CMGT 410 Project Management UoP

You have been tasked with the project of organizing a company offsite 2-day training session in which people are brought in from different parts of the country. This entails everything from preparation, accommodations, and facilities.

Create a Microsoft® Project file (no other format will be accepted) for the project that includes the following:

• Create a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) that includes all project tasks (hierarchically grouped) and durations.
• Establish task precedence relationships.
• Show milestones and deliverables.

Please see my comments highlighted below.  Please remember that only an MS Project file format will be accepted, any other format will be an automatic zero.

• Create a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) that includes all project tasks (hierarchically grouped) and durations.  This means that a task list needs to be created in order to implement the training event that each of you wrote a memo about during week 1.  As you create this task list, please review the typical project management life cycle phases and use those phases in creating the summary tasks for the project.  A summary task in MS Project is basically a header for all of the tasks indented under it.  The task list created under this bullet must be comprehensive, meaning that I would be looking for a task list that includes tasks for creating the project plan, the WBS, having design reviews, etc..
• Establish task precedence relationships.  This means that there are task dependencies among tasks, for example task 2 cannot start until task 1 gets completed.  This can be easily done in MS Project by establishing predecessor or successor relationships.
• Show milestones and deliverables.  This means that in order for the project status to be determined certain milestones need to be established.  In MS Project a milestone gets created when the duration of the task is set to zero.  Also, and this is part of the task list, I expect to see a task that will basically produce the associated deliverable under its appropriate phase.  

Hope this helps.  

Below are more suggestions for developing the MS Project file for this week’s submission.  If you have questions, please do not hesitate to ask me.

Planning ( 1st Summary Task )

This phase should include tasks for planning the event.  At this point you would need tasks for generating the project plan as well as the WBS.  Also some tasks for negotiating/creating an estimate and another for requesting the approval for funding. As part of this phase I would also include a task for negotiating buy in from all managers.  A milestone for this phase could be completion of the project plan with managers buy in.

Requirements Definition (2nd Summary task) it is during this phase that the requirements are formally captured in some sort of document.  But before the requirements get captured they need to be properly defined.  So, I would recommend having several tasks for finding out how many managers are attending, negotiating accommodations, doing travel arrangements, facilities etc.  Once these requirements get solidified then this phase should include tasks for creating the requirement document, validating the document with the customer, another task for updating the document. The completion of the requirement document should be the milestone and the deliverable for this phase. 

Since this is a small and simple project I would recommend going directly into the Design (3rd Summary task) phase.  For this phase you would need tasks for creating the training products, or for hiring a company to perform the training.

Execution (4th summary task) at this stage is when training is getting executed.  You could have a task for when training is going to occur, and another task for evaluating the results of training.  A milestone could be the completion of the training event and the deliverables are the training products and the training evaluations, perhaps the generation of lessons learned file, etc.