. “We are looking at utilising IoT and data – that we potentially collect from other sources as well – to find innovative approaches to any problem.”

One of the biggest challenges for the project is managing the stakeholders, who are spread across various departments within the council, plus other organisations such as Humberside Fire and Rescue Service, and the University of Hull.

Hull City Council is taking a ‘one council’ approach to managing it all. People see the council as ‘the council’ not as a series of separate services. Constant engagement with stakeholders across all service sectors is crucial.

The end result

Due to its size, strong digital infrastructure, and lessons learned from other smart city projects, Hull City Council has been able to skip the pilot phase and roll out Smart City OS across the city. This could potentially cause Hull to leap up the UK smart city league tables.

Hale and Kenworthy are confident that it will bring considerable economic benefits to the region, making the city particularly attractive to tech firms. While the council has a lofty ambition to make Hull the world’s smartest city, the objective is primarily to benefit the people of the city. “We do not want to be a smart city because it is cool,” says Kenworthy. “We have to be sure that what we are doing is for the benefit of the city.”