Project Management Assignment: Fresher’s Week Event In QA Higher Education

Question

Task: Summative (Main) Assignment: This assignment is based on a fictitious case study (details to be provided separately) that presents students with a business project scenario. You must take the role of Project Manager and are required to analyse the case study, research the best approach to managing it and develop the following 4 items of project planning documentation, to be submitted as a single, individual report:

1. Sample Project Initiation Document (PID) including:

• budgetary information
• timescales
• objectives
• approach
• key staff, and
• stakeholder analysis (approx. 750 words)

2. Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) with at least 20 items. The WBS should be presented in the form of a table that includes dependencies, milestones, and summary tasks. You are free to deliver this as a Gantt chart (use GanttProject to develop this), but it is not required. Include with this table a referenced paragraph explaining how a WBS can be used to help manage the tasks on a project and give a further paragraph briefly explaining the importance of critical path analysis;

3. Risk register containing at least 10 fully documented risks, including owner, mitigation and contingency actions, pre-and post- action weighting and scores;

4. Short report to the Project Sponsor, the Director of Operations. Your report should contain both of the following:

a. An explanation of the need for quality leadership on the project, and the role that a successful project manager can play – the project manager has to be much more than an administrator or coordinator. Discuss the value of strong leadership on a project and, using examples, explain what happens when this leadership is missing;

b. An analysis and critique of methodologies that might be used to run the case study project, comparing Agile, Waterfall and PRINCE2 methodologies. Explain their strengths and weaknesses and give your recommendation to the sponsor as to which methodology you believe would be best to use. There is no right or wrong answer for this, hence marks will be given on the basis of how well you have explained and justified your decision. As with the other assignment elements, reference to examples and theory is very important.

Answer

Introduction
QAHE had completed a refurbishment of their computing labs and teaching rooms in Manchester, Birmingham and London premises. The new teaching rooms and computing labs will ensure all the students will experience an excellent learning environment. The staffs can quickly gain access to all the latest technology. The college is looking forward to creating a launch event to publicise the new teaching rooms and computing labs. In this assignment, the project manager needs to ensure the development is well planned and must be implemented as per the given deadline. The project manager will be going to use the PMBoK and waterfall methodology as project methodology for this particular event.

Project initiation Document
Budgetary Information
Total fifty thousand pounds had been provided to the project manager by the managing director of QAHE to implement the significant event successfully. The major event will occur in three premises of QAHE which are located in London, Birmingham and Manchester. The total budget that had been provided by the managing director must be invested separately for every three premises. The project manager had to split the total budget amount separately for every three locations(Turner, 2016). If the project manager breaks the given budget, then total expenses for every three areas is 16,700 pounds. The total costs include staffs and students from three different premises. The project manager had invited all the local dignities, create a formal ceremony, setting up legal opportunity to tour the computing labs and teaching rooms. In this particular event, the project manager has to distribute celebratory elements like snacks and beverages to the participants who will be participating in three different premises. After analysing the total expenses required for the event, it could be found that the given budget is feasible.

Timescale
The project manager requires a total of 67 days to make a healthy plan for implementing a significant event in three premises of QAHE. The main event will occur on January 2020, where QA higher education celebrates Fresher’s week. In London premises, the vent will happen on 4th January 2020. In Birmingham premises the event will occur on 5th January and Manchester premises the event will occur on 6th January 2020. The project manager needs to ensure all the activities had been completed as per the given timeline or not.

Objective
Creating goals or objective to implement the event is important for the project manager to create a strong strategy or plan. The project objective that had been selected for the research study are as follows :

• To create formal ceremony in Fresher’s week for both the students and staffs
• To ensure the activities are being implemented according to the given time schedule
• To make promotional strategy for promoting the new computing labs and teaching rooms
• To ensure both the students and staffs will have a great day during the event
• To improve communication between senior and junior students
• To construct a community pride and social cohesion

Approach
The project manager needs to organise the Fresher’s week major event on three premises with the help of staffs and students. The project manager must not involve any teachers because they need to invest their own time in the teaching process. For implementing the event successfully during the fresher’s week, all the project members must be well-coordinated and communicated(Hopkinson, 2017). The project coordinator or manager needs to be hired for managing the decorations of the event. The team members of the game include event coordinator, senior students and staffs. The project manager must assign tasks to the team members according to their capabilities. All the team members had to undergo frequent discussions or meeting to implement the fresher’s week event.

Key Staff
The critical staff of campus QAHE are the project manager, project sponsors, even coordinator, senior students, cleaner and marketing manager. The college staff will provide a tour in QAHE campus to their local dignities and new students. The students will be going to more motivated to improve their grades after checking out the newly refurbished teaching rooms and computing labs. The event coordinator main task is the identification of the best catering service(Nicholas and Steyn, 2017). The event coordinator needs to hire jazz or blues music band for the three premises on a contract basis.The most critical stakeholder for this particular is the project manager who had to control the team members in three premises of QAHE.

Stakeholder Analysis

ID	Description of Risk	Likelihood of Risk	Impact of Risk	Severity	Owner	Mitigation of Risk
1	Presence of Communication gap between the staffs, students and the project managers	Low	Medium	Medium	Students and Staffs	The event coordinator needs to create a communication plan. The plan includes the audiences, frequency and goal for all the students and staffs in three premises (Fewings and Henjewele, 2019). The communication plan will help students and staffs to communicate more easily
2	Staff Priorities are not being set by event coordinator	Medium	Medium	Medium	Manager of the event	If the event manager is not controlling the staff priorities, then the event could not be organised according to the given deadline and strategy created by the manager (Chih and Zwikael,  2015). The students and staff will have negative image about QAHE during the time of the event
3	Definition of  the project schedule  is not explained properly and  the QAHE staffs did not understand the schedule of the project	Medium	High	High	Students and Event Coordinator	If the project timeline provided to the project staffs are not clear by event manager. Then there will be a high failure to implement the event. The project could get delayed as per the chosen time. This particular risk can only be neglected only by providing deadline to each team members to complete each task.
4	Provided budget is not enough to set up an event by the event coordinator	Low	Medium	Low	Project Manager	The event manager plays must control the project activities as per the given budget. The event manager needs to communicate with the project sponsor weekly basis. All the activities they need to be completed as per the given budget.
5	Confusion during implementation of  a Fresher week event due to less clarity in the plan	High	Medium	High	Project Sponsor and Project manager	The event manager must reduce the confusion which can be done by creating a stakeholder analysis plan . With the help of stakeholder analysis plan the staffs and students will able to  know the activities  of each stakeholders who areworking to improve the project tasks.
6	Pressurising the project team members arbitrarily for lowering the duration of the task	High	High	High	Project Manager	The project manager must not pressurise their team members to complete the task before the given deadline because the team members will be going to lose motivation (Meredithet al.,2017). The participation of the team members will get reduced due to the rude behaviour of project manager. IF there is a possibility that team members had completed the task before the given deadline then project manager will have the right to reduce the duration.
7	Project Conflict must be avoided in the exact time	Low	Low	Low	Event Coordinator and Students	Project Conflict will provide a   problem to all the staff and students because it could the completion time of the Fresher’s week event could get delayed. Conflict can reduce total clarity of the project outcome if the conflict is not being reduced . Event managerneeds to set up a leader for every department. The team members will be going to make sure no conflict is present among the team members
8	Addition of more pressure and workload create problem for employees	Low	Medium	Medium	Event Manager and team members	Increasing the workload will provide huge problem to the team members.Conflict among the team members could arise due to high workload. Both students and staffs will get stressed out and demotivated due to high workload (Bourne, 2016). The event manager must provide reward or bonus to make event members more motivated when the total workload of the event is high.
9	Beverages and Snacks got delayed during the project work	Low	Hard	Medium	Event Manager	If the event coordinator fails to distribute the snacks and beverages in time, then the event will create a negative image for students and staffs.Theevent manager must not create conflict among the students, staffs and other invitees. Details must be provided in invitation cards to reduce problems among the staffs and students
10	The local dignities were not taken a special care during  the Fresher’s week event or will not able to participate for some reason	Low	Medium	Medium	Event Manager	The event manager needs to delay the date of the fresher’s week  if they are unable to visit the QAHE campus. Event manager needs to make sure all the chief guests are treated well in fresher’s week event  and enjoy view of the new computing labs and teaching rooms.

 

Work Breakdown Structure

Risk Register

Report to project Sponsor
Requirement of quality project leader
An experienced project leader needs to identify the right external and internal stakeholders. All of these stakeholders will be going to help the project team members to make a successful fresher’s week event. The event manager must segment all the tasks to every team members. According to their abilities or skills, one can able to complete the tasks as per the given time.
An experienced event manager must create a milestone for each activity. It will make sure all the projects are being progressed as per the given project timeline or not. For Fresher’s event, the event manager must create a balanced lifestyle for the team members. Otherwise, the whole team members had to stress themselves while completing the given tasks(Svejvig and Andersen, 2015). An experienced event manager needs to create a communication plan for all the project team members. The project team members need to clarify all the roles which help the project team members for the completion of the project.

Analysis of project methodologies
Waterfall methodology is the project methodology that will be going to help the project manager to execute the fresher’s event. All the participants will be going to participate in the Fresher’s Week event. Finally, the waterfall methodology will be going to help the team members for managing the participants when the Fresher’s Event is occurring on a given day(Hornstein, 2015). The event manager needs to make sure all the staffs and student had received great excitement and enjoyment the Fresher’s week event. Waterfall model is applicable for the fresher’s week event. However, for the complex project, the project manager needs to follow agile methodology. Agile project methodology must be used on sophisticated project methodology because it requires a lot of time and money. However, choosing an advanced project methodology will waste a lot of money and time to manage a simple project. For this reason, waterfall methodology is applicable for managing the simple project because it requires less finance and time for achieving the desired project objectives.

Figure 1 : Waterfall Model
( Source : Serra and Kunc, 2015)

Conclusion
From the overall analysis of the assignment, it could be found that Fresher’s week event is applicable according to the given time and budget of the game. The event manager must assure that the participants will be going to have a great day. All the team members will get motivated when they receive a positive image from the newly refurbished classrooms. The senior students need to guide all the new students and must provide positive views about QAHE campus. The interaction between existing and new students will help the QAHE to achieve high academic grades.

Reference
Bourne, L., 2016. Stakeholder relationship management: a maturity model for organisational implementation. Routledge. Chih, Y.Y. and Zwikael, O., 2015. Project benefit management: A conceptual framework of target benefit formulation. International Journal of Project Management, 33(2), pp.352-362.
Fewings, P. and Henjewele, C., 2019. Construction project management: an integrated approach. Routledge.
Hopkinson, M., 2017. The project risk maturity model: Measuring and improving risk management capability. Routledge.
Hornstein, H.A., 2015. The integration of project management and organizational change management is now a necessity. International Journal of Project Management, 33(2), pp.291-298.
Meredith, J.R., Mantel Jr, S.J. and Shafer, S.M., 2017. Project management: a managerial approach. John Wiley & Sons.
Nicholas, J.M. and Steyn, H., 2017. Project management for engineering, business and technology. Routledge.
Svejvig, P. and Andersen, P., 2015. Rethinking project management: A structured literature review with a critical look at the brave new world. International Journal of Project Management, 33(2), pp.278-290.
Turner, R., 2016. Gower handbook of project management. Routledge.