Introduction

A project manager who understands the complexity of a virtualization project is worth their weight in gold. What are the tasks? Where are the resources? What are the stages? How long will it take? Who provides the authority for the project to happen?

It is perhaps this last question, of authority, which demands a well crafted Project Charter. This document outlines a project charter document in the PMP format for the VI3 Deployment.

Intended Audience

Project Managers, VMware Certified Professionals (VCP) and VMware Architects (VCDX), and the management and finance teams who will support and fund the virtualization project.

Project Management Office (PMO) teams, especially certified project managers such as Project Manager Professional (PMP) or Prince2 professionals, will find this document as a good start to providing their own Charter (if using PMP) or Project Initiation Document (PID) - if using Prince2).

Outline

• Requirements that satisfy customer, sponsor, and other stakeholder needs, wants and expectations

• Business needs, high-level project description, or product requirements that the project is undertaken to address

• Project purpose or justification

• Assigned Project Manager and authority level

• Summary milestone schedule

• Stakeholder influences

• Functional organizations and their participation

• Organizational, environmental and external assumptions

• Organizational, environmental and external constraints

• Business case justifying the project, including return on investment

• Summary budget

to satisfy customer, sponsor, and other stakeholder needs, wants and expectations

This project must meet the following requirements:

high-level project description, or product requirements that the project is undertaken to address pull out bullets from business case

• Reduce capital and operational costs within twelve months

• Solve datacenter space issue

• Stop over-deploying and under-utilizing servers

• Mitigate risk of "out of support" servers

• Increase server utilization and reduce waste

• Increase IT project delivery and throughput of change

• increase team collaboration and unlock delivery efficiences

In summary, we need to reduce costs and increase productivity within twelve months.

Summary of business case justification

• The benefit in capital cost avoidance of virtualizing is $3M

• The benefit in operational efficiences will avoid missed revenue and delayed orders adding up to $25M in Q1

and authority level

The assigned project manager is Jayne Doe, PMP (Project Management Professional), from the Project Management Office (PMO). Jayne has capital budget authority for the project and will spend her budget through the procurement process. Jayne has management support for access to resources to deliver the project. Jayne reports into Mrs Big, Chief Information Office (CIO), who is also the Executive Sponsor of this project.

These are the major steps of the blueprint

This schedule will be update when the VI3.Blueprint is more complete

RACI Diagram

A RACI Diagram is a simple tool to show all the stakeholders and their relationship to the key milestones of the project.

• See Wikipedia - RACI Diagram

RACI is an acronym for:

• Responsible - who will be tasked to complete the work

• Accountable - who will approve / sign off the work - ie. the ones to whom Responsible is Accountable to.

• Consulted - persons whos opinion is sought, two-way communication

• Informed - persons who are notified, one-way communication

end-user (sales and finance), datacenter, IT

The direct end-user and customer for the VI3 solution are the sales and finance organizations, with their CRM and ERP applications respectively.

The indirect organizations affected by VI3 are:

1. IT Operations, as they must operate a new technology implementation using the majority of their existing tools but with some new features.

2. Other subject matter expert technology areas such as Networks and Storage, where VI3 integrates with their products in a different way than existing technology. These integration points are handled by the Workshops in the Design stage of the VI3.Blueprint - please see the list of workshops for the list of organizations affected.

what we can virtualize, vendor suitability

There are assumptions at this point that VI3 will work and will deliver the benefits. This assumption is reasonable given the maturity of the solution and the roll call of other organizations who have successfully benefited from virtualization, many of whom are just like our organization. If they can do it, why can't we?

That is the other assumption: that we can execute on VI3, like other organizations. This relies on our ability, across functional teams, to adapt some of our processes to benefit from VI3.

We also assume that our workloads can be virtualized, although the Proof of Concept activity will confirm this at an early stage.

We are also assuming that there will be no major problems with either technology or service integrations, but that we do need to spend effort in each area to ensure we have a realistic chance of succeeding: this is why we have prepared workshops in each discipline before committing to a design and then an implementation.

what known, not predicted or expected, constraints exist today to impact the project

The matrix organization of this project, where resources are pulled from other teams, means that there is a resource constraint from the start of the project which can only be alleviated by line managers releasing their resources on time.

To manage this constraint, we have prepared the VI3.Blueprint to allow managers to see what resources they need to release and when.

See VI3.Blueprint Business Case and VI3.Blueprint Financial Justification for detail.

Costs including the Budget estimate. Costs are detailed in VI3 Financial Justification and Bill of Materials.

The main costs are:

• Hardware - $x

• Sofware - $x

• Consulting partner - $x

• Disposable of old hardware - $x