Analysis of Data Silos and Communication Alternatives for LTR

This project delves into the issue of data silos within Luton Town Residences (LTR) and their impact on operations and project management. The assignment identifies data silos across various departments, including finance, facilities maintenance, and customer service, highlighting the challenges they pose to effective decision-making and information sharing. The project then explores alternative communication solutions, focusing on enterprise social networking platforms like Slack and Yammer. It analyzes the features, benefits, and limitations of each platform, considering their potential to improve team collaboration, data protection, and overall communication efficiency within LTR. The project concludes with an executive summary, outlining the reasons for implementing Yammer, expected benefits, and a business options analysis, emphasizing the importance of addressing the existing communication challenges to ensure the company's survival and growth. The solution provides a comprehensive overview of the problems and proposes practical solutions for enhancing communication and data management at LTR.

Operations and Project
Management

Table of Contents
PORTFOLIO 1.................................................................................................................................1
1 Data Silos in LTR.....................................................................................................................1
PORTFOLIO 2.................................................................................................................................3
2. Alternatives for making communication.................................................................................3
Portfolio 3........................................................................................................................................5
REFERENCES..............................................................................................................................11

PORTFOLIO 1
1 Data Silos in LTR
A data silo is indeed a series of knowledge in an enterprise separated from certain areas
of the company and not available to them (Braglia and Frosolini, 2014). Eliminating data silos
will help you access the best details at the right moment so that correct choices can be taken.
Thus, by lowering cost of storage for redundant content can be beneficial for LTR to save capital
and other resources. The main happening of data silos in LTR is because of three common
reason such as:
Company culture: Departments are sometimes siloed from one another, especially in bigger
firms. It is often since internal rivalry develops, and because one organization considers itself as
distinct from another may not know that knowledge can be exchanged.
Organisational structure: If an company works deliberately to merge different divisions, it's
possible to create bureaucracy and management structures that prevent divisions from
exchanging knowledge.
Technology: Use specific technologies is not unusual for various agencies, making it impossible
for the agencies to exchange similar knowledge.
In the context of Luton Town Residences the department of General purpose housing
basically have three functional team which are responsible to manage different issues and
concerns relevant to their areas. Each team have their unique way to handle and communicate
information whenever required that ease the process of decision making for entire management
team of LTR. The data silos related with all team of company are discussed underneath:
Team Software Problems
Finance team Sage Accounting, Excel
spreadsheets and Word
documents including a
Sharepoint server.
The main issue faced by this
section is not easily assessable
of information by the other
department manager and
employees as accountant use
to protect the information.
Using of sage accounting
software can not be done by
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any other member unless and
until they have a proper
training and understanding of
software (Bucero and Englund,
2015).
Facilities maintenance
team
360 Facility. This particular software need
professional and specialised
person to handle information
and make it confidential for
other users. Thus in need of
skilled person to use 360
facility software the overall
cost is increasing which lead to
other problems to LTR.
Customer services team Blocks alongside Word and
plain text documents and Excel
spreadsheets.
In the context of customer
services team the main
problems faced by the
management of LTR is that
they uses several modes to
record and analyse
information. The several mode
of recording of useful
information about customer
make uneasy for the upper
management to make a proper
and effective analysis that
further lead to improper
decision making.
On the other side the supported housing team of LTR use to personal coach to handle
information with protected excel and other saving option (Burke, 2013). Thus, the main issue
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which is faced by the management of LTR is that at the time of making any policies and scheme
plans they are unable to use the information. This lead to negative impact over the company
performance resulting into future failure.
PORTFOLIO 2.
2. Alternatives for making communication.
Enterprise Social Networking refers to platform that communicates with workplace. That
includes team communications, project management, platforms for teamwork, and much more
(Fortune and et.al., 2011). Enterprise social networking emphasizes on usage of social
networking media or social connections between individuals who have commercial interests
and/or experiences. Enterprise networking is a business social media service, which is basically
social media that is utilized in "enterprise" environments.
Slack: Slack is basically a chatroom for entire business, built to substitute email as primary
communication as well as sharing tool. The workspaces enable to organise network
communications for discussions and enable you to exchange information, data, and more in one
place for private messages.
Corporation-Wide and Private Messaging: Slack messaging is organized into networks and
private messages to coordinate communications and replace interactions that may otherwise be
distributed over emails, texts, or in meetings with people (Fleming and Koppelman, 2016).
Public platforms are available to all network members and therefore can cover anything from
various marketing and selling activities to casual conversations and memes sources.
Integrations: This messaging app provide integration facility with third-party services which is
most powerful feature. Company can store data through these facilities. Several of Slack’s key
integrations involve:
 Google Drive
 Zapier
 Dropbox
 Zendesk
 Heroku
 Github
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Teams & Workspaces: Slack facilitates businesses, commercial enterprises, different
communities as well as other enterprises to build a specific private and dedicated workplace with
complete customised URL (Hanisch and Wald, 2011). By doing a simply a sign-up procedure,
individual to invite team-members to connect and make conversation. For micro to med-sized
businesses, inidividual probably need only one work space affiliated by public as well as private
networking to fullfill all business needs, but this app also offer features to enable businesses in
handling multiple workspaces at single time. This also provide end to end encryption so safe for
using in a business environment.
Free Services: This app also provide some free features along with premium feature, as listed
below:
 10k Messages Search
 5GB of aggregate Storage
 Two-Factor Authentication
 One-on-One Voices and Video Calls
 10 Integrations
 5GB of Aggregate Storage
Sharing: Slack allow individuals for sharing all kind of data file and docs within workspace
including Word-Documents, Audio files, excel spreadsheets, PDFs, images and videos. This
make it compatible for business environment (Kerzner and Kerzner, 2017).
Yammer- Yammer is a special social networking service developed for the better communication
in the businesses. Yammer was founded by Geni, a business whose primary aim is to help
workers interact and collaborate through their enterprise. This became highly popular and was
eventually extended to become its own offering as well as a business launched in September
2008. With encompasses of time the usage of this software has been increased in an effective
manner. The main cause of success of this software is that this is easier to use and set up.
Yammer helps companies–especially those with numerous offices–to work together through
areas. Instead than sending the email requesting who to contact for X, users can easily post it to a
Yammer Team. The heads of division keep an eye on their Yammer groups and answer questions
appropriately. In the context of LTR, they can adopt this communication software instead of
email system. They can get below mentioned benefits if they will use this software which are as
follows:
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 It keeps workers connected and entertained- This software is not only formal but also it is
informal too. Under it, different types of gifs, jokes are being shared. To each workplace,
it's a perfect way to connect internally while encouraging other organizations to join in
through feedback and get a feel for the atmosphere of their co-workers. These can also be
set up in such a manner that users can work comfortably for consultants, partners and
firms. Such as in the context of above firm, they can use this for getting connected with
each other with different departments such as finance team, maintenance team etc.
 It fosters transparency- Another benefit of this communication software is that by help of
it, different types of departments can make a clear protocol for communication. As well
as this software assures that everyone is updated on what are the tasks of teams. Same as
in the above Luton residency, they can apply this for making transparency different
departments inside (Hanisch and Wald, 2011).
 It offers a wide platform to show internal achievement and help departments build on
work of others- As well as by using this software, employees can share their
achievements to their superiors by updating on daily basis. Due to this, senior department
will be aware about progress of each employee. In the aspect of LTR, this can be useful
for sharing internal data within different departments.
So these are the common benefits of this software and LTR can use this in order to remove
obstacles in current communication system. Though, this also has some limitation but it is better
than email system which they are using for making communication inside.
Portfolio 3
Executive Summary:
Numerous associations are thinking about the most ideal approach to drive upper hand against
new monetary difficulties. With asset and work cost preferences components of the past for
some, the following incredible outskirts seems, by all accounts, to be a principal wagered on
information specialist adequacy. Advancement, aggregate dynamic and better access to data and
mastery across authoritative and geographic limits all looms as the following huge wager
openings.
Yammer charged Luton Town Residence (LTR) to look at the all out monetary effect and
potential degree of profitability (ROI) ventures may understand by conveying Yammer. LTR
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directed inside and out meetings with administrators from four Yammer clients with paid
licenses and systems of in any event six (6) months development.
Reasons:
The main reason behind undertaking the project is meeting common objective of LTR, for
instance team collaboration, group conversation, file sharing facility and impressing clients.
These were the main issues faced by organization and Yammer is the one which can successfully
sort out these problems with its efficient features. It will enable the achievement of corporate
strategies and objectives in number of ways discussed below:
 Growth of Yammer usage will be organic and no formal management push up to promote
initially will be done.
 With these email replacement tool, employees will overcome form silos due to mergers
and acquisitions, separate department, team collaboration, data mishandling and poor
communication within organization.
 Due to its strong user support; the company can formalise its relationship with clients by
taking premium Yammer package.
 It will also allow LTR to improve security for the collaboration tool and provide more
sophisticated administration for its users. It will also provide access to managers directly
by customers and identify collaboration opportunities and strategize for company.
Business Options
Business option Reason for choosing that option
Do Something It will be hard for LTR to survive if it chooses the option “do
nothing”; because its clients daily facing connection problem
with managers and also their problems remains unsolved for
several days which projected negative impact on customers.
Also company’s confidential data are diversified on several
hard disks which again raise the issue of data management at
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single place. Team collaboration is very necessary to sustain
business. At this point LTR can’t afford any further
expansion as it is unable to satisfy its existing customers. So,
it is recommended that company should do something to
handle this situation other it will be collapsed.
Expected Benefits
Some of the benefits of application of Yammer are as follows:
Project cost savings from visible communication and collaboration:
Yammer will provide channel for LTR to collaborate and communicate among teams that were
separated physically and functionally. It is tough for employee to answer basic project related
queries if team became distributed. Traditional communication like email not able to filling the
gap of proper communication but with Yammer it will be possible to gain active knowledge.
Data protection and 360 degree security to personal information:
At present employees are storing their personal data in private hard disk and take backup at
localized portable disks. To communicate they use SharePoint software which is centralized at
common headquarters. But this whole process breaches the confidentiality of customer’s private
information. To provide protection to personal data of clients; this is an efficient tool and it also
speedup the decision making process.
Team collaboration:
By providing better environment for team coordination and technology advancement; Yammer
boosts team collaboration within LTR. It also provides opportunities to staff for sharing their
innovative ideas, business improvement suggestions and any issue face by them.
Some of the other benefits are:
 Improve employee productivity for engaged Yammer users due to data sharing
 Higher employee engagement resulting in faster on boarding for new staff.
 Improving vertical communication between company managers and staff.
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 Providing client efficient system and recording conversation facility for future reference.
Expected Dis-benefits
As Yammer doesn’t show any dis-benefits or limitation but still at initial level some of the dis-
advantages like increasing overall cost of LTR on providing training, physical arrangement of
servers and systems, connection loss with customers due to installing Yammer in systems and
delay in service can be seen at initial stage but later benefit company in long run of the business.
Timescale
The total time estimated for completing project is six months; during this period LTR will start
getting benefits. This time scale is further divided into particular time taken by each project:
Project Heads Total time required
Analyzing current issues 1 Week
Detecting problem 1 week to 2nd Week
Installing Yammer on all systems 2nd Week to 3rd Week
Training employees 3rd Week to 8th Week
Retesting software 8th Week to 12th Week
Sort out issue with software 12th Week to 20th Week
Benefits started 20th Week to 24th Week
Total Time 24 Weeks
Costs
The main costs associated with the deployment of Yammer are: 1) monthly software license fees;
2) administrative support costs; 3) internal labour for administrative oversight; 4) internal labour
costs for implementation; 5) training development costs; and 6) training costs. Costs for the
composite organization that are used for the financial analysis are listed below:
Software Licence fees:
The price of Yammer Premium per user is $5 per month. This includes data ownership,
administrative controls, security tools and customer branding and customer support. The
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composite organization licensed Yammer Premium for 66 users; at a monthly fee of $5 per user
be $330 monthly and for three years it will be $11880.
Administrative Support Costs:
LTR has also assigned business analyst and online communication project manager for Yammer
administration. Both will spend 15% of their time liaising with Yammer; including growth
management and monitoring new releases. The average annual compensation will be around
$848 per year and for 3 years it will be $2545.
Implementation Cost:
The total average cost of internal labour is estimated at the rate of $15 per hour and it will take
around 12 days @ 8 hours per day. So, total cost of implementation will be $180.
Training costs:
Training is prepared through presentations over webinars and slide shows. Simulation exercise
also added to analyse real time result of training. It was estimated that total 65 hours required to
be familiar with complete Yammer tool. The trainer cost per hour will be $45; hence complete
training cost is $2925.
Total cost to company for installation of Yammer over three years period of time is approximate
$17,530.
Investment Appraisal
Composite Organization three year risk adjusted ROI
ROI Payback
period
Total Benefits
(present Value)
Total costs
(present Value)
NPV
365% 4.3 months $63,985 $17,530 $46,454
Major Risks
LTR associated with mainly two types of risks viz. Implementation and impact risk.
Implementation risk is the hazard that a proposed interest in Yammer may go amiss from the first
or anticipated necessities, bringing about greater expenses than foreseen. Impact risk alludes to
the hazard that the business or innovation needs of the association may not be met by the interest
in Yammer, bringing about lower in general absolute advantages. The more prominent the
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vulnerability, the more extensive the potential scope of results for cost and advantage gauges.
Risks affect costs by raising original estimates and affect benefits by reducing original estimates.
The following implementation risks are estimated which affect can cost of project:
 Labour needed for implementation, training and support might exceed initial estimates.
Following impact risks can affect benefits of project:
 Variance in productivity savings of employee engagement level.
 Variance in average project cost savings result in Yammer.
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