Boeing's virtual fence Project Case Study

Introduction: A Comprehensive Project Plan for Boeing's Virtual Fence on the US-Mexico Border Using Project Management Software

Boeing's virtual fence project is a kind of true project management task for the department of homeland security. It is actually beginning for stopping the ongoing, epidemic-scale flood of illegally crossing the border along the Mexican border. It is noted that the department of homeland security officially canceled the project for some reasons. There are some particular strategies to proceed with the project plan for Boeing's virtual fence. The project management service of this particular project has several techniques to develop the project with some scopes. Basically, the infrastructure, components, and moving pieces needed in a project make it a difficult enterprise. It is important to have at least one project plan for any type of project and it should be implemented with various strategies. The goals that have for the project are what users hope to accomplish when it is finished. This could incorporate deliverables and assets, as well as more elusive goals like boosting motivation or productivity.

Aims and objectives

Aims

The primary aim of this project management is to make a project plan in the project libre software to create Boeing's virtual fence for preventing illegal entries of people into the border of the United States of America.

Objectives

• To develop an outstanding project based on user requirements in the project management tool
• To generate efficiency in the project plan for generating Boeing's virtual fence
• To use tearing electrical items to effectively monitor the whole country's border.
• To maintain the sustainability of the project to effectively implement protective measures in order to increase the nation's safety and security, which will be very helpful to the security services
• To make a project design timeline for making a successful project plan to make virtual fence

Methodology

There are so many ways to create a project plan and all of these should be developed with certain processes (Tereso et al. 2019). The selected project should be organized by making a project chart on the project management tool. The project plan has been suitably designed in the project libre software by following some methods. The timeline of the project is created in this software platform by

• Building up a project plan
• Schedule creation
• Making milestones
• setting up WBS
• Writing some resource names
• Assigning the resources
• Making a resource calendar
• Searching out the resources that are over allocated
• Solve the over allocation
• Establishing the first-time baseline and saving it
• Updating the Schedule Using the Reported Accruals
• Analyzing the time and expense Variance Implications Now and in the Future

The project planning approach is critically done by making a timeline of the project in the project libre software stage for improving project management technology. The virtual border barrier appears to be an overall pretty amazing concept, a method to use reducing technology to more easily monitor America's vast boundaries (Larsson and Larsson 2020). The virtual border fence's flexibility compared to a genetically predetermined fence is its intended advantage. Some basic steps to making a project plan are

• Make project purpose
• Make a suitable project approach
• Identify the topic of the project
• Analysis of the project
• Design of the project
• Develop the project
• Apply the project plan in reality
• Assign tasks

The project is totally based on the use case of the Boeing virtual fence to decrease excessive immigration and criminal activities on the Mexican border. The project, which was started in 2006 and is being managed by Boeing Co., has cost roughly $1 billion and was created to combine video cameras, radar, sensors, and many other capabilities to arrest illegal immigrants and dealers who attempt to cross the porous border. The stages of making a work breakdown structure are

• Recognizing project deliverables
• Make a list of tasks by defining them
• Connect dependencies
• Build up costs and resources
• Manage start and end date-time feature
• Write notes
• Generate reports

A Gantt chart is also developed by making a schedule of the project by adding resources and milestones in the project libre software platform. The Gantt chart describes how the project will work in the future for the Boeing virtual fence project improvement (Chen et al. 2019). The methods to create the pictorial diagram in the project management are very simple and these must be followed while making a project plan. Firstly it is required to add tasks to the project management tool with all the basic details including resource name, duration, and start and finish timing. After that, all the tasks should be added by using predecessors so that all the tasks can be connected. Then the Gantt chart will be ready in the output section where it is shown that each of the tasks is perfectly linked up with the name of the resources.

Scope of the project

The industrial firm Boeing Co. is getting ready to redesign its problematic virtual fence perimeter system in Arizona, trying to save a consumer industry for the technology notwithstanding the number of issues with its rollout. The business created the virtual fence in accordance with a $20 million contract with the US Department of Homeland Security (Toljaga-Nikoli?, et al. 2020). The project is a component of a bigger Boeing border enforcement licensing right as SBInet, which, if completely deployed, could cost around $8 billion by 2013. Along with other important indicators, such as increasing the number of Border Patrol agents, Homeland Security believes it is continuing its efforts to design a technology-based border security strategy. Boeing as well as Homeland Security referred to the original Project 28 technology as an advanced prototype. Not a single copy is being produced. New software, communications, and sensor technologies are being constructed for the upcoming iteration. The redesigned technology, according to Boeing, should warn border officers and track unauthorized border crossers more swiftly. As opposed to satellite-based communications, the service will use radiofrequency transmission, enabling speedier data transfer. The brand-new towers will be made of concrete, be immovable, and be able to hold bigger machinery. So the preparation for making virtual fencing on the US-Mexican border is a strategic technique to remove smuggling and illegal circumstances (Buganová and Šimí?ková 2019).

Implementation

The full name of WBS is denoted as a work breakdown structure that is a pictorial diagram of the implementable and hierarchical disintegration of the Boeing virtual fence project. It is a useful graphic for project leaders since it enables them to deconstruct their project requirements and see every activity needed to finish their projects. The project schedule chart is a crucial project planning tool because it lists every part of a project's work. The WBS stages below the project scope represent the activities, deliverables, and work packages needed to execute from beginning to end (Farashah et al. 2019). The final project outcome, along with the activities and work modules connected with it, appears on the top of the WBS diagram. There are some reasons to utilize the WBS diagram in project management techniques such as

• Increasing the quality of the project schedule
• Developing an attractive project plan
• Project budgeting
• Resource management
• Task management
• Risk management

It is highly recommended that a work breakdown structure will deliver a structural diagram of different types of complicated projects.The summary of the project plan is designed by providing a project management report that contains all the important details of the designed project strategy. The report is implemented to provide an understanding overview of the performance of the project on the basis of project scheduling. No matter what kind of report it is, it always involves managing data based on management, technical, budgetary, commercial, or financial elements.

Project resources are vital factors for a project's successful execution. They contain everything the project designer will need from the planning of the project to the implementation phases, including people, tools, cash, time, and knowledge. Since a shortage of resources limits the project's ability to be completed, resource management is a crucial project part of management that determines a significant portion of the project's success (Ika et al. 2020). There are three types of project resources that are successfully defined in the project management software implementation work and these are project designer, project manager, and project developer. Insufficient resources will probably impede progress and lead a project to be delayed. Resources define how the tasks will be conducted to complete the project and make fencing on the border of the USA.

Analysis

A Gantt chart has been created with the help of project libre software to make an overview of Boeing's virtual fence project timeline. All the steps have been covered to start the project from a specific date and time (Thesing et al. 2021). Mainly the Gantt chart is used for making project-related plans and scheduling a particular time as well as a date. The Gantt chart can also show the beginning and ending dates of activities, milestones, interactions between tasks, and assignees. The project management team deserves Gantt charts for two key reasons. Complex plans are made simpler by them, especially those that entail several teams and varying timeframes. Teams can more effectively allocate resources and run their business with the use of Gantt charts (Müller et al. 2019).

A project schedule has been created in the project libre task management tool where all the activities to make the project plan marvelous have been maintained. The main purpose of making a project schedule is to organize different kinds of tasks, and resources for completing the project on time. Project milestones are used to describe a specific point in the schedule of the developed project (Flyvbjerg, 2021). Those milestones will operate as a project's beginning and endpoints as well as the declaration of a significant work phase conclusion. Although milestones are typically applied as a scheduling tool, they are able to represent anything that has begun or concluded. Milestones are key for realistic scheduling and planning of projects because they offer a technique to more properly anticipate the time that it will take to finish the project by designating significant dates and events. Their applicability them a crucial ingredient of project documents including the project timeline, project charter, and project plan.

Project issue

There have been numerous technological complications with a pilot study to create a "virtual fence" anywhere along the Mexican-American border (Barbosa et al. 2021). It will take a minimum of three years longer to complete the project's initial phase. The pilot, designated "Project 28," was designed by Boeing with over $21 million. The business tried to identify illegal immigrants entering the nation using off-the-shelf components, but they didn't perform as envisioned. A network of towers serves as the virtual border, and sensors on them, including radar and optical ones, are used to track movement across it. It was intended for the border enforcement command post to be able to concentrate on the operations without a physical border in position (Armenia et al. 2019). The american government is currently spending several hundred million dollars on surveillance cameras for the Southwestern border. Additionally, Congress is proposing committing several trillion dollars more. However, ’s final time the government made a major effort to secure the borders, it ran into some difficulties. As they look for technology to safeguard a crucial section of the border, federal officials are attempting to draw lessons from previous errors.

The SBInet "virtual" fence project, of the kind that Boeing began in the month of November 2005 and ultimately abandoned 10 months later after spending more than a billion dollars, is the subject of the article (Ma et al. 2018). While the initiative in theory provided 24 hours border patrols utilizing observation buildings and software platforms and required less staff, the outcomes in actuality were appalling. SBInet was criticized for anything from blatant technical errors to subpar management and a dearth of quantifiable success metrics. The Secure Border Initiative, which the Bush administration announced with rapturous applause in 2005, included a "virtual fence" on the southwest border to provide law enforcement with the cutting-edge surveillance photographs and data needed to identify breaches and make configuration decisions to protect the United States from terrorists, drug traffickers, and illegal immigrants (Sabini and Alderman 2021). The Homeland Security Agency announced last month that the intervention had been disbanded in favor of a more province approach after 4 years of constant delays and cost overruns, but even those who support tightening the nation's borders now claim the distraught project just wasn't good enough to warrant its $1 billion current price.

Conclusions

It is concluded that project libre is a very good stage to make a project timeline for a certain project. It is easy to create a schedule in this project management platform by generating a Gantt chart and a work breakdown structure respectively. A project report has been successfully produced in this research study for providing an overwhelming planning approach for initiating a Boeing virtual fence on the USA border so that no expatriates can enter the country for criminal mentality. It is also observed that a critical path is a set of interconnected tasks that have a direct impact on the project's completion deadline. The project as a whole is delayed if any work mostly on the critical path is interrupted. Task dependencies are frequently used to connect the tasks written in this research study and these can comprise the critical path. The project plan is likely to contain a lot of these networks of tasks and when the final item inside this critical path is completed, the project is finished as well.

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