60903   Project Management for Science   UTS: FACULTY of SCIE Assessment 1 (25%) – Individual Assignment – Spring 2017

 

Task 1: Project Assessment Report (15 out of 25 marks)

 

You have just been employed by a dynamic company as a project manager and your first task is to assess the existing project experiencing delays and lack of overall progress. You are expected to collect the available information, set some realistic expectations with regards to completion and inform the company director.

 

This project has 15 activities, labelled A through O and is listed in the table below. The table indicates the immediate predecessors of each activity along with each activity’s expected duration, in days.

 

You managed to collect the following information on project activities:

 

Activity	Description	Predecessors	Duration (days)
A	Perform needs analysis	None	10
B	Develop specifications	A	6
C	Select server	B	6
D	Select software	B	12
E	Select cables	C	4
F	Purchase equipment	D, E	3
G	Develop user manuals	C, D	6
H	Wire offices	F	12
I	Set up server	F	3
J	Develop training program	G	14
K	Install software	I	4
L	Connect network	H, K	3
M	Train users	J, L	8
N	Test and debug system	L	12
O	Get management acceptance	M, N	4

 

Your output to the director should be in a form of a formal status report. The report should include a title, background information, objectives, methodology used (diagrams, if any used) with expected results and recommendations. Any references used should be clearly documented.

 

There are some specific components that you are expected to include in your report:

1. Project network diagram.
2. Project schedule and duration
3. Critical path identification – highlighting the tasks that cannot be delayed

The following change scenarios need to be considered and questions answered:

4. What would be the consequence of delaying the start of activity C only, by two days?
5. What will happen to the project duration time if the duration of only the activity D will have to be increased by one day?
6. In this project, activities C and D can be done concurrently. Suppose instead that activity C is an immediate predecessor of activity D. (the same employees to be used due to cost restrictions, and these employees can perform only one activity at a time.) Will this affect the project completion time you obtained in part #2? Will there be a change in the critical path?
7. Two new activities are being added to the original list: P and Q. Activity P moves selected employees to temporary offices while installation occurs, and activity Q moves them back after installation is finished. Activity P has immediate predecessors D and E, immediate successor H, and duration three days. Activity Q has immediate predecessor L, immediate successor O, and duration three days. You can assume that activity E is still an immediate successor of activity C. That is, it doesn’t need to wait for activity D to finish. Will these changes affect the duration of the project and/or the critical path you obtained in question #2?
8. Due to work commitments employees cannot go for training on the schedule date expected in part #2. Training of users, activity M cannot start until three weeks after the start of activity J, which is the development of training program. What effect will this have on the project?

 

Task 2: Work Breakdown Structure (10 out of 25 marks)

 

Consider the following scenario:

 

You are a member of a youth soccer club that helps bring recreational players to a higher level of competition and preparing them for the Olympic Development Program and/or A-League tournaments. The club currently has 123 boys and girls (ranging in age from 5 to 16).

 

The club’s board of directors decided to sponsor a winter invitational soccer tournament to generate revenue. Given the boom in youth soccer, hosting winter tournaments has become a popular method for raising funds. The club needs funds to refurbish and expand the number of soccer fields in their home ground. Funds would also be used to provide partial or full scholarships to youths who need financial assistance in paying the annual club membership fee of $450.

 

You are a soccer enthusiast and a long-time associate of the club who had been elected as the tournament director and is responsible for organising the club’s first winter tournament. A committee meeting planned for a two-hour duration, was held on a Thursday evening at 6 pm, after you election to gather the members’ opinion.

 

You started the meeting by having everyone introduce themselves and by proclaiming how excited you were that the club was going to sponsor its own tournament. You then suggested that the committee brainstorm what needed to be done to pull off the event; you would record their ideas on a flipchart.

 

What emerged was a free-for-all of ideas and suggestions. One member immediately stressed the importance of having qualified referees and spent several minutes describing in detail how his son’s team was robbed in a poorly officiated championship game. This was followed by other stories of injustice on the soccer field. Another member suggested that they needed to quickly contact the local colleges to see if they could use their fields.

 

The committee spent more than 30 minutes talking about how they should screen teams and how much they should charge as an entry fee. An argument broke out over whether they should reward the winning teams in each age bracket with medals or trophies. Many members felt that medals were too cheap, while others thought the trophies would be too expensive. Someone suggested that they seek local corporate sponsors to help fund the tournament.

 

The proposed sale of tournament T-shirts and sweatshirts was followed by a general critique of the different shirts parents had acquired at different tournaments. One member advocated that they recruit an artist he knew to develop a unique silk-screen design for the tournament. The meeting adjourned 30 minutes late with only half of the members remaining until the end. Jane drove home with seven sheets of ideas and a headache.

 

You realised that organising this tournament would be a big project and will need proper planning. The first thing you wanted to do was to develop a WBS for the project.

 

You need to do the following:

 

1. Make a list of the major deliverables for the project and use them to develop a draft of the work breakdown structure for the tournament that contains at least three levels of detail.

 

2. Provide short answers to the following questions:
   1. How would developing a WBS alleviate some of the problems that occurred during the first meeting and help you organise and plan the project?
   2. Where can you find additional information to help you develop a WBS for the tournament?
   3. How could you and your committee members use the WBS to generate cost estimates for the tournament? Why would this be useful information?

 

Submission instructions:

• Assessment document template provided
• Submit your file to UTS Online
• You can submit your assignment as PDF or MSWord
• Any figures, diagrams, charts etc. need to be embedded in the document or inserted as pictures if not easily included in its original format (for example MS Project output)
• Clearly name your submission file, using the following format:

Assessment 1 – Surname Name – Submission date, for example:

Assessment 1 – John Smith – 08092017.pdf

 

 

 

 

 

 Assessment criteria:

Criteria	Weight
Description – presentation and style	10%
Description – literacy	10%
Description – knowledge	10%
Description – evidence of enquiry and use of scientific method	20%
Analysis – application	10%
Analysis – deduction, inference, making connections within the subject	6.66%
Personal meaning / impact – knowledge	10%
Personal meaning / impact – making connections outside the subject	6.66%
Action identified	6.66%
Evidence of action taken	10%
TOTAL	100%

 

 

Mark distribution across the assessment:

 

Part	Assessment Component	Mark Value
Part 1	Professional style, structure and format of the report	3
	Coverage of all elements expected in the report	3
	Quality of responses to each question	6
	Recommendations/advice to the director	3
Part 2	List of deliverables – clarity and relevance	2
	WBS logic and content	2
	Short answers to questions	6
	TOTAL	25

 

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