Assignment: Project Scheduling and Cost Outline

Overview

Governmental and nongovernmental acquisition projects each have their own set of challenges, including extra regulatory activities. The basic project management scheduling and cost principles still apply. Cost and earned value analysis play an important role, just as they would in any project, to keep an acquisition project on track. In this course, you are asked to develop a Acquisition Project Scheduling and Cost Management Plan that allows you to select and integrate scheduling, performance, and cost-related tools to enhance the overall scheduling and cost control of an acquisition project. You will select a project that you may have developed in a previous class or a known project in an organization that is an acquisition-type project to create this plan for.

Throughout this course, you will be working on developing several components of the final Key Assignment. Additional information and the deliverables for each Individual Project will be provided in the assignment description for this project.

In this first Individual Project, you are asked to develop the outline of the sections that will be included in the Acquisition Project Scheduling and Cost Management Plan document and a draft of a proposal to submit to your instructor. The other information you will include is a high-level description of the project that you will be developing for a small-acquisition project.

You will also be setting up the final Key Assignment outline that you will add to each week. The combined Individual Project (IP) assignments will be your final Key Assignment deliverable.

Project Selection

The first step will be to select a project for which you want to develop a Acquisition Project Scheduling and Cost Management plan. This project will be used as the basis for each of the assignments throughout the course and should conform to the following guidelines:

• Nontrivial: The selected project candidate should reflect a real-life project.

• Domain knowledge: You will be applying knowledge of this acquisition project to address assignments related to scheduling and cost.

Select a project that fits these requirements, and submit your proposal to your instructor before proceeding further with the assignments in the course. Approval should be sought within the first few days of the course. Your instructor will tell you how to submit this proposal and what notification will be given for project approval.

Length: Word document with 10 total pages, including empty sections; 600-900 word

• There should be a project description and deliverables for the selected project.

• You should discuss what types of cost tools and techniques they would utilize to perform the initial estimates they are using to monitor the project's progress.

• You should also cover what each of the following items is and provide one for their specific project:

o Gantt chart
o Program evaluation and review technique (PERT) chart
o Critical path method (CPM)

• Finally, discuss what some of the key schedule influencers are and how they will handle them.

Instructor's Comments:

The project deliverables are the following:

• Submit your project proposal to your instructor for approval.
• Acquisition Project Scheduling and Cost Management Plan document shell

o Use Word
o Title page

- Course number and name
- Project name
- Your name
- Date

o Table of Contents (TOC)

- Use an autogenerated TOC.
- This should be on a separate page.
- This should be a maximum of 3 levels deep.
- Be sure to update the fields of the TOC so that it is up-to-date before submitting your project.

o Section headings (create each heading on a new page with "TBD" as the content, except for sections listed under "New Content" below)

- Project Outline
- Cost, Schedule, and Technical Performance Management
- Management of Small Projects
- Acquisition Project Guidelines
- Costing Methods and Tools
- Earned Value Management System
- Overall Cost and Schedule Performance

• New content to be inserted in document shell

o Project Outline

- Give a brief description of the project.
- Discuss the overall project deliverable.
- The material can be taken from approved proposal submitted to instructor, and this will serve as the draft for the proposal.
- Be sure this project is approved by the instructor.

o Cost, Schedule, and Technical Performance

- Discuss cost techniques both in determining initial estimates and in monitoring and controlling them throughout the life of the project.
- Determine the project schedule for the acquisition component of the overall project and include a copy of it.
- Develop the program evaluation and review technique (PERT) and critical path method (CPM) for this Key Assignment acquisition project, and include copies of those charts in this section.
- Describe all of the key schedule influencers that can impact a schedule positively or negatively and how you would handle them.