Project Management Assignment: Project Planning For Seven Seeds Coffee Roasters

Question

Task:
Individually, in this project management assignment, you are required to prepare an eight-page project management plan for a company. In analysing the organisational factors that promote effective project management, students will also consider factors that may give rise to ethical compromises.

Answer

Executive Summary
The project explored in this project management assignment has been based on the new office opening of the Seven Seeds Coffee Roasters in Canberra, Australia. This project has developed a business profile at the initial stage with the main operations and products of the company. After that project scope and main purpose of developing this project has been identified. This study has identified the budget and important cost factors and monitoring activities that the company need to perform for effective project success. This study has also identified the team building and payment structure for the employees in the new office with the working schedule. After that, project resources and procurement activities for the suppliers of Coffee beans have been described in detail. This study has also included work breakdown with the main operations, time plan and specific works for the new office in the selected location and other diagrams have also been attached in this study. This study has divided major risks into internal and external risks for the project and company with their likelihood and severity levels have been projected in this study. Results of this study has been indicated to the fact that Seven Seeds Coffee Roasters is quite equipped and ready for the new office expansion project for their Coffee and other services.

Overview of the company
Situated in Melbourne, Australia, the Seven Seeds Coffee Roasters is a micro roaster, retailer, and café-based company. This organization has been doing business in sourcing, importing, reasting and sell best possible coffees all over Australia and overseas (sevenseeds.com.au, 2021). This company target to manage close communication with the coffee beans suppliers and producers as well as regularly travel to different origin to work on acquiring best coffee. The café serves the brewed and roasted coffee to the consumers. The essentials for the business operation include funding needs for the new office. The opening cost will be $131,500 and the capital is calculated $101,500. The resources or supply of raw materials would be locally managed.

Operations of the company
The main products or offerings of this company include Roast-to-order Coffee, Seven Seeds Merch, Brew Kit and Café. The famous products in this company are Beef Brisket Hash, Waffle, Mocha, Soy Latte, French Toast, Hot Chocolate, and others. Around $50 is charged for two consumers per servings (sevenseeds.com.au, 2021). This company is also very active in online deliveries and partnerships with popular online selling platforms such as Amazon. This company also directly sell their products to the consumers through online ordering facilities and order over $100 will get delivered to homes.

Project purpose
This project has been prepared for the decisions of Seven Seeds Coffee Roasters to open a new office in Canberra. The company has been targeting to attract regular consumers in the Canberra area for the take-out and deliveries in the initial year of their opening (Bell & Ross, 2018). This project will also focus on providing the consumers with best roasted coffee at an affordable cost, and offer effective customer services, measured by minimum five percent annual sales increase and consumer complaints low than one percent.

Project scope
The new office opening project scopes are listed below;

• Effective product line and services, which would develop and maintain consumer loyalty
• Seven Seeds Coffee Roasters new office location would assure higher business visibility and higher flow of consumers
• Effective management capability to efficiently running a common café atmosphere
• The commitment to continuous development and total quality services

Opening new office budget
After discussing many months searching for a good location, the Seven Seeds Coffee Roasters has decided to lease a suitable commercial space in Canberra. The new office opening capital would be utilized for regulatory costs, kitchen inventories, tools, packings and ither materials with insurance, rent level, marketing on hand at the new office opening, as detailed in the organization detail segment of this planning (Ho, 2018). The company has calculated total new office opening expenses around $131,500. The numbers in this current project and the investment are meant for reflecting these calculations. Seven Seeds Coffee Roasters capital would be $101,500.

Table 1: Cost table
(Source: Created by the learner)

Monitoring Activities
Project monitoring suggests to the procedure of keeping track of all project associated metrics involving team performance, operation duration, underlying important problem as well as taking steps important for making sure that the project is as per scope, on budget and the timeline (Galante, La Fata & Passannanti, 2019).

This new office opening project for Seven Seeds Coffee Roasters will follow the internal monitoring process. Core activities and particular operations are listed below;

Table 2: New office internal monitoring process
(Source: Created by the learner)

Project management methodology
This project will follow the waterfall methodology for finishing all tasks. The stages are listed below;

Figure 1: The waterfall methodology for the project
(Source: Andrei et al., 2019)

As per the above framework, this project will follow the same sequence in finishing all the project (new office opening) related tasks. It could be said that the business owner will develop the project case or the specific needs of the new office in Canberra. After that, the target market in the area will be identified and it has been identified that the business or café concept will follow the same concept in Melbourne (Suhud et al., 2020). There will be no change in the new office concept. This has been done for the convenience of the customers and for the online consumers who are used to the old service and product concept of the company. After that, new office opening works will be done. In this regard, the resource management works will be done. After finishing all these works, opening of the new office would be done in the selected area. Maintenance process will be a continuous process and the maintenance surveillance will go on for one year of opening the new office.

Project resources
Under project resources, human resource planning and facilities analysis will be done.

Facilities for the new office
The Seven Seeds Coffee Roasters’ chosen location is very effective, offering higher visibility, higher traffic, as well as a higher flowing of consumers wishing to stop at the café. As per, the rent, which was considered for in this planning is high than in other places of this city. Other benefits of the selected location involve:

• Good place for parking, extra storage and garages exists
• Effective central location with easily accessibility to main destinations, transport, and freeways (Melton & Meier, 2017)
• Shortage commute to main staff in Canberra
• Higher flow of walkers
• A current commercial area after the pandemic situation where many consumers could be attached by the café at the centre

Human resources
The staff planning suggests the requirement for bolstering the skills to reach the positioning plan of the new office. Seven Seeds Coffee Roasters would include the below employee:

• Manage in the new office
• Coffee makers
• Two main kitchen staff
• Part-timers

As the previous locations, the team of seven capable staff will work in this new office. Working as a team is important for the success of this new office. The company identified that HR are Seven Seeds Coffee Roasters’ most significant asset (sevenseedsroasters.com, 2021). The staffing policy will also focus on identifying. training, inspiring and rewarding staff to create staff loyalty as well as develop performance.

Figure 2: Staff plan
(Source: Created by the learner)

Project team building
As the café would be open from Monday to Saturday from 10 AM to 8 PM, the team of 7 could operate efficiently only through applying alternative working time, which will take account busiest time during day, the time required for preparing and serving coffee prior opening, as 40 hours a week (sevenseedsroasters.com, 2021). Additional to payment, significant bonuses and incentives will be involved in the employment contract, which would be utilized for rewarding staff performance, on the pay-for-performance based. The effectiveness of this planning is to develop productivities and lower staff burden in the new office’s operating costs; while managing effective staff involvement in the service success.

Figure 3: Staff working time plan
(Source: Created by the learner)

Procurement management
Under the five stages of procurement management, Seven Seeds Coffee Roasters will follow specific matters that are listed below;

Table 3: Procurement planning process
(Source: Created by the learner)

Work Breakdown Structure

Figure 4: Work Breakdown structure for new office opening project
(Source: Created by the Learner)

The milestone scope statement is listed below;

Table 4: Milestone scope for the project
(Source: Created by the learner)

Time and action planning for the project

Table 5: Timeline planning for the project
(Source: Created by the learner)

Gantt Chart

Figure 5: Gantt Chart
(Source: Created by the Learner)

A scheduling flowchart
Critical path

Table 6: Activities and sequence chart
(Source: Created by the learner)

Figure 6: Critical path for the project
(Source: Created by the Learner)

Network diagram

Figure 7: Network diagram for the project
(Source: Created by the Learner)

Risk assessment matrix

Table 7: Risks in this project
(Source: Created by the Learner)

Table 8: Risks and impacts on the project
(Source: Created by the Learner)

PM activities are listed below;

• Assigning tasks to the project management team members as per their skills
• Calculating and developing the needed human and material resources for new office opening
• Reporting progress to the company CEO on a weekly basis
• The project manager should control overall project execution inputs and outputs

References
Andrei, B. A., Casu-Pop, A. C., Gheorghe, S. C., & Boiangiu, C. A. (2019). A study on using waterfall and agile methods in software project management. Journal Of Information Systems & Operations Management, 125-135.

Bell, E. K., & Ross, T. (2018). Canberra centre. Artichoke, (64), 52.

de Araújo, M. C. B., Alencar, L. H., & de Miranda Mota, C. M. (2017). Project procurement management: A structured literature review. International Journal of Project Management, 35(3), 353-377.

Galante, G. M., La Fata, C. M., & Passannanti, G. (2019). Project monitoring by dynamic statistical control charts. The Journal of Modern Project Management, 7(3).

Gregory, J. (2020). Newbies in the Cafe: Lessons from behind the counter. Judy Gregory.

Ho, A. T. K. (2018). From performance budgeting to performance budget management: theory and practice. Public Administration Review, 78(5), 748-758.

Kristina, S., & Wijaya, B. M. (2017, December). Risk management for food and beverage industry using Australia/New Zealand 4360 Standard. In IOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering (Vol. 277, No. 1, p. 012025). IOP Publishing.

Melton, E. K., & Meier, K. J. (2017). For the want of a nail: The interaction of managerial capacity and human resource management on organizational performance. Public Administration Review, 77(1), 118-130.

Seven Seeds Coffee Roasters, Melbourne. Seven Seeds. (2021). Retrieved 2 February 2021, from https://sevenseeds.com.au/.

Seven Seeds Coffee Roasters. Seven Seeds Coffee Roasters. (2021). Retrieved 2 February 2021, from https://sevenseedsroasters.com/.

Suhud, U., Allan, M., Wibowo, S. F., Sabrina, E., & Willson, G. (2020). Measuring customer satisfaction of a café and coffee shop colony at a traditional market. Journal of Foodservice Business Research, 23(1), 78-94.

Appendix
Customer profile suggestion for Seven Seeds Coffee Roasters