CASE 6

If I would be a Project manager if ever, well I would do all my responsibilities, all of my certain tasks. And I would also ask to some of my teams of what is the best, because a successful project manager has teachable spirit that are willing to be teach and to learn of what is right, and by that attitude it would be better and soon we would have a best and successful job.

If given the opportunity to be the Project Manager of the said programs, it would be a great responsibility to carry on. With the situation given and the opportunity, what would be my solutions to the problem? First, let me identify the problems. The first problem is the senior teachers’ lack of knowledge to manipulate a computer. Second problem is the slow connection and server traffic due to huge number of students and teachers that use the program at the same time. And lastly, the third problem which is the hacking of the databases that caused the mismatch on students’ grades and identification.

            As quoted in the famous Spiderman movie, with great power comes great responsibility. Given the chance to be the project manager bears the weight of carrying the task of managing most of the project. Not only will you have to manage the materials and human resources, you also share the tasks that make up the project. According to the Project Management body of knowledge guide a project manager is the individual responsible for managing projects. Project managers have a great deal of independence and authority and they are generally expected to be the project’s leader as well. Leadership within in the team, however, is not limited to the project manager alone. It may be demonstrated by many different individuals at many different times during the project. With this responsibility, a project manager’s position requires a set of skills that would suffice and justify the work needed to be executed. There are ten qualities that are the top ten qualities ranked in order, according to ISE International. A project manager inspires a shared vision. An effective project leader is often described as having a vision of where to go and the ability to articulate it. Visionaries thrive on change and being able to draw new boundaries. It was once said that a leader is someone who "lifts us up, gives us a reason for being and gives the vision and spirit to change." Visionary leaders enable people to feel they have a real stake in the project. They empower people to experience the vision on their own. According to Bennis "They offer people opportunities to create their own vision, to explore what the vision will mean to their jobs and lives, and to envision their future as part of the vision for the organization." (Bennis, 1997). A project manager should also be a good communicator. The ability to communicate with people at all levels is almost always named as the second most important skill by project managers and team members. Project leadership calls for clear communication about goals, responsibility, performance, expectations and feedbacks. There is a great deal of value placed on openness and directness. The project leader is also the team's link to the larger organization. The leader must have the ability to effectively negotiate and use persuasion when necessary to ensure the success of the team and project. Through effective communication, project leaders support individual and team achievements by creating explicit guidelines for accomplishing results and for the career advancement of team members. Communication within a team is always a vital factor to the success of the project and as for the operations and activities needed to complete the project, it plays a huge role in the delivery of instructions and commands necessary and needed. Communication is always the key. One quality a project manager is integrity. One of the most important things a project leader must remember is that his or her actions, and not words, set the modus operandi for the team. Good leadership demands commitment to, and demonstration of, ethical practices. It also depicts that a project manager should be the best example to stand above the rest of the project team. Creating standards for ethical behavior for oneself and living by these standards, as well as rewarding those who exemplify these practices, are responsibilities of project leaders. Leadership motivated by self-interest does not serve the well being of the team.

Leadership based on integrity represents nothing less than a set of values others share, behavior consistent with values and dedication to honesty with self and team members. In other words the leader "walks the talk" and in the process earns trust. With this quality, not only will the project leader earns the rest of the team’s trust but their commitment to do the work as efficient as he/she is. A project manager should be enthusiastic towards the project. Plain and simple, employees don't like leaders who are negative. They want leaders with enthusiasm, with a bounce in their step, with a can-do attitude. They want to believe that we are part of an invigorating journey - we want to feel alive. They tend to follow people with a can-do attitude, not those who give us 200 reasons why something can't be done. Enthusiastic leaders are committed to their goals and express this commitment through optimism. Leadership emerges as someone expresses such confident commitment to a project that others want to share his or her optimistic expectations. Enthusiasm is contagious and effective leaders know it. This quality affects the rest of the team resulting to a more positive energy flowing while on the course of the project. The quality of being empathetic is also a top quality of a good project manager. Empathy, presupposes the existence of the object as a separate individual, entitled to his or her own feelings, ideas and emotional history (Paul, 1970). As one student so eloquently put it, "It's nice when a project leader acknowledges that we all have a life outside of work." And of course one quality a good project manager possesses is the existence of competence. Simply put, to enlist in another's cause, we must believe that that person knows what he or she is doing. Leadership competence does not however necessarily refer to the project leader's technical abilities in the core technology of the business. As project management continues to be recognized as a field in and of itself, project leaders will be chosen based on their ability to successfully lead others rather than on technical expertise, as in the past. Having a winning track record is the surest way to be considered competent. Expertise in leadership skills is another dimension in competence. The ability to challenge, inspire, enable, model and encourage must be demonstrated if leaders are to be seen as capable and competent. It’s a very vital quality for it shows the rest of the team that a leader is capable of bringing things to higher level and has the capability to do so. In a way this skill has the effect of challenging and inspiring the rest of the team. Another quality is the ability to delegate tasks. Trust is an essential element in the relationship of a project leader and his or her team. You demonstrate your trust in others through your actions - how much you check and control their work, how much you delegate and how much you allow people to participate. Individuals who are unable to trust other people often fail as leaders and forever remain little more that micro-managers, or end up doing all of the work themselves. As one project management student put it, "A good leader is a little lazy." An interesting perspective. Since a project is mostly handled by a team, it’s a good thing that a project manager knows how to entrust individual tasks to the rest of the team to show them your trust in a way that could benefit to the completion and success of the project. More importantly, two heads are always better than one. Another good quality of a good project manager is the calmness under pressure. In a perfect world, projects would be delivered on time, under budget and with no major problems or obstacles to overcome. But we don't live in a perfect world - projects have problems. A leader with a hardy attitude will take these problems in stride. When leaders encounter a stressful event, they consider it interesting, they feel they can influence the outcome and they see it as an opportunity. "Out of the uncertainty and chaos of change, leaders rise up and articulate a new image of the future that pulls the project together." (Bennis 1997) And remember - never let them see you sweat. It’s a quality that mostly depends on the leader’s character and how he deals with conflicts and problems along the way. It’s always best to have a project manager that sees a problem as an opportunity rather than a hindrance to the success of the project. It involves optimism from the project manager’s end. A good project manager also has great team building skills. A team builder can best be defined as a strong person who provides the substance that holds the team together in common purpose toward the right objective. In order for a team to progress from a group of strangers to a single cohesive unit, the leader must understand the process and dynamics required for this transformation. He or she must also know the appropriate leadership style to use during each stage of team development. The leader must also have an understanding of the different team players styles and how to capitalize on each at the proper time, for the problem at hand. Lastly, a good project manager has good problem solving skills. Although an effective leader is said to share problem-solving responsibilities with the team, we expect our project leaders to have excellent problem-solving skills themselves. They have a "fresh, creative response to here-and-now opportunities," and not much concern with how others have performed them. (Kouzes 1987). As for this quality, problems occur. They are inevitable in all circumstances. For a project manager, it is best that he/she possesses the skill to solve problems even though it’s a team work. The following qualities are qualities of a good project manager. This is just a list that shows what a good project manager possesses and how these qualities play a vital role to a project’s success.

            Going back to the main question, what quick solutions can I introduce towards the stated problems? As for the first problem, which is the lack of knowledge of senior teachers to manipulate a computer, a quick solution would be to make the environment of the system as easy and fast to manipulate with just few clicks. It’s the quickest solution and best to give, since we developed the system, we can have changes injected to the system and make it more simple and basic. To support this solution, the team or we can give them instruction materials on how to use the system and eventually, they will grow accustomed to the basics. Even though they are seniors, humans have the ability to follow and understand basic commands. Computers in this era are user-friendly and so should the programs and systems that should be installed to it. Moving on to the second problem on slow connection and server traffic due to huge number of students and teachers that use the program at the same time, these are entirely two different things. With respect to the slow connection, it appears to be an issue that depends on the users end. How and in what way? In most circumstances, the team only provides the system and not the internet connection to make it operative. The speed and strength of connections also vary on many factors like the location and etc. However, as a project manager, I would suggest that they get a more reliable and faster connection in their location to fix the problem. Moving on to the other problem which is the server traffic due to huge number of users at the same time, there are quite a few factors to this problem. According to a trusted source, there are four causes of this. One is the Internet traffic load. Spikes in Internet utilization during peak usage times of day often cause lag. The nature of this varies by service provider and a person's geographic location. Unfortunately, other than moving locations or changing Internet service, an individual user cannot avoid this kind of problem. Second one is online application load. Multiplayer online games, Web sites, and other client-server network applications utilize shared Internet servers. If these servers become overloaded with activity, the clients experience server traffic/jam. Third is weather or any wireless interference. Satellite, fixed wireless broadband and other wireless Internet connections are particularly susceptible to signal interference from rain. Wireless interference causes network data to be corrupted in transit, causing lag from re-transmission delays. Lastly are the lag switches. Some people who play online games install a device called a lag switch on their local network. A lag switch is specially designed to intercept network signals and introduce significant delays into the flow of data back to other gamers connected to a live session. A person can do little to solve this kind of lag problem other than avoiding playing with those who use lag switches; fortunately, they are relatively uncommon. This traffic also occurs on home networks not only on internet connections. It might be because there is an overload on routers or modems. Any network router will eventually bog down if too many active clients are using it at the same time. Network contention among multiple client’s means that they are sometimes waiting for each other's requests to be processed, causing lag. A person can replace their router with a more powerful model, or add another router to the network, to help alleviate this problem. Similarly, network contention occurs on a residence's modem and connection to the Internet provider if saturated with traffic: Depending on the speed of their Internet link, homeowners should avoid too many simultaneous Internet downloads and online sessions to minimize this lag. Another would be an overloaded client device: PCs and other client devices also becomes a source of network lag if unable to process network data quickly enough. While modern computers are sufficient powerful in most situations, they can slow down significantly if too many applications are running simultaneously. Even running applications that do not generate network traffic can introduce lag; for example, a misbehaving program can consume 100% of the available CPU utilization on a device that delays the computer from processing network traffic for other applications. Malware is also a factor. A network worm hijacks a computer and its network interface, which can cause it to perform sluggishly, similar to being overloaded. Running antivirus software on network devices helps to detect these worms. Lastly, is the usage of wireless. Enthusiast online gamers often prefer to run their devices over wired Ethernet instead of Wi-Fi because home Ethernet supports lower latencies. While the savings is typically only a few milliseconds in practice, wired connections also avoid the risk of wireless interference that results in significant lag if it occurs.

According to the situation given, it is clearly stated that as the school opens for the registration or enrolment for the second semester, there are several problems that have been experience by the school and the students. These problems affect the enrolment of the students, the reason why they declared a non enrollment of the students because of the senior’s teacher. We can’t blame them, because they are too old to access or operates a computer, so in computing grades, they are too slow to upload those grades online. Another problem they encounter is too slow for updating courses and grades due also to slow connection and server traffic of the system cause by the number of teacher and students using the program all the time. Another reason why the system was damage is that, the system database was hacked which resulted to mismatch of student’s grade and student’s identification.

My answer for the question stated above is that, if I have the opportunity to be a project manager of the program, I will introduce my solution for those problems encounter during the enrolment for the second semester by having a best plan to fix that problem that is needed to solve in order for the students to enrolled for the semester. These are the following problems encounter during enrolment for the students:

Computer literacy of the senior teacher.

To fix this first problem is that, at first, as the system was develop for the university, we need to have a meeting or something that all teachers or staff may attend for it to explain the system develop for the enrolment. To apply a certain program, as a project manager, I need to introduce it to everybody who will use the program especially the teacher. In a school or university, most teachers in a public school are senior’s, so most of them are too strict in handling a class. But in their case, senior’s teachers affect the enrolment process, not too affected but because of their age or too old they are too slow to encode each grades of the students for the first semester. What happen is that those senior’s teacher upload the grades late that’s why the enrolment was not declare I think. For the solution of this problem, as a project manager, I will assign something to encode their grades in each course does the university have. That is my solution for it, in order for those seniors teacher would never been hassle anymore in uploading the grades. The advantage for my plan, to assign someone is that, those teachers belong in one college should only pass their grades to the assigned person who will work in encoding and uploading the grades. So in that case, they only pass the grades early and nothing to worry about the grades of the students.

Slow connection and server traffic.

To fix this another problem meets in the situation, we should upgrade the connection in order for those who will upload grades and those who will look their grades online can’t wait longer. In a program, slow connection and server traffic are usually reasons for a system to perform. Some schools in the Philippines are not totally fast in terms of connection because connection or internet connection matters in a place where they are located. Some schools are near to the mountain or in the province where connection are possible too slow because of the signal. Lucky to those schools located in city’s because internet is possible too fast unlike to those in province. The reason why the teachers uploaded the grades late because of the slow connection of the university not only those senior’s teacher have a problem on the online enrolment system but also in connection. As a project manager, my suggestion for this is to upgrade the connection and purchase some latest products which can solve the slow connection of the university. Another thing is that, the server traffic of the system, this problem happens when there are lots of teachers and students use the system. We can’t blame them, or we can’t tell them that only few students and teachers will use the system at a time because this system implement to use during enrolment and we know that there are lots of users will use the program. So as a project manager, to fix that problem, the developers need to improve the system in order for it to carry the number of users will use the system. This kind of problem are usually happens in a university or in a company, but commonly in university because, mostly in public school have lot of students enrolled so if they implement that kind of system, it ensure that server trafficking be happens.

Mismatch of grades

Mismatch of grades and identification of the student is the problem encountered by the XYZ University because the online enrolment system database was hacked. Now a days, there are lot of people knows how to hacked a system or an account. But in their case, I don’t know if there are someone hacked the system or it was already hacked because of the server traffic or anything may result to hack the system. Because the system was damage, the enrolment was affect to the situation. Only the database holds the system to save, search, view, add and delete the data. If the database was not functioning or performing, the system will also not performing the program. Mismatching of grades and identification is difficult to fix if a university have a lot of students enrolled. In that case, it is hassle to fix it because you need to identify if that certain student status about their grades and students identification was correctly encoded. So as a project manager, the system we develop should take in private so that no one can change the program without any permission to the high officers. If we take it in private, only those developers or members belong to those developer are intended only to use, fix, change, and improve the system whenever it may encounter some problem in order for the university to secure the system to have a better enrolment process. If we did securing the system, hacking of database would not be happen anymore or I don’t think so just to secure the system only. Finally, if we fulfill securing the system, mismatching of grades and student’s identification would not also be happen anymore depending on the teachers who will encode the grades.

 Another solution is also improving the security of the system database. In the situation, it was stated that the system’s database was hacked which resulted to mismatch of students’ grades and students’ identification. By just reading these statements you could clearly see that its security is easily breached and looks like the security of the database was not even strong enough just to repel an attack of a hacker. A system database is the heart and soul of the system itself and if it is easily breached, hacked or even destroyed then you are going to have a very hard time. I researched some steps in order for you to stop the hackers in their tracks from future attacks.

1. Follow Hacking Forums – it was stated that it is always good to follow hacking forums in order for you to know all the latest methods that are used to attack. Being able to know makes you even more prepared than anybody. It is like knowing beforehand the enemy and you will be able to stop them if they will decide to hack the system.

2. Change your passwords frequently – sometimes in a system, there always a default password, change it directly. It is extremely unwise and dangerous to leave it unchanged after installation. If you will not change it, it is clearly attack-prone and it will be easily breached.

3. Identifying entry points - in order to identify the entry points of the hackers you must first install a software that identifies the entry points to the network and in to the database. Finding and identifying these entry points is not an easy task. It was stated that it is recommended to take the help of ethical hackers who have taken special network security training to perform the task.

4. Perform attack and penetration test - by making attacks and penetration tests, you can also identify the vulnerable points in the network that is easily accessed from both external and internal users. After identifying points you could easily repel the attacks and correct the mistakes that could make it as an entry point for the hackers in to your network and database.

5. Make user-awareness campaigns - making the people and users aware that there have been a hack attack in your network and database could help minimize the risks. If all of them are already aware, protection can now be carried out to them.

6. Configure Firewalls - Firewall if not configured properly can act like an open door for any intruder. A firewall must have its own configurations depending upon the security aspect of the organization. From time to time proper analysis of the composition and nature of the traffic itself is also necessary to maintain security.

7. Implement and use password policies. Use strong password policies by having passwords of seven characters which are of secure length and relatively easy to remember.

8. Install anti-virus software. Both intrusion detection systems and anti-virus software must be updated regularly and if possible on a daily basis. The updated version of anti-virus software is necessary as it helps in detecting even the latest virus.

Lastly is to hire more manpower that could help in maintaining the integrity and security of the system database. Having them in a team is very helpful in terms of the knowledge they could give to you in order to stop those attacks. The experience they have over those types of attacks is also inevitable when it comes to neutralizing such feats. Even though it is costly but would you exchange quality because of such price? NO. Quality service should always be the main priority when it comes to things such as Online Enrolment Systems. Just like in XYZ University, if given the proper manpower and skill set those people have I’m sure that as a project manager I would be able to handle such problems in no time but also the pressure is always there to haunt any project managers that could land such projects and systems in the future.

Therefore I conclude, performing a system or program is not easy to handle because there are times that it may encounter some basic problems usually happen in a system. But if the developer know how fix the problem, there’s no need to worry about that, but just to secure that it was functioning. As I have the opportunity to be a project manager for this time only, not actually performing as a project manager but to think like I’m in that position. Thinking on how to handle and manage the system or the situation is not easy. Maybe it is too hard for me because I don’t have any experience but as the time I make my idea on how to fix the problems of XYZ University my head still processing on how to fix it but it already take pain and it makes me stressful. Those skillful people who take the position of a project manager should be responsible always as they perform the project. Only the project manager can guide the members on how to do the task of that activity. As I learn being a project manager, I was amaze to those professional project managers because working on that position is not easy but for them, they can carry it always.