IT Acquisitions Management

/in /by

Please limit your answers to 200-500 words for each question.The questions pertain to IT acquisition problems that are encountered by many organizations. They present serious challenges that IT professionals and business managers must overcome to achieve superior business performance.

Do not repeat the questions. Use your own words–do not quote others. This is not a research paper so you are not required to cite references. Be sure each answer you prepare the response to the question asked and you will likely do very well.

Question 1. (1 point). The title of this course is IT Acquisition Management. In your own words, please explain what does that means? Why is it important?

Question 2. (1 point). When you perform an internet search on acquisition strategy, you will access some sites addressing corporate mergers and acquisitions (M&A), in which one corporation is acquiring and merging with another. Why is M&A beyond the scope of this course?

Question 3. (4 points).  Explain why the following types of problems should NOT be selected:

-A problem that can be solved with better internal management or different use of internal resources
-A problem that can be solved by adding to the tasks of a current contractor
-A problem that can be solved by commodity purchases (provide examples of commodity purchases)

Question 4. (2 points). What is/are the difference(s) between a Gantt chart and a work breakdown structure (WBS). As you know, one of the most popular tools for creating Gantt charts is Microsoft Project. Microsoft Project has the ability to generate a WBS from the data entered from the Gantt chart. Please explain why it is considered poor management practice to generate the WBS from the Gantt chart.

Question 5. (2 points) Template 13, by IT Economics Corporation, is an example of a matrix used for summarizing the results of evaluating proposals received from IT services contractors. The template uses “adjectival” rating codes and brief statements to summarize the evaluation results of each proposal from IT services contractors. What are the principal risks associated with using such a matrix and what do you recommend to avoid, mitigate, or transfer each principal risk that you identify?

Question 6. (3 points) A large hospital is preparing a request for proposal to acquire IT services to improve its electronic health records management system. It plans to implement an iPhone software application (app) for convenient mobile access to view and update patient records, prescribes medications, view lab results, communicates with patients, and view personal work schedules. It plans to prepare a performance work statement (PWS) for the development of the app to include in the RFP.

Your Question/Task: Prepare the required outcomes and their performance standards, monitoring methods, and incentives/disincentives that the hospital might use in its PWS for the request for proposal. Your required outcomes and associated information should apply to only the first and second desired app functions, view and update patient records and prescribe medications. Your required outcomes and related information should reflect the best practices for performance work statements and each should include performance standards, monitoring methods, and incentives/disincentives.

Note: This is not a test of your knowledge of hospital activities but of your ability to prepare a performance work statement. You can make reasonable assumptions regarding hospital activities if necessary. The app functions in the question are comparable to those used by many organizations outside of the medical field.

Question 7. (3 points) Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR) require that federal agencies use performance-based contracting to the maximum extent possible for service contracts, including contracts for the acquisition of IT services. Performance-based contracts rely on performance work statements (PWS). However, a prominent organization of former federal government acquisition officials argues that the PWS works well with short-term, relatively simple service contracts, but “it is unrealistic to ask agencies to specify services at time of contract award in clear, specific, objective, and measurable terms when future needs are not fully known or understood, requirements and priorities are expected to change during performance, and the circumstances and conditions of performance are not reliably foreseeable.”

Your Question/Task: If you agree with this group’s position, explain why you believe the group is correct in contending that the PWS is not suitable for long-term, complex IT service contracts. If you disagree with this group’s position, explain why you believe the group is not correct and why a PWS is suitable for long-term, complex IT service contracts.

Question 8. (3 points) An organization is planning an IT acquisition strategy for a large and complex project. It plans to outsource part of the solution implementation to an IT services contractor. Prior to preparing a request for proposals, it must decide which solution implementation activities should be performed by in-house staff and which should be performed by the IT service contractor.

Your Question/Task: What guidelines would you recommend for making the decisions regarding which solution implementation activities should be performed by in-house staff and which should be performed by the IT service contractor?

Case Study on Youth For Tomorrow

/in /by

Step 1: https://youthfortomorrow.org/
Use the questions below to collect the information from the website and/or ask questions during a phone interview.
Section 1: Program Description
    What are the goals of this program?
    What tolls or techniques are used to meet these goals?
    What is the capacity (how many clients can be treated at 1 time)?
    How many contact hours/treatment hours are part of this program?
Section 2: Clients
    Who are the clients being served?
    What does the typical client look like (gender, age, education, and so on)?
    What are the clients perspectives of the treatment program?
Section 3: Staff
    What is the client-to-staff ratio?
    What are the staff backgrounds and qualifications?
    What are the perspectives of the staff about working there (or about program effectiveness)?
Section 4: Evaluation
    How many clients finish the program and how many drop out or do not complete it?
    What are the reasons for not completing the program?
    What is the daily (or yearly) cost per client served?
    Have any clients been tracked after they leave the program? What were the results?
Step 2: Write a case study in Microsoft Word, based on the information you have collected from the website and/or phone interview.
1.    Organize the case study using current APA formatting. Begin with a title page. Be sure to include appropriate headings, paragraph structure, and logically connected sentences.
2.    Follow with an introduction. Identify the organization you selected, and be sure to include a citation to this source on the reference page. Describe the program, the clients, and the staff.
3.    Do not use APA titles.
4.    Evaluate the programs effectiveness. Be sure to apply what you learned about residential community supervision programs from the reading/study to your evaluation.
5.    Include a reference page and support your assertions with evidence from at least 68 US references. Be sure to cite the references in-text, using current APA formatting. The body of your paper must be a minimum of 7 pages.
6.    Discuss a Biblical worldview as it relates to the case study and integrate biblical references to support your discussion.
7.    Conclude the case study with a substantive summary of key points.

Assignment: Assessing and Treating Clients With Anxiety Disorders

/in /by

Examine Case Study: A Middle-Aged Caucasian Man With Anxiety. You will be asked to make three decisions concerning the medication to prescribe to this client. Be sure to consider factors that might impact the clients pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic processes.

At each decision point stop to complete the following:

Decision #1
Which decision did you select?
Why did you select this decision? Support your response with evidence and references to the Learning Resources.
What were you hoping to achieve by making this decision? Support your response with evidence and references to the Learning Resources.
Explain any difference between what you expected to achieve with Decision #1 and the results of the decision. Why were they different?
Decision #2
Why did you select this decision? Support your response with evidence and references to the Learning Resources.
What were you hoping to achieve by making this decision? Support your response with evidence and references to the Learning Resources.
Explain any difference between what you expected to achieve with Decision #2 and the results of the decision. Why were they different?
Decision #3
Why did you select this decision? Support your response with evidence and references to the Learning Resources.
What were you hoping to achieve by making this decision? Support your response with evidence and references to the Learning Resources.
Explain any difference between what you expected to achieve with Decision #3 and the results of the decision. Why were they different?
Also include how ethical considerations might impact your treatment plan and communication with clients.

Demand Elasticity

/in /by

Respond of 100 or more words to following discussion separately on (There are several factors that affect transportation costs. I would like you all to explore costs that are associated with demand elasticity on a single user’s transportation cost. This user would be traveling via plane from their point of origin to their destination. Also how could one build a model to represent total traveling costs to this user)  Responses should be a minimum of 100 words and include direct questions.

1. Good evening all,
When exploring a single users transportation costs, I, like other posts Ive read, chose to look at my personal habits/choices on air travel. Air travel for me is either work related and funded by the government or personal and funded by me. Business travel is relatively a simple decision. I call the travel management agency we use and say I need to go from point A to point B. Outside of selecting departure and arrival times that are most beneficial to me, I really consider very little and therefore, there is little driving my demand outside of necessity.
My personal travel is typically leisure based and I consider the trip based on the package deal. Obviously, the price of an airline ticket is part of the equation, but the price of the amenities (hotel, food, rental vehicle, etc.) are also taken into the equation. Much of this is driven by the economy and, in my experience, when prices are lower across the board or I have more jingle in my pocket (i.e. my economic position has improved), I have more desire to travel. 
In the research I found, it appears that my decisions are pretty much in the norm. In a meta-study, 21 previous studies on the demand elasticity of air travel were compiled and found that price elasticity estimates suggest that tourist (personal travel) arrivals will fall 15 percent for every 10 percent rise in the cost of travel (Gillen et al. 2003).
I am no mathematical genius by any means, so any feed on my attempt at a model for total cost is much appreciated. But I would develop model that provides a composite score based on the sum of weighted factors and weighted products. Each factor (airline ticket price, lodging price, etc.) can be weighted equally or in order of importance and how well they meet your preferences. For example:
Factors (1-3 base on importance):      Cost Preference
Air fare cost(3)                                  9 = $100-200
Hotel cost(2)                                      6 = $201-400
Food cost(1)                                        3 = $401-600
                                                            0 = $600

So a proposed trip to Dallas: $300 airfare, $450 lodging, $180 food
Airfare (3)(6)=18
Hotel (2)(3)=6
Food (1)(9)=9
Composite score (18+6+9)/(3+2+1) = 33/6 = 5.5
One could add additional vacation cities or any other factors (rental vehicle, # of days, activities) to consider their overall importance in your decision making.  Compare the final scores of all options and make your decision.

2. Transportation elasticity seems to be difficult for transportation managers to project. Many factors are moving variables that can only best be estimated based off of future projections and past metrics. Transportation Demand Management (TDM) Encyclopedia identifies transit elasticity as the percentage change in transit ridership resulting from each 1% change in transit service, such as bus-miles or frequency (2018).

Some of the elasticities that can affect the demand for travel are price, route, time of travel, and, for this forum, the size or type of aircraft. For instance, the price is generally less to travel on those red eye flights that have a couple of connections because it is less desirable to get up in the middle of the night and get on a plane followed by rushing to connecting flights which generally leaves more open seats that the airline needs to fill. What makes projecting the demand elasticity most difficult is that the demand all depends on the consumers need and available funds. If the service costs more than what the customer can afford then the customer will find another way to travel or will stay home and the transportation manager has to plan based off previous data points to determine the right price to offer services and when it becomes appropriate to adjust the price and to what extent to keep those last minute customers purchasing to cover the cost of operation and come out ahead (Transportation Economics, 143-144).

To help with building a model for total traveling costs to this user we would need several data points. Things to consider for the individual users cost can go as in depth as if they are using a private auto and all the costs for their auto (i.e. insurance, maintenance, fuel, etc.), parking, baggage fees, if they are using the perks areas within the airport or paying for upgraded ticket for quicker boarding, any services that they are using on the aircraft, and travel and lodging once at the destination.

Transportation Economics, (ND). Transportation Economics. Accessed from https://engineering.purdue.edu/~ce561/classnotes/Chapter%205.pdf on 16 April 2020

3. Changes in demand can fluctuate based on a change in an attribute of a service or product provided.  When it comes to transportation costs, a single users preference or demand for a mode of transportation is largely dependent on their circumstances (lifestyle) and the trips price, utility maximization, route, time, safety, security, convenience, or comfort.  All these subjectivities make up service attributes that are accounted for in a basic demand function, which in linear form is y=b+mx (Sinha & Labi, 2007).

Since we are only concerned about a single user, a disaggregate approach is the most suitable method to building an individual choice model that helps determine the probability that an individual will choose a certain trips characteristics and attributes.  According to Sinha & Labi (2007), Depending on the number of travel alternatives and the statistical assumptions associated with the demand data, model types include logit, probit, and dogit models.

If the user is traveling by air from their point of origin to their destination, they are likely to face transportation costs such as trip fare, taxes, baggage fees, facility usage costs (WIFI on the airplane), delay and travel time costs.      We can calculate the individuals ATC with the fixed and variable costs that he or she is likely to face then estimate the users demand elasticity for different service attributes of their trip using a demand function or model.  We can also formulate the unit travel time.