Mary Kate is a project manager in the IT department for auniversity. She has been asked to manage a project to create afaculty intranet. The university has multiple campuses in variouslocations, and professors and other faculty need to be able toeasily post questions, schedules and other documents to share in asecure environment.

Mary Kate performed the following steps to begin the intranetproject.

She performed a needs analysis. Mary Kate interviewed theuniversity faculty to determine their needs for an intranet and theuses they foresee for it. She discovered that several of theprofessors were working on a research project and wanted to use theintranet to facilitate group discussions, as well as to hostperiodic Webinars for professors at other universities.

She chose the project team. Mary Kate enlisted members of the ITdepartment for the project, including someone to install firewallsso users have more secure access to the Internet, and someone toset up the site to host Webinars.

She determined the project constraints. Mary Kate determinedwhen the intranet needed to be live. She considered how long shewould have the services of the various team members, how long teammembers could work on this project before being assigned to othertasks, and when the first Webinar was scheduled. Once she gatheredall of this information, she was able to determine the projectscope and constraints.

She created the project schedule. Mary Kate worked with theproject team to outline the tasks and task relationships requiredto complete the project. She assigned resources to specific tasksso that each person was aware of his or her role in the overallproject plan.

She scheduled weekly meetings for the duration of the project.Mary Kate included the CIO, project team members, faculty membersand all other stakeholders in the meetings.

She created a project status report and an issues log. Mary Kateused these documents in each meeting to apprise stakeholders of theproject's progress and to introduce any problems or issues that hadarisen since the last meeting.

Once Mary Kate had performed all these tasks, she was ready tobegin the executing phase of the project.

How might scope creep occur in this project? How could it bemanaged?