Project Costs
Expanding Target’s online presence will require work on several fronts. First, the company will need to expand the size of its web team, The current team is built mainly to maintain the current website and social media, but this new project is a capital project that requires new incremental investment. The total cost for the needed team is expected to be around $200,000, hired on a contract basis, along with redeployment of existing resources, in order to ensure that the project does not create any problems or issues for the existing web infrastructure. There will also be ongoing needs for two marketers, at a cost of $80,000 per year total. In addition, Target is building some other functionality, including new cybersecurity measures, into this project. The company has already made massive cybersecurity investments in the wake of the 2013 breach. The new cybersecurity investments will be done concurrently with the expansion of the company’s web presence, but they were going to be implemented anyway, and therefore do not count as incremental expenses. The total capital budget will therefore be $300,000, the other $100,000 being for infrastructure, along with ongoing $80,000 needs for operating the website, and redeployment of some existing resources to maintenance of the expanded web presence.

As with most web development projects, there are significant risks associated with timeframes. Because the company is relying on contract labor, the ability of that contract team to deliver on time and on budget is unknown. Target has faith in the project management capabilities of its in-house team, but is also aware that web development projects can have a high level of variance between the expected completion time and the actual completion time. The downside risk of web projects in particular has been fairly well documented – 27% run over budget, with average cost overruns over 200% (Hazrati, 2011).

There are several benefits to operationalizing this idea. The first is that there are opportunities for Target in terms of building a better e-commerce experience. The company lags behind rival Walmart in terms of its e-commerce business, and there have been several things that have been identified as potential causes for that – things that needed to be modernized in the user interface and core site functionality, for example. A reinvented web presence also provides additional opportunity to build content marketing into the company’s overall marketing strategy, and to implement some much-needed improvements to cybersecurity. Being able to tackle these multiple issues is one of the major benefits of this project. This will be weighed against the potential costs, which include the risk of the project going over budget and underperforming in terms of the deliverables.

Work Breakdown Structure

The work for this project will be done in three phases. These are the pre-development, the development and the post-development phases. The pre-development phase will be done by an in-house team that is comprised of members of the marketing and IT teams. The time frame for this stage will be four months, as team members build this project into their daily rhythms. During this phase, the marketing team will work with the IT people to determine the scope of the project. Establishing an appropriate scope and sticking to it is an essential component of bringing a project in on time and budget (Hazrati, 2011). This first phase will also include the building of the team at will work on the site – including back end, front end and UX/UI people.

The marketing team will identify the opportunities that this project can position the company to exploit and set targets for the post-implementation functionality and metrics, in order to determine whether the project was a success or not. By determining up front what the project will achieve, this cross-functional team...…only will an external team be used to build out the project’s infrastructure, but there will be extensive communication required from all participants, and not all of this communication can be face-to-face. Giving each team member the right amount of visibility, and ensuring that communication about any challenges that may arise in the course of the project, will be critical to ensuring its success (Teamwork.com, 2016).

Risk Mitigation

There are a few methods by which the risks inherent in this project can be mitigated. The first is through the use of budgets as a control mechanism. If cost overruns are the biggest risk to Target, then the budget should be subject to considerable scrutiny. Third-party oversight might be required to at least provide visibility from the outside into the budget aspects of the project. It is important that the project is kept on track with a high level of budget control.

There should also be operational control in order to mitigate risk. The project manager will need to have granular visibility into the project to ensure that everything is going smoothly. The means of communication need to be established, and there needs to be clear communication guidelines in place so that everybody knows what their role in the project is. All told, this is significant challenge in terms of risk mitigation – the better the communication, the more likelihood that potential problems are detected early and resolved.

Finally, having clear role definitions is an essential part of risk mitigation. When everybody knows exactly what they are supposed to be doing, the risk associated with the project is lower, because each person can be held accountable for fulfilling their role. Furthermore, the project manager can be held accountable for any roles that needed to be filled but wasn’t. Clear responsibilities, strong communication, and formal budgetary controls are all important elements of risk mitigation for this project.…