Msc Strategic Project Management

Strategic Project Management C11CP1

Module Assessment: Business Case; Focus

on the Future

Submitted By: Jumbo Victor Miriam 091611448

Akinlose Modupe 091595609
Umar Galadima Shehu 091550631
Maryam Ciroma 091548018
Halima Ciroma 091548007

6th of December 2009

Lecturer: Amos Haniff

a.haniff@hw.ac.uk

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 Table of Content
Executive Summary

Introduction

Define Phase:

• Statement of Opportunity
• Feasibility Studies (organisation Structure)
• Responsibility Matrix (Governance)

Planning Phase:

• Work Break Down Structure (Time Scale)

• Budgeting and Costing
• Risk Assessment

Execution

Evaluation

Recommendation/Closure

Benefits/Impact

Critical success factors

Reference List

Appendix

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 Executive summary

One of the key strategies of Heriot-Watt is to play a greater role in Knowledge and
developing human capital in order to improve productivity growth through research and
development [1]. Since Dubai is now one of largest tourist centres in the world with
modern and interesting Architectural structures, it will be a very good area to improve on
Heriot-Watt’s record on Research and development. Establishing a major Research centre
in Dubai for education and research into architectural design to minimise energy, this is
an important Research theme in Heriot-Watt’s School of Built Environment and we
believe would elevate the universities position in the world. Now building a major
Research centre, which is the program in this case involves a lot of projects from
construction of the actual buildings, infrastructures, to recruitment of staffs.

The world of IT is headed toward major shifts in the manner in which its resources are
organized and optimized. The growth and expansion of an organisation entails the growth
in technology, IT infrastructure is one of the most expensive things to deal with. This
project focuses on reducing the negative impacts of excessive fragmentation and
complexity, and the corresponding benefits of infrastructure simplification which will
help in the development of the research centre. The deployment of virtualization in Heriot
Watt University’s IT environment will allow Heriot Watt University to reduce the overall
cost of IT infrastructure needed in the research centre and provide additional capital to
improve actual research. The question now is can virtualization (infrastructure
simplification) yield benefits that would assist in justifying our strategic focus? Is it
simply a case of reducing IT costs and savings for improving other aspect of the
Strategy? This report will help provide answers to these questions.

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 Introduction
In their book, “The E for Everything”, Oblinger and Katz discuss IT leadership strategies
for universities in the areas of e-commerce, e-business, e-learning and research. They
note that institutions must identify the technical building blocks necessary to move
forward without constraining future options and opportunities. To accomplish this within
higher education, we have begun to deploy integrated virtualized systems. To pursue this
further, we need to consider how to integrate these systems into our academic enterprise,
Katz and Oblinger also highlight the need to view our IT infrastructure as a strategic
resource, identifying the requirements for intra- and inter-campus solutions that provide
services across solutions.
But what is Virtualization?
Virtualization is a means by which multiple physical IT resources like server, storage
and network resources are viewed as a single logical unit [3]. With virtualization, many
physical servers, data centres and network resources can be consolidated into one small
and compact virtual pool, that can be easily managed, maintained, administered with far
less financial resources as compared with operating these resources separately, and takes
less space. This will ultimately result in effective utilization of IT resources, giving the
possibility for expanding workload on the infrastructure if needed without expanding
physical hardware resources.
Virtualization can address the institutional goals of
• Offering on- and off-campus students, faculty and staff twenty four hours access to
online learning resources.
• Enhancing distance-education students’ experiences.
• Streamlining our research administration and proposal management process.
• Reducing the need to acquire extra hardware and manpower resources to
accommodate the increase in online course workload.
The document focuses on the implementation of Virtualization on Heriot Watt
University’s IT infrastructure for the purpose of contributing to the development of its
research centre for Agricultural design and minimization of energy.

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 Statement of Opportunity

Research and development is driving higher education to change. The Dubai campus
students, faculty and staff have increased expectations for research into architectural
design to minimize energy due to its increasing importance in the Middle East region,
while it would like to offer a Research and development institute to explore this area of
research. These, amongst other drivers are moving the university’s Dubai campus
towards implementing Virtualization. The other drivers include:
• Increased need to expand interdisciplinary and inter-institutional research and
collaboration.
• Increased need to improve on its Research and development area, for the ultimate goal
of improving its current rankings in UK.
• Changing needs of teaching and learning and providing the need to set up online
teaching environments to run e-learning SCHOLAR courses without overstretching the
current IT resources, the need to go green by cutting down power and energy
consumption.
Moving to a virtual environment helps Heriot Watt University cut capital costs by
reducing the number of physical servers necessary to support its IT infrastructure.
With a virtualized environment, the university can reduce its capital expenditures for
storage devices and network hardware moving towards a virtualized environment means
lesser energy consumption and a “Greener” IT implementation
How are these drivers addressed? Virtualization can enable these new services while
limiting cost and resource overhead in implementing them.

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 Organisational Structure
Heriot Watt University is said to be operating in combination of pure functional and
product organisational structure, a structure based on horizontal and vertical
relationships. This structure attempts to integrate a structure which is project oriented
with the organisations existing structure in place, as seen in the matrix structure presented
in the appendix section where reports and decision making process are passed through a
series of hierarchical authorities in order for greater visibility and management control of
activities within an organised setting while allowing for concise high level expertise in
functional areas.
The table below (fig1.1) represents a technique used to measure the level of influence the
existent organisational structure could have on the proposed project.

Matrix Structure

Project Characteristics Balanced Matrix

Project Managers Authority Moderate
% of Performing Organisation Personnel 45%
Assigned Fulltime to Project Work
Project Managers Role Full- Time
Common Titles for Project Managers Role Project –manager/project officer
Project Management Administrative Staff Part-time
Matrix Structure (Gardiner Paul .D 2005) fig 1.1

Strategic Governance

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In line with the University’s focus on the Future which underpins its vision for the next
decade to be the worlds leading university, the success of this project is dependent on the
strategic governance of those at the top to effectively manage the existing programme,
ensuring this Information Technology project ensues an efficient use of development
resources such as business analysts, VMware solution architects, web designers and lots
more whilst going green, minimising cost of duplicate management and support activity.

The executive director or principal in concert

Principal
with Board of Directors considers the
Universities long term technological, educational,
societal and
environmental future, and formulate policies..

Board of Directors

Policy Communicated

Managing Director
The Managing directors or Line
Managers represent the Executive
Sponsor who consider events
external environment of the
institute, Consumer responses,
Program Committee Industry & Commerce, Alumni and
{Programme development} Community changes and then
develop strategies relative to
Development, Operations and
Programs.

Organisational Structure Fig 1.2

Figure 1.3 simply summarises Heriot Watt’s into a three tier structure, showing three
organisational levels who are directly involved in the effective implementation of the

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project through the executive sponsor represented as the managing director which
comprises of people and organisational development and the director of international
development; through whom there is an established link between corporate governance
and project governance. A descriptive representation of the institute’s organisational
structure has been provided in the Appendix section of this paper.

Business Technology
Drivers Drivers

Business Technology External

Strategy Strategy Focus

(Cutting cost using

VMware)

Business Technology Processes Internal

Processes Focus
Business and
Technology Matrix
(Smith 2002) Fig 1.3

This project is therefore consistent with the organizations strategies and it’s Focus on the
Future, as the project incorporates technological measures through cost cutting
techniques, to help support the universities vision to be the world’s number one
university in the future. This project is to provide deliverables (VMware) that would
support other sectors such as excellence. As business environment changes (over 900
universities all over the world has invested in the VMware soft ware to cut cost) the
related technology areas must remain synchronized, so also as technology advances to
create new opportunities for organizations, Heriot Watt University must find new ways to
assess, capture and incorporate corporate strategies to exploit the opportunities provided
by certain external changes driven by technology (fig 1.3). A full length organisational
structure of the institutes represented in the Appendix shows clear lines of accountability,
direct leadership and responsibility, judging from the flow of work from the top
(principal/board of directors) and down towards the project level.

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 Stakeholder Mapping
In light of the university’s structure, it is important to take into account its stake holders,
using the Stakeholder Mapping technique to determine the level of power over interest
which these stakeholders, who are directly or indirectly connected to the organisation
may have on the future decisions made by the organisation.
High

Keep Satisfied Key Players

• Alumni
• Students
• Community
• Research council and other
funding bodies.
• Staff
• Court
Power

Minimal Effort Keep Informed

• Society • Industry and Commerce
• Bankers •
Low

High Low
Level of Interest
Stakeholder Analysis fig 1.4
The stakeholders with high power and interest (students) are most likely to control the
strategic direction of the organisation and also the success of this project.

Schedules

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 Fig 1.5 project time Scale (Gantt Chart)
According to S. Elberk & M. Thomas; project managers may instinctively think that
allocating more resource to a task will reduce the time that it takes to complete this task,
in other words increasing the effort can reduce the duration of the task
Nevertheless what every project requires is the application of adequate effective planning
tools to ensure that the appropriate activity is carried out at the right time in a strategic
and structured manner. Therefore to base our assumptions and judgement we hereby find
the Gantt chart to be the appropriate for identifying and measuring this project in regards
to its time scale
In regards to an assumption that this project has been approved and is dated to
commence on December 4, 2009, the project team has to identify appropriate servers to
assume virtualization between day 4 and day 7, between the 8th and 11th day the discovery
of new server architecture by the project manager is subject to take place. In between
these dates the project team is expected to announce the categorization of appropriate
data centres, which is the 10th to 14th day .More so the recognition of appropriate network
resources within two days (10 & 11) has to be done, along side ensuring that the right
virtualization software is put in place. However the installation of software should not
exceed two days 14th and 15th. Overall is the testing of the new environment between 18th
and 21st.In addition to new change project there should be a deployment of new
environment in the production environment for just one and last day 22nd of project
implementation. As seen by the timescale the project timeline is short term which will
allow proper reviews to measure milestones.

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Budgeting and Costing

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At this stage of the project planning process, a cost estimate is drawn up in order to
provide a structured framework for estimating the total cost of the project and is hereby
subject to changes from a higher power.
In line with the institutes objective for continuous quality improvement by streamlining
service delivery (including assessment of quality, relevance and cost) and to reduce cost
by 10% over a three year period; this project introduces an essential academic support
tool used to reduce cost known as the Virtualisation Mware a products that support
multiple operating systems (such as Windows and Linux) on a single machine It’s
therefore important to note that at this stage of the project planning, financial budgeting
made is only an estimate and the estimate is bound to change as the work begins. This
estimate is done in regards to Castle Computer Services (technician).
Description Cost A (£) Cost B (£)
Project Manager
-Planning 4,000
-Reviews 5,000
-Progress Meetings 4,000 13,000
Interviews & Research
-International
Legal
-International
-Returns 17,000
Technical
-Provider
-Support 13,000
Report & Presentation
-Legal
-Research
-Technical
Total Resource Cost
-Equipment Cost - - Capacity Planning
Exercise
- - Blade Chasis
- - 7 x Blades
- - 1 x Storage Area Network
(SAN)
- - VMware Software 90,000
Estimated Total Project Cost 103,000
Cost and Budgeting fig 1.6
An analysis of the financial statement of Heriot Watt University in consideration of
possible investment into this project, the institutes Income and Expenditure account (a

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summary of profits the business had earned over a period of time) which depicts an
increase in Net Surplus of £1,393,000 in 2008, but it’s a 30% decline when compared to
the previous year. This could be as a result of the increase in total expenditure from
108636 in 2007 to 116300 in 2008 and such changes can be traced to expenses in various
sectors of the organisation, judging from the Notes To The Accounts this change is
identified from increased staff cost (Academic Support –Information technology Support)
which rose by 15% from the previous year.

Therefore with the implementation of this project, the institute should be able to cut
cost through savings:
• Of over £41000 per year
• 197,964 kWh on Electricity
• In total Staff Cost
• Reduction in maintenance cost and depreciation
• Fewer IT Servers
The Consolidated Cash Flow Statement which is particularly important when considering
new ventures shows cash increase of £1,452,000 in 2008; depicting a long and profitable
future ahead open for new investments. Through a strategy to tackle our numerous debt
issues we should be able to align Trade debtors with creditors to allow for more
productive investments.

Virtualisation Risks and Response Planning

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It is the means by which a company or organization operates a number of applications or
operating systems on a single desktop or server, A survey carried out by the leading
virtualisation vendor estimates that 50% of organisations are or will employ virtualisation
server and more than 90% of virtualised and consolidated IT infrastructure are in
production environments. All these rush for virtualisation are due to its potential benefits
such as
• It creates cost benefits for the organization, by freeing up systems capacity,
improving processes and resource for use by more critical applications and
processes

• Greater flexibility to identify and rectify software errors in a timely and efficient
manner

• The ability to implement offline hardware and software maintenance and

upgrades with minimal disruption

• Significant reduction in lead time for new server upgrades and requirements
• A significant reduction in the organization’s hardware footprint, which reduces,
for the first time, the physical space, power and cooling requirements of the
company

As a result, leading companies are adopting virtualisation as an efficient way to improve

processes, cut cost and increase efficiency. For example BT, Nationwide, Prudential UK,
and lots more, and also many renowned universities and schools around the world are
running their mission-critical enterprise applications, database systems, and education-
specific applications such as College NET and the Blackboard Academic Suite in
virtualized environments including Cambridge, Princeton, Stanford, Purdue, the
University of Maryland, etc.

Virtualisation may have proved its mettle in terms of lowering costs and improving
efficiency but its security implications which could put the university at the considerable

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risk must be thoroughly looked into before deployment and decide whether it is the right
choice.
Risks Associated with Virtualisation
There are, however, some risks which come with virtualization. These risks need to be
analysed and decide whether there are ways of neutralizing them without losing the
benefits gained. The risks are:
• Loss of separation of duties for administrative tasks

• Patching and signature updates and protection from tampering

• Limited visibility into the host operating system and virtual network to find
vulnerabilities and correct configuration

• Immature and incomplete security and management tools

• Restored views into “inter-virtual machine traffic” for inspection by intrusion

prevention systems

• Mobile virtual machines and security policy

Risks of virtualization fall into four major categories

1. Server failure: Large scale consolidation may put many key processes,
applications and services in the same proverbial basket. Consequently, fewer
physical servers bear the workload and a physical failure has much more
significant consequences.

2. Over-provisioning: starting consolidation without a clear picture of an

application’s function, workload or profile may lead to infrastructure that are out
of balance and over-provisioned

3. Operational process: Many majors that have deployed virtualization implement

proactive monitoring systems and some formally change control process, but few
have advanced operational processes to manage crucial aspects of a smooth
running virtual environment

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 4. Service levels: virtualization technology requires new skills, e.g. the ability to
identify whether a problem originates in the physical or virtual environment,
without skilled staff to address problems, service levels may suffer.

Risk Analysis
Serial Risk Likelihood Consequence Risk Level
Number (Severity)
1 Server failure Likely Major High
2 Over provisioning Likely Major Medium
3 Operational process Quite Likely Major Medium
4 Service Levels Likely Minor Low
Risk Analysis Fig 1.7
The number of servers involved, their importance and identified risks will help to dictate
the resources that are required to manage these risks successfully. The table above is an
estimate risk matrix; however, rigorous risk models, simulations etc. may be used to
determine the risks since some risks have a low probability of occurring or low impacts
on the projects.
Likelihood
Likely = conceivable and could possibly happen
Quite likely = almost certain to happen
Consequence
Major disruption = destroy or damage to the virtual servers
Minor: partial or recoverable damage to the virtual servers

Risk Level
High = urgent action will be required, interim measures must be in place
Medium = action required soon, interim measures must be in place
Low = action is required to reduce the risk

Possible Preventive Measures

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 • A trial of the development or test environment on one of the university's non-
critical applications must be set up to prove that the virtual machines can reliably
meet the university’s aspirations.

• It may be beneficial to bring in a consultancy to have a second opinion, so as not

to overlook cost savings beyond the server hardware and also to ensure that a
validated methodology that assure a range of availability and improved disaster
recovery capabilities that can provide quick restoration or the ability to failover to
an alternate site.

• It will be reasonable to use a combination of vendor and peer-to-peer on-the-job-

training, in order to minimize costs, only a few staff of the university needs to be
trained. Then, those trained can train their peers on the job.

• Standardize on a hardware configuration or at least a single vendor will save time

and money, staff will only have to coordinate with one vendor, it will facilitate the
reallocation and reuse of servers.

Risk Response Planning

This is to bring organised purposeful thoughts to the subject of identified risks and to
ensure that they are managed successfully. This plan should include activities to manage
the risk, people to be assigned, completion dates, and periodic dates to monitor progress.
Hence, it is important to choose the right vendor offering the most trusted and reliable
platform as a top reason for investing in server virtualization. The vendor must
demonstrate how to:

• Eliminate identified risks wherever possible

• Isolate and minimize risks
• Develop alternative course of action
• Establish time and resources to cover risks that cannot be avoided
• Contingency plan
• Monitoring plan

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Risk Control Strategies
Avoidance: causes of the risks are avoided completely by possible elimination of many
steps from the build process that requires multiple technicians and administrators to touch
the system and adopt the system that allow use of tested and trusted virtualization
software.

Mitigation: measures that need to be carried to reduce the probability or impact of the
risk, most critical applications need to be protected by business continuity and disaster
recovery solutions that work quite well and provide a much better level of service by
allowing failed systems to automatically restart on new systems and easily can be copied
to another location for disaster recovery purposes.

Acceptance: acceptable level of risks needs to be determined, and then employ a leading
vendor to load and configure applications which may be time-consuming, error-prone and
not consistent so as to reduce the impact of the risks to acceptable level.

Transfer of the risks: due to fact that the virtualization is a new technology, many
insurance companies may be wary of investing on it. Transfer or sharing of risks may be
a possible solution by contracting out to another party that can invest in server
virtualization since any business continuity and/or disaster recovery (BC/DR) investment
is essentially an insurance policy against an improbable but very disruptive event.

Absorption or Pooling: partnership with any major vendor to ensure additional

improvements, backup procedures can be greatly simplified for the staff, administrative
requirements to keep things running smoothly after deployment, and comprehensive
safeguard against hardware failure will be guaranteed

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Knowledge and Research: Tests and simulation studies can be used to improve the
prediction of the most likely outcome, in the event of emergency situation. Hence,
simplified contingency plan procedures need to be in place for very fast recovery,
hardware isolation etc.

Project Execution
This project focuses on the successful deployment of software to be used in virtualisation
of Heriot Watt University’s current IT infrastructure. Current activities related to the
execution phase of this project include:
Planning Stage:
This stage involves planning the server; network and data centre resources to help
eliminate un-necessary investment on resources not needed for the implementation and
execution phase; which will involve selecting appropriate virtualization software, and
deploys the software in the university’s production environment. The project will develop
a set of expert guides to capture knowledge related to virtualization topics so that
knowledge will be available to less experienced staff even after resident experts are no
longer available. Additional supplemental funded opportunities will be identified in this
area to address plant needs. Accurate planning of IT resources need to be put in place to
successfully deploy VMware ESX server. The following steps are to be taken:

Identifying Appropriate Servers:

The servers to be used for this implementation need to be identified. It is possible that not
all servers at the University will be used, but for this deployment, we are going to use a
server that will be responsible for supporting Heriot Watt University’s both present and
future IT programmes.

Capacity Planning:
The goal of capacity planning is to provide satisfactory service levels to users in a cost-
effective manner, currently Heriot Watt University Dubai campus has over 1000 students,
with an anticipated increase in the number of students in future programmes to over 5000
in the next 4 years. So it can be estimated that after 3000 new users are registered, the
server response time will increase from its current value, leading to server performance

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problems. Using new and faster server architecture will enable effective support of any
increase in workload without affecting current server performance. For this
implementation we are going to use a Pentium Core 2 Quad processor based server.

P2V Immigration:
In this stage, several of the University’s current physical servers are migrated to the
newly created VMware server running on the new server architecture. In this
implementation, for each new virtual server, we will move to minimize them to 10
university servers.

Virtual Infrastructure Management:

The overall project is managed by a single project manager. The management and
administration of the VMware ESX server is carried out by a VMware certified
administrator. He/she is responsible for ensuring the smooth running of the virtual server,
virtual network and storage resources, and also reports back to the project manager.

The vendor software that will be used in this deployment is the VMware ESX
virtualization software. After the software is installed on the new server, the whole
infrastructure is migrated to it and tested first. If the test is successful with acceptable
results, all the university’s IT services will be brought online for use by its staff, students
and faculty.

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 Evaluation

Item Yes No N/ Comments/Expla

A nations
Does the virtualization project align with and support business directions and
priorities?
Is the project consistent and compatible with  The project
the university’s goal contributes to
the university’s
goal of
becoming a
world-leading
university.
Is the project consistent and compatible with  The project
ongoing or planned initiatives complements
other
initiatives
including
Excellence,
teaching, risk,
etc.
Is the project consistent and compatible with  The project
the university’s IT direction, strategies, contributes to
architectures and infrastructures? the university
strategy which
in this case is
Research.
Is the project consistent and compatible with 
government regulations (if applicable) for the
delivery of services?
Does the project conform to industry-common 
IT standards, infrastructures and architectures?
Is the business case based on the full cost of 
the system from initiation through
development, implementation and the
estimated annual cost of operation?
Has the project manager ensured that the 
project team has all the necessary
competencies required by the project?

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Item Yes No N/ Comments/Expla
A nations
Does a deputy or assistant project manager  There is no
directly manage each sub-project? assistant project
manager
assigned for the
project
Are all core project responsibilities and 
functions under the complete control of
departmental management?
Where there are several departments involved in the delivery of a project…
Do all departments involved understand and 
agree with all of the other departments’
objectives, roles and levels of participation?
Has the designated lead university established 
an overall project office, separate from its
project team, with an overall project sponsor,
project leader and project manager staffed at a
sufficiently senior level to be able to intercede
at the appropriate level in the participating
departments?
Are project managers developed, and do they work within a corporate discipline?
Did the university perform a preliminary  The outcomes
assessment of the project’s scope, complexity were included in
and risk before finding and assigning a project this document
manager?
Does the assigned project manager have the  It is required that
knowledge, skills and experience required to the project
manage the project’s scope, size, complexity manager must
and risk profile? have necessary
skills and
experience to
manage the
project
Are there other project managers in the  None required.
organization with relevant knowledge, skills
and experience from whom project managers
can get advice and support?
Are project management decisions based on risk management?
Is the overall project being delivered via a set  None identified
of sub-projects, each of which is less than
twelve (12) months in duration and costs less
than $1 (one) million?

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Item Yes No N/ Comments/Expla
A nations
Does each sub-project team consist of ten (10) 
or fewer people?

Does the project have scheduled review  The checkpoints

checkpoints when management will decide on are a measure of
its future and, if necessary, take appropriate the critical
corrective action? success factors
outlined.
Have only the funds needed to reach the next  All funds need to
milestone been allocated to the project? be allocated for
the project to
succeed.
Have the project and any related contracting 
been structured to avoid incurring litigation?

Is the contractor required to provide complete 

information on project performance and
progress?
Is an option to cancel the project at scheduled 
checkpoints specified in the contract?

Have contingency plans for potential problems 

discovered at these checkpoints been
developed in advance?
Has a project risk assessment been used to  Results of the
identify and quantify risks? assessment are
described in the
project risk
section.

The deployment of middleware virtualized infrastructure supports institutional goals of

offering on and off campus staff, students, faculty 24 hours access to administrative and
academic resources offering distance-education as expanding and improving Heriot Watt
University’s research eliminates the need to hire additional technological or technical
staffs to manage new applications and the entire IT infrastructure.

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 Benefits
Moving to a virtual IT environment will help Heriot Watt University cut capital costs by
reducing the current number of physical servers necessary to support its IT infrastructure.
With a virtualized environment, the university can reduce its capital expenditures for
upgrading its current data centres and network resources, and improve the recovery time
of its servers and data centres whenever there is a failure. A virtualized environment
means lesser power, energy consumption and a “Greener” implementation of its current
IT infrastructure.

Provides the university’s Dubai campus with an alternate source of funds it needs to be
able to undertake the implementation of a research and development in architectural
design and minimization of energy in these harsh economic times.
Virtualization will further improve on the security of the university’s IT infrastructure. It
will also simplify the administration and maintenance of the whole IT infrastructure.

Positive Impact
Direct cost savings
• Reduces maintenance costs of IT hardware resources.
• Reduces cost of obtaining and maintaining IT network resources
• Eliminate cost of Disaster recovery of IT infrastructure

Avoided costs
• Reducing cost of avoiding costly mishaps.

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 • Cost-effective simulation alternatives for design, testing, and training during
modifications
• On-line monitoring-based predictive maintenance for avoiding unneeded
maintenance
Strategic Decisions
• Control room human factors guidelines
• Improved information access and visualization
• Virtualization enhanced approaches for tacit knowledge capture and training

Negative Impacts
While implementing Virtualization, a number of issues may affect our deployment,
Considerably time and effort to conduct campus-wide planning, review and negotiation
processes, educating the campus and stakeholders on the benefits and implications of
virtualization is necessary for a long-term viable implementation, reallocation in capital
equipment and staffing requirements, the need to plan for new software resources while
using existing hardware resources. As more new applications are introduced into this new
infrastructure, additional guidelines will be needed to learn how they are used.
Decrease in IT service availability would be experienced since the implementation of
virtualization involves re-deployment of all the University’s IT services like email library
services. Moving to this new infrastructure will cause a short term decrease in availability
of the university’s IT services.

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 Critical Success Factors
These are factors that need to be in place for a successful implementation of the project.
The Project strategy is one of the major factors to be considered in that the strategy is a
match between the institutes capabilities and changes in the external environment, and
that it aligns with overall corporate strategy. From our research into the university
strategy (Heriot Watt University) one of which is cost cutting. The implementation of
virtualization software in its information technology unit is a means of cutting down of
cost so as to enable the organization to acquire and reinvest in other sectors like research,
teaching and learning which will give the school cost advantage to support the price
advantage of the tuition fees and embracing continuous improvement as a way of
working. Nevertheless the stakeholders’ commitment is another paramount area that
would be looked into. Commitment from the top management in terms of provision of
adequate resources likes financial, capable staffs with the necessary skill; infrastructures
such as technical requirements and so on is vital to make the project accomplishable with
effective communication from top management to employees in order to give reasons
why the project is necessary and reward any employee the change project would affect
negatively. In addition there has to be proper risk management in control so as to weigh
the risk and deliverables of the project and also to mitigate, share, avoid, transfer, accept
any uncertain event that could affect the project negatively or positively. Moreover
effective planning and control of the virtualization software has to be in place using a
comprehensive and more reliable metrics like control chart to check if process is in
control or out of control so as to prevent defect in the output/deliverables. However with
the clear goal (cost cutting) of this project should and will give the university a cost
leadership over its competitors such as Oxford and Cambridge University so as to attract

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more international students giving them a competitive advantage with proper portfolio
management in place.
In addition electronic experience of distance-learning students becomes a critical success
factor in their overall perception of the institution, so providing a framework for efficient
allocation of resources for that purpose will most definitely provide instant access to
electronic services like email, library resources and online course work.

References
Books:
• S. Elberk & M. Thomas (1998) Project Management Skills; Prentice
Hall UK

• Gardiner P. (2005) A Strategic Planning Approach, Palgrave

Macmillan N.Y

• Johnson, Scholes & Whittington (2009) Fundamentals of Strategy,

Prentice Hall UK

• Katz, Richard N, Oblinger, & Diana .G The E Is For Everything: E-

commerce, E-business, And E-learning In The Future Of Higher
Education Jossey-Bass

Websites:
• Course Estimation http://scholar.hw.ac.uk/courses.html accessed
20/11/09

• Focus on the Future http://www.hw.ac.uk/home/dir/16/international-

students/focusonthefuture accessed 20/11/09
o Virtualisation
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/ accessed
20/11/09
• Virtualisation and Cost Cutting
http://www.teamquest.com/pdfs/whitepaper accessed 20/11/09
• IT Infrastructure of Royal High http://www.royalhigh.edin.sch.uk
21/11/09
o Virtualisation Infrastructure
http://www.reddi.gov.on.ca/track_what.htm accessed 22/11/09

27
• Risks to be considered when looking at Virtualisation (J. FIELDING
2006)
HTTP://BLOGS.TECHREPUBLIC.COM.COM/NETWORKING/?
P=136 accessed 15/11/09
• Virtualisation security risks being ignored (E. Messmer, 2007)
HTTP://NEWS.TECHWORLD.COM/OPERATING-
SYSTEMS/8491/VIRTUALISATION-SECURITY-RISKS-BEING-
IGNORED/

• Virtualisation dangers and how to avoid them (C. M. Burry and G.

Darbyshire,, 06) http://howto.techworld.com/operating-
systems/3012/virtualisation-dangers-and-how-to-avoid-them/
accessed 16/11/09

• The Benefits of Moving to a Virtualised Environment (J. Syrkiewicz

2008)
http://webmasterresources.suite101.com/article.cfm/an_overview_of_
virtualisation#ixzz0YR86YES8 accessed 17/11/09

• Forrester Consulting Report on Behalf of VMware: The Business

Value of Virtualization (2009)
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/solutions/Business-Value-
Virtualization.pdf accessed 18/11/09

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