Project Costing - Final Assignment
The Circumstances
You are employed by a company in Australia and the CEO has decided that the company should bid for work in a new area of business. The CEO requires a briefing document to outline the risks of contracting for work in the new area, recommendations to minimise these risks where appropriate, and the anticipated costs, resources and timing to prepare a typical bid for a contract in this new area of business.
What Is Required In This Assignment?
You are to prepare a report to the CEO which will go to the company board as a briefing document. The briefing document must have sufficient background supporting data to give the CEO confidence about the result, but only the executive summary will go to the board.
The report will contain the following parts:
1. An executive summary to go to the Board.
2. A risk assessment summarising the major risks of contracting this work and your recommendations on how to reduce these risks.
3. An estimate of the costs to prepare a bid for a contract of this type and value. The estimate is to be summarised in a table by department (rows) and work phase (columns & total).
4. A schedule (prepared in MS Project 2010 or after) for the bid preparation. The Schedule is to identify the work phase and department for each activity.
5. An appendix summarising your background research on three projects.
(A summary is required for each project and articles should be referenced rather than printed out. The summary is to focus on the risks encountered and how they were managed.)
Report on Business Opportunities
Briefing to the Company Board on Bidding for work in a new area of Business
Frequently Asked Questions about the Final Assignment
1. What form should the executive summary take?
As with all executive summaries (see the peer review assignment #2) it should have:
- An introduction showing who the report is addressed to, the context (describing how & why it was prepared) and what the report is about.
- A body summarising the results
- A conclusion stating the main issues & decisions required
2. How do I decide what risks to put in the before and after risk matrix?
The start of a risk assessment is a brainstorm to decide all the reasonably foreseeable risks. For each risk you then determine an order of magnitude $ estimate of the consequences and multiply this by an estimated probability such as 1/10,000. The result is a probable value which can be used to sort the list from largest (most significant) to smallest (least significant). Put the top 12 in your risk management plan. Then work out a strategy to manage and minimise the risks for the top 5 and put these results in the before and after risk matrix.
3. How do I decide what costs to put in the estimate of the cost to prepare a bid for a contract in the chosen area of business?
You must make you own estimate of the time and work hours required for each of the activities listed in 2.1. You will not be marked on the accuracy of any estimate but will be assessed on the reasonableness and logic or how you put it together.
4. What are the site visits referred to in the activities list? These are items 4 and 14 of the activity list.
Attachment:- Assignment.rar