Introduction to the Project
The modern world is a global space where long distances are no longer barriers for people willing to travel. More than a billion people travel between countries across the world for various reasons. Nevertheless, this number has reduced significantly in the last one and half year due to restrictions imposed to cope with Covid-19 pandemic. Despite this, there is prospectus that once the travels resume, the number of people travelling across international boundaries will continue to grow and surpass 2 billion per year by 2029 (Bansal et al., 2018, p. 39). Noteworthy, these travels require effective, efficient, safe, and reliable methods of accessing and using money, regardless of the location. It is for this reason that Houghton’s Bank Pty is seeking to develop a global travel card to facilitate its customers in their national, regional, and international travels.
Houghton’s Bank Pty (HBL) is a hypothetical financial bank located in Newcastle upon Tyne, England that provides a variety of services to individuals, groups, organizations, and companies. The bank is three years old but is experiencing rapid growth, having reached 12 branches from its initial one location it operated two years ago. In addition, the bank’s customer base has reached 18,000 and is expected to increase to more than 300,000 in the next 4 years. Therefore, this rapid growth has created the necessity to offer the customers with global travel cards, especially because people in England are among the most travelled in the UK and Europe.
This project report provides detailed explanation on the overall picture of the proposed Global Travel Card business for HBL. The company seeks to introduce the card business in the next six months and thereby issue the cards to its customers. Specifically, the bank will collaborate with Visa and MasterCard in its initial rollout. These global corporations have a long history of experience in facilitating client banks to rollout international card services and provide services to their clients seamlessly without limitation by geographical boundaries. Consequently, the purpose of this report is to describe the entire project proposal details, theoretical framework and model behind it, plan and approaches, stakeholders, project management, and an appraisal of the academic documents supporting the project.
Concepts, Theories, and Approaches Applied in the Project
In the process of developing the project, the team has adopted system development life cycles approaches used in the development of software systems. Specifically, the team has settled on agile approaches in the project management as it is highly flexible and efficient. Conceptually, the term ‘agile’ refers to the ability of the project to move easily and quickly (Rasnacis & Berzisa, 2017). Therefore, this approach will help the team developing the global travel card to adopt a faster and easier compared to other project methodologies such as SDLC and waterfall.
The Agile approach works in ongoing sprints of the specific project planning and execution, which will enable the team to continuously adapt and mature its scope, plan, and designs throughout its lifecycle (Bergmann & Karwowski, 2018). The approach has four values that make it a popular method for managing projects of various kinds. First, it focuses on individuals and interactions instead of tools and processes. Secondly, it focuses on software rather than on comprehensive documentation (Rasnacis & Berzisa, 2017). Third, the methodology focuses on customer collaboration instead of contract negotiation. The fourth value is that the method focuses on responding to change instead of following a plan.
Projects under the Agile development method require an iterative approach, which is effective as it supports an incremental, consistent, and frequent delivery of workable products to the project customer (Ciric et al., 2018). In addition, it is highly innovate and ensures that the project team will consistently deliver the products without delays due to changes and changing requirements (Rasnacis & Berzisa, 2017). Furthermore, customer involvement is very high and there must be frequent reviews of the project progress, which involves both the client and the developing team.
Noteworthy, there are several frameworks of subsets of Agile methodology such as Kanban, DSDM, Scrum, and Extreme Programming. For the purpose of developing the global travel card, the team has settled on the Scrum framework. The rationale behind the choice for Scrum is because the approach is a lightweight process framework that will be effective but less cumbersome for the team (Hidalgo, 2019). A process framework implies that it will use a set of practices that makes the entire project consistent. The term ‘lightweight’ means that the processes’ overhead will be as small as possible (Hidalgo, 2019). This means that it will ensure that the team maximizes the amount of productive time available to achieve the ultimate objective.
The Scrum approach will have specific concepts and practices divided into roles, artifacts and time boxes categories. This approach is among the most effective in managing projects involving complex software, which means that it will fit the current project for developing the global travel card (Hidalgo, 2019). A scrum process allows an organization to adjust smoothly to the rapidly changing and dynamic requirements (Hidalgo, 2019). In addition, it allows organizations to produce products that meet rapidly changing or evolving business goals. Among other benefits, the Scrum Agile methodology will increase the quality of the deliverables, deal with change and expect good changes, provide good estimates in reduced time frame, and take control of the project state and schedule.
Table 1. Description of the expected deliverables for the global travel card project using Scrum Agile methodology
References
Ahmed, A. (2017). Software project management: A process-driven approach. CRC Press.
Bansal, S., Bruno, P., Denecker, O., Goparaju, M., & Niederkorn, M. (2018). Global payments 2018: A dynamic industry continues to break new ground. Global Banking McKinsey.
Bergmann, T., & Karwowski, W. (2018). Agile project management and project success: A literature review. In International Conference on Applied Human Factors and Ergonomics (pp. 405-414). Springer, Cham.
Ciric, D., Lalic, B., Gracanin, D., Palcic, I., & Zivlak, N. (2018). Agile project management in new product development and innovation processes: challenges and benefits beyond software domain. In 2018 IEEE International Symposium on Innovation and Entrepreneurship (TEMS-ISIE) (pp. 1-9). IEEE. doi: 10.1109/TEMS-ISIE.2018.8478461
Hidalgo, E. S. (2019). Adapting the scrum framework for agile project management in science: case study of a distributed research initiative. Heliyon, 5(3), e01447.
Mikkelsen, H., & Riis, J. O. (2017). Project management: A multi-perspective leadership framework. Emerald Publishing Limited.
Rasnacis, A., & Berzisa, S. (2017). Method for adaptation and implementation of agile project management methodology. Procedia Computer Science, 104, 43-50. Web.