Plan de gestión de proyecto para el desarrollo de un sistema de publicación electrónica e impresa de indicadores económicos en La Nación

Abstract

La Nación is a Costa Rican newspaper of national circulation, which was founded in 1946. Since 1995, it has also been involved in the distribution of digital news through its website nacion.com. Even though La Nación maintains strong leadership within the mass media industry in this country, the Internet boom has forced the company to consolidate its convergence between print and digital news. In this context, various opportunities for the formulation and implementation of multimedia convergence projects have emerged. Along with this, important challenges in the field of the professional administration of projects have also been detected. An instance of a project closely linked to this multimedia convergence but clearly uncertain regarding its objectives, scope, resources, and duration is the creation of a digital space at nacion.com intended to display the main economic and financial indicators at a national and international level. This research suggests that, by following the Initiating and Planning stages of the professional approach contained in the PMBOK ® Guide, it is possible to substantially improve the prospects for success of La Nación’s project, called Economic LN Indicators, mostly in terms of objectives, scope and duration. This research is part of a descriptive and cross-sectional graduation project, whose main objective was to design a project management plan for LN Economic indicators where, initially, different areas such as scope management, duration, human resources, and communications could be integrated. To achieve this, the project was designed according to the Initiating and Planning stages of the 2008 PMBOK ® Guide. This not only involved the development of the knowledge areas established by this guide, but also required the use of highly recommended technical tools such as matrices, interviews, expert judgment, among others. Among its main conclusions, this study highlights the importance of planning the scope and duration of a given project, not only to estimate its duration and define its deliverables, but also as a source of input and feedback for other processes, namely resource management, communications, and quality, just to mention a few. As a general recommendation, this project emphasizes the need to begin structuring a new methodology, or best practices framework, for project administration at La Nación.