Expanding into new markets

About the company

The core business of SmartTraining Corporation is to deliver educational platforms which provide educational institutions with an option to deliver educational content to their students. At the moment, SmartTraining Corporation is delivering educational software traditionally, using conventional media CD/DVD.

In order to improve the company's offerings and make it more "smart" in accordance with company's name and in accordance with the advance in technology, the company's management decided to use the potential of cloud computing technology, more specifically a cloud computing model called Software as a Service. A key assumption of SaaS model is to provide customers with specific piece of software remotely through their web browsers thus leaving a worry on service maintenance and underlying infrastructure management to the service provider (Amazon Web Services, Inc., 2018).

Management's' decision to develop SaaS business model goes beyond creating an innovative image of the company and encompasses some purely economic reasons such as reducing manufacturing costs and increasing margins for creating the company's software platform.

I was assigned a task to create a strategy describing the organization's plans around the following areas:
● System rollout and transition
● Globalization and resource balance
● Disaster recovery
● Business continuity

The details of the specified plans are provided below.

System rollout and transition plan

In defining rollout and transition plan I will start from the fact that project planning consists of three phases:
1. Initial planning
2. System planning
3. Implementation planning.

Initial planning

Problems, opportunities, threats, and weaknesses

The problems, opportunities, strengths, and weaknesses of the project can be systematized as in the following POWS chart.

Preliminary identification of the goals, scale, and scope of the project

The general project goal is to extend the SmartTraining Corporation business model into a Software as a Service field.

Specific project goals can be systematized as follows:
● To build an educational platform for our clients based on the SaaS model.
● To finish the project within the scheduled timetable
● To finish the project within the scheduled budget
● To finish the project within the same level of quality
● To finish the project within the specified guidelines (Mathis, n.d.).

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