Innovative Prescription Delivery
Part 1 - Case Problem Information
Shopper’s Drug-Mart (hereafter referred to as SDM) is a top ranked Canadian retail pharmacy, based in Toronto, Ontario, with more than 1300 stores nationwide, in all Canadian Provinces, and two territories, employing more than 26,000 people overall.
The company has been very innovative in their business practices, and now they covertly considering even a newer concept – delivering prescriptions and store items by flying drones.
The concept is not new – a small firm named DroneDeliver in London, Ontario, (hereafter referred to as DD) announced the concept in 2017 and they are looking to develop a relationship with a lead drugstore to launch the concept into reality. SDM may be the big break they are looking for!
Mike the president of SDM wants to develop a pilot project to get something moving and see how it works. Mike will provide the funds and will oversee all aspect of this initiative. Mary is
the project lead on the business operations side who will manage the project for SDM. Mike has made an agreement with the CEO and founder of DD, Kevin, to prototype this project in London Ontario, the home location for the DD organization where it developed the system. DD will customize its systems, interfaces and business processes to conform to SDM project requirements.
Your Team, who works at SDM internal IT Department, has been assigned by the company’s CIO, to lead the project in terms of the information systems that will be needed to support the initiative. Phil is the project manager at DD, who will work with your team. Generally, from the IT perspective, the project will likely have to accomplish the following:
Develop SDM online order entry system modification that will allow customers in London, Ontario, to register their willingness to have a drone, deliver their orders by means of online entry or smartphone entry. There will be significant restrictions on the approval of customers for this service, so there will be need for a segment of the system to allow SDM management approve the customer, send a confirmation to the customer, and so on.
Create reports for SDM’s management, regarding sales information, customer reactions, and key project performance indicators, as defined by senior management.
Create electronic messages for the customers through email, online notifications, or mobile alerts as the customer prefers.
Interface to the DD Corporation for its order entry, delivery confirmation and mobile application software. Ali is the point of contact on the information systems side with DD and will be overseeing the team on their side. A price for this customization is not yet determined, and the development of this proposal will be part of your project plan.
Develop security options for all systems that will safeguard the data as it is stored within your company, and also as it is exchanged with DD. You will work with SDM’s information security management team to achieve this, and Bill is the project lead on that team for this project.
You will need to identify basic requirements and then determine your team members from the list of people given in this document as you move towards final project planning.
It has been determined that only four (4) SDM Pharmacists in the London Ontario area will participate in the prototype delivery system. The are in a relatively close geographic area to one another, and they are in a non-urban environment, consisting mainly of suburban homes, and small businesses. Consumers in apartment buildings will not be permitted in the prototype project due to delivery issues.
No hardware, servers, workstations, or other network infrastructure will be required for this project, as all of that is only on DD side, and they will be including it in their proposal and a separate project plan that they will give you as a part of their contract. SDM can accommodate this prototype system within their existing infrastructure that handles customer orders. Ongoing system maintenance scheduling or planning after the prototype is implemented will not be part of the project schedule or plans – you will be developing that plan separately once the system design is known.
SDM has allocated a maximum of CAD 1,750,000 for this prototype project. You have been asked by your CIO to ensure that your project does not go over this figure, and if possible, that the total project cost is under that amount. The two companies agreed that they would like to begin the project on the on next January 5th, and their first customer delivery flight should take place no later than November 30th to avoid harsh weather in Ontario.
Of course you also need to include specific steps and processes for:
Regular meetings with the team, stakeholders, and the cross-impacted areas of the company
Approval points as needed through the project sequence.
Points at which you refine cost and staffing requirements (you should not need to calculate costs or total staffing at this point)
Points at which you will produce the various project documentation deliverables (discussed in class).
Testing, quality control, and provision for issues that may develop
User training and other preparations for system implementation. The SDM change management team, headed by Shirley, will assist you in this effort.
Summary of personnel involved in the project
1. DroneDeliver Corporation Staff:
- Kevin, CIO and founder
- Phil, Project Manager – Main point of contact
- Stephanie, Senior Business Analyst
- Gerald, Senior System Engineer
- Ali, Project Lead IT Systems
2. Shopper’s Drug Mart Staff:
- George, Operations VP
- James, CIO
- Mary, Project Lead, Business Operations Team
- Bill, Project Lead, Security Team
- Julie, SDM Pharmacy Manager, West London
- Jamal, SDM Pharmacy Manager, East London
- Steve, SDM Pharmacy Manager, North London
- Wilma, SDM Pharmacy Manager, South London
- Your Group, Project Manager
- Marianne, Business System Analyst
- Johnathan, Programmer
- William, Senior Programmer
- Sherry, Database Administrator
- Linda, Reports System Programmer/Analyst
- Gerald, Testing Specialist
- Elizabeth, Senior Testing Specialist
- Shirley, Change Management Coordinator
Part 2 - Project Scheduling Information
The project scheduling information provided in this part, should be added to the problem information provided in part 1.
1. Total project cost must not exceed project constraints. Project schedule should begin January 5, and should meet the schedule constraints as per the case information for completion. You should assume 100% allocation to this project for each resource in the list below. Load leveling is NOT required for this assignment, and over-allocation warnings on your WBS will not be counted as a problem as long as the resource effort allocation is reasonable.
2. It is critical that your assignment WBS is specific to the case problem in detail. You must ensure that all required deliverables appear in your WBS specifically, and that each includes design development, testing and implementation as appropriate. Your WBS must include Project Management steps for the charter/scope, risk management, WBS, schedule, training and the required meetings to conduct and manage the project. Do not includes things like “procurement management plan” or “staffing plan” or “quality management plan”, as these are not a part of this case problem. A generic WBS is not acceptable for this assignment. This is a practice for you to see how you might deliver such a detailed schedule for this case problem, and it will be evaluated that way.
3. It is advisable that you add the Project Management, Communication, Testing, and Training tasks as needed to make the project successful. Use in the information in the case, along with your own ideas, about how much effort is involved to ensure a quality implementation overall throughout the project. Be sure that you do not exceed the project constraints.
4. Remember that this project will be tight in terms of time and cost, so do not include steps that are not really necessary. You should schedule the project from the beginning, including charter/scope, planning meetings, risk management and communications management plan development, WBS and schedule development – these items need to appear along with resource assignments and the appropriate costs that go with them.
5. Finally, you are required to indicate appropriate quantity of tasks that have been already in progress or completed. Assume that we are looking at your schedule on June
27. Show which work packages would probably be at what stage of completion by this
specific time in the schedule. Use you own judgement based on the work package finish dates, but be reasonable.
6. The personnel involved in DD corporation do not have billing rates per hour because their cost is being absorbed by the fixed fee specified in their proposal below. These people should be listed in your resource sheet, but with $0.00 standard rate, and they should be assigned to the appropriate tasks for the project.
§ Kevin, CEO and Founder
§ Phil, Project Manager and Main Point of Contact
§ Stephanie, Senior Business Analyst
§ Gerald, Senior Systems Engineer
§ Ali, Project Lead IT Systems
They should be assigned to the project tasks as appropriate using the information in the case and the details below:
DD Corporation Contract Fees and Dates
SDM has signed a contract with DD specifying the following phased payment plan that is linked to specific dates or deliverables. You are responsible for ensuring that the payments occur on time, but are only made if the appropriate conditions have been met. Be sure to include the necessary tasks in your WBS to accommodate evaluating, and paying for, these contract activities:


SDM Effort Hours
The following is the estimate TOTAL EFFORT HOURS for only the software programming and reporting to the customer and SDM management for the prototype systems. (these do not include design requirements, project management activities, testing, training, final implementation, or meetings – you will need to add estimates those additional steps.

You need to determine who on SDM’s and DD’s staff should be involved in the various deliverables based upon your best judgement, and how their positions relate to the tasks.
END OF CASE PROBLEM