CASE STUDY

One of your team is the director of external affairs for a national not-for-profit medical research center that does research on diseases related to aging. The centres work depends on funding from multiple sources, including the public, individual estates and grants from corporations, foundations and the federal government.

Your department prepares an annual report of the centers accomplishments and financial status for the board of directors. It is mostly text with a few charts and tables, all black and white, with a simple cover. It is voluminous and dry reading. It is inexpensive to produce other than the effort to pull together the content, which requires time to request and expedite information from the centers other departments.

At the last board meeting, the board members suggested the annual report be upscale into a document that could be used for marketing and promotional purposes. They want you to mail the next annual report to the centers various stakeholders, past donors, and targeted high-potential future donors. The board feels that such a document is needed to get the center in the same league with other large not-for-profit organizations with which it feels it competes for donations and funds. The board feels that the annual report could be used to inform these stakeholders about the advances the center is making in its research efforts and its strong fiscal management for effectively using the funding and donations it receives.

You will need to produce a shorter, simpler, easy-to-read annual report that shows the benefits of the centers research and the impact on peoples lives. You will include pictures from various hospitals, clinics and long-term care facilities that are using the results of the centers research. You also will include testimonials from patients and families who have benefited from the centers research. The report must be eye-catching. It needs to be multicolor, contain a lot of pictures and easy-to-understand graphics, in addition be written in a style that can be understood by the average adult potential donor.

This is a significant undertaking for your department, which includes three other staff members. You will have to contract out some of the activities and may have to travel to several medical facilities around the country to take photos and get testimonials. You will also need to put the design, printing and distribution out to bid to various contractors to submit proposals and prices to you. You estimate that approximately five million copies need to be printed and mailed.

It is now September 2023, The board asks you to come to its next meeting in April 2023 to present a detailed plan, schedule and budget for how you will complete the project. The board wants the annual report in the mail by July 1, 2023. The centers fiscal year ends March 31, 2023 and its financial statements should be available by May 2, 2023. However, the nonfinancial information for the report can start to be pulled together right after the Aprils board meeting.

Fortunately, you are taking a project management course at Durham College and see this as an opportunity to apply what you have been learning. You know that this is a big project and that the board has high expectations. You want to be sure you meet their expectations and get them to approve the budget that you will need for this project. However, they will only do that if they are confident that you have a detailed plan for how you will get it all done. You and your staff have twelve weeks to prepare a plan to present to the board during the second week of April 2020. If approved, your team will have from May 1, 2020 to June 30, 2023 to implement the plan and complete the project.

Your staff is composed of the members of your assigned group. In addition to the project manager, you have among you a marketing specialist, writer/editors and a staff assistant whose hobby is photography (pretend she/he is going to college part-time in the evenings to earn a degree in photojournalism and has won several local photography contests).

FINAL WRITTEN ASSIGNMENT BASED ON FOREGOING CASE STUDY

1) Establish the project objective and make a list of assumptions about the project.

2) Develop a work breakdown structure.

3) Prepare a WBS (Work Breakdown Structure) Dictionary, that includes a list of the specific activities that need to be performed to accomplish the project objective

4) Perform a PERT analysis on each activity to determine its duration.

5) Create a network diagram that shows the sequence and dependent relationships of all the activities.

6) Perform a forward and backward pass on your network diagram, showing early/late starts and finishes, as well as slack time for each task.

7) Determine and identify your critical path.

8) For each activity, determine the person who should be responsible.

9) Develop a responsibility assignment matrix.

10) Estimate the cost for each activity.

11) Determine the total budgeted cost for the project.

12) Prepare a budgeted cost by week table.

REQUIRED DOCUMENTS (see rubric for additional detail)

1) Project summary scope statement

2) Work breakdown structure

3) Documented PERT analysis per task

4) Network diagram

5) Responsibility assignment matrix (RACI)

6) Project budget