Reference no: EM132675620

PROJ6002 Project Planning and Budgeting - Laureate International Universities

National Symposium Project

Planning and implementing a national symposium for a society that will draw about 1000 attendees is a major project. As the event is not for profit, the registration fee is $1,250 per attendee for a 3-day symposium with free access to all arranged workshops. The tasks involved in hosting such an event are considerable and involve selecting a program committee, choosing a theme, contacting exhibitors, making local arrangements, planning the program, and on and on. Gold Coast is selected as host city/chapter for the 2020 Annual December Symposium. The objectives for the event are three: (1) to deliver a high-quality, value added program that would be useful and last for years to come, (2) to offer a social and guest program that would reflect well on the host city, and (3) to meet strict financial criteria. The first task after selecting the city and hotel facilities is to put together the project team and chairperson. This includes managers in charge of each of the tracks, the social program, the local arrangements, and all the other details.

The project team needs to organize this event using a functional approach. The Gold Coast officers have most of the primary responsibilities, with members from five other business partners assisting in other duties. Next is the development of the work breakdown structure and the Gantt chart of activity schedules. As shown in Table 1, scheduling all the work for a major event such as this is an overwhelming effort. For the 2020 Symposium, the technical program offered 22 workshops composed of 70 technical papers, special panel discussions, and case studies.

The technical tracks include engineering and construction, pharmaceuticals, utilities, software, automotive, R&D, defence, education, and manufacturing. The workshops include sessions on preparing for professional certifications, learning about Taguchi concepts of statistical quality control, and future practices. All of these also require careful scheduling. The vendor program includes exhibits by dozens of vendors and a large number of showcase sessions for in-depth demonstrations of their wares. The social program includes a golf tournament, numerous social activities to meet with colleagues, tours of Pittsburgh's attractions, and a wide variety of entertainment opportunities. All in all, a symposium is as difficult a project as many firms face in their competitive markets.

Your tasks:
This case study provides you with an opportunity of drawing on your acquired project planning, scheduling, budgeting and quality management skills and materials covered in this course. Overall, you are responsible for developing a project scope statement document, a project schedule, a cost management plan and a quality management plan for the case study.
Specific tasks:

A group of maximum 2 students is required to perform the following tasks in addition to the descriptions in assessment briefs.

Assessment 1-Part B

1-1) Scope management planning
• Describe the entire scope of the work including project background, a list of specific project goals, deliverables, constraints and assumptions, and milestones.
• Create Work Breakdown Structure (at least three levels) for the project.

1-2) Project scheduling
• Construct an original Gantt chart for the project using project activities given in Table 1.
• Conduct a critical path analysis and carefully apply the 3-point estimate technique on identified critical activities to develop an estimated project schedule. It is assumed that the critical activities will remain the same in a risk-free environment. On the other hand, without an appropriate risk management, the durations of critical activities creep by 40%
• Perform a final schedule analysis using the results obtained from project scheduling conducted in the previous stages.

Assessment 2-Part B

2-1) Cost management planning
• Apply a diverse set of cost estimating tools to justify the cost of activities

• Develop and aggregate the cost of resources needed to complete each activity and determine the detailed budget of the project. Your cost estimate must incorporate at least two appropriate resources given in Table 3 for each group of the given activities. Both cost estimate and a budget baseline must be produced in alignment with the estimated project schedule.
• Develop and clearly demonstrate the resource loading and cost management planning components in your Cost Management Plan.
• The cost management plan must include Earn Value Analysis (EVA) as a compulsory cost control tool to be utilised along with other cost control tools in this project. The application of EVA must be clearly demonstrated.

2-2) Quality management planning
• Develop the quality management planning components of your Quality Management Plan.
• Apply a quality management framework to ensure the project performance is consistent with the quality management plan.

Attachment:- Project Planning and Budgeting.rar