18/12/2018 V1-0

Project Management Fundamentals

MBA 2018-2019 Semester 1
FINAL EXAM

Objectives
The purpose of the exam is to check that the learning objectives of the course are well understood :
- Know the 10 knowledge areas of traditional project management,
- Understand the project lifecycle
- Have the basics upon project complexity (ambiguity, uncertainty, system assembly) and the related
theories of complexity
- Have fundamentals knowledge of scrum
- Have fundamentals on agile on scale (SAFe®)
A second objective of the exam is to develop a justified approach on an actual question concerning the
upcoming evolution of project management.
It is very important that justifications must be based on gathered facts and up-to-date sources (books,
blogs, articles etc…) by means of discussions, comparative analysis, or benchmarks …
Practicalities
The exam consists in a team work of no more than 4 people. All team members of a given team will
receive the same grade (maximum 20 points)
The deadline for the submission is 2018, January 23rd , midnight to the following email address :
martial.bellec@univ-rennes1.fr.
The grades of submissions later than this time (even by one minute, email time stamp) will be divided by 2.
The outcomes of this study should be abstracted in no more than 2 pages of text (with font similar to the
present document), referring to details in well-structured annexes. The total number of pages, including
annexes, is unlimited.
Context :
One of the main difficulties to manage projects is that projects teams are geographically dispersed,
through virtual teams1. For these projects, face to face discussions are seldom, this degrades the
performance of the team . Several digital tools such as Trello® , MS Project® … are used to facilitate
interactions and real-time sharing of information to put the project under control. Nowadays, these teams
use several heterogeneous digital tools in parallel, and suffer from having a “one-in-all tool” suite gathering
all features2.

1
VTMM for real virtual team performance, Ralf Dietrich, youtube
2
Version One .12th annual report on state of agile, page 13.
https://explore.versionone.com/state-of-agile/versionone-12th-annual-state-of-agile-report
MBA – Final Exam – Project Management Fundamentals 1
Your goal as a team
To develop a common vision regarding the following question :
“According to you, what could be the ideal digital tool suite for a virtual team to manage efficiently a small
project?”
About the small Project (aka ALPHA project)
The ALPHA project is a small project of whatever kind (for example personal (your next vacations with
remote friends…) , non-profit association (IGR associations …) , in a public administration or in a private
company) and will be preferably run in agile mode (scrum).You are invited to select one “actual” project
as a live example and to describe it.
The characteristics of the ALPHA project are as follows :
- Strict cost and timeline, scope is negotiable.
- The team is dispersed in time zones +/- 2 hours CET, no more than 2 team members are colocated
- The team size is 7, variations will be +/- 2 teams members depending from the lifecycle phase
- The hosting organization has:
o limited budget to purchase licenses of digital tools
o a traditional waterfall culture
Question 1 (3 points) : Describe your ALPHA project. Develop and justify the list of knowledge areas
which are mostly used all along the lifecycle of the ALPHA project. List the most common artefacts which
are used (backlog for scope definition etc…).
Question 2 (3 points) : Develop a list of digital tools that you already use for your projects like ALPHA and
compare them in a tabular format, their advantages and drawbacks by means of a quantitative
assessment regarding their suitability to implement knowledge areas as well as the scrum mode.
Question 3 (6 points) : Gather the additional most popular tools found on the market, which are not listed
in question 2. Similarly augment the Table found in question 2 with them. (tabular format with augmented
list of features and discussion comparing them)
Question 4 (4 points) : set the requirements of the “all-in-one” digital tool suite of your dreams, fulfilling
the advantages and mitigating the drawbacks of Question 3.
Question 5 (4 points) : develop the commercial brochure (eg. on canva) or the prototype of the
emblematic web page of the tool suite. Be specific and illustrative by means of a colorful annex.

MBA – Final Exam – Project Management Fundamentals 2