Project Planning & Management Group Assignment

Question 1 -

In your team you should conduct an assessment of the following:

a) What are your own individual skills?

b) What do you each want to get out of this course?

c) What are the complementary skills in your group?

e) How are you going to work effectively as a team - explain any mechanisms or team standards that will you employ to ensure the team works effectively?

Instructions: Use the spreadsheet in the Assignment 01 folder (available in .xls formats) to identify the group member's contact details and how the group will disseminate information, store and track documents. In addition, the skills of each member towards the team skill set should be clearly identified.

A separate section should provide a brief report (not more than 4 pages) identifying the aspirations of each member in terms of outcomes from the course and discuss how these aspirations and skills are complementary or mismatched to the other group members. Include a paragraph for each member.

Question 2 -

Find details of two successful and two unsuccessful projects and briefly review them as indicated in the instructions below. Try to ensure they are relatively recent, certainly nothing before 2011.

Why does your team feel they were successful or unsuccessful? Look at the PMBOK areas of project management.

Using reference to the PMBOK knowledge areas, identify the areas of strength of the successful projects and the areas of weakness in the unsuccessful projects.

Instructions: Use web search engines to conduct a search for recent news items concerning projects. Produce a report that identifies four projects (2 successful and 2 unsuccessful). The report for each project should be approximately one half page to one page for each project. For each project indicate the purpose and level of success or failure. In your report for each project discuss the reasons you believe the project has been successful or unsuccessful. Limit the answers to this question to 4 pages maximum. Penalty applies if page limitation is exceeded.

Question 3 -

You work for the MakeBelieve company, which expects to earn at least 20 per cent on its investments. You have to choose between two similar projects. Below is the cash flow information for each project. Your analysts predict that the inflation rate will be a stable 3 percent over the next seven years. Which of the two projects would you fund if the decision is based only on financial information? Why? (Hint: to answers this question, you should compute the NPV, ROI & PayBack analysis for each project)

Instructions: Use a spreadsheet to answer this question and then paste the completed spreadsheet into your final document.

Question 4 -

The Custom Bike Company has set up a weighted scoring matrix for evaluation of potential projects. Below are five projects under consideration.

a. Using the scoring matrix below, which project would you rate highest? Lowest?

b. If the weight for "Strong Sponsor" is changed from 2.0 to 5.0, will the project selection change? What are the three highest weighted project scores with this new weight?

c. Why is it important that the weights mirror critical strategic factors?

Question 5 -

NASA has a contract from Australia Government to produce 10 advanced satellites to support worldwide connectivity and telephony system for remote locations in Australia. NASA will develop and produce the ten units and it has estimated that the R&D costs (one time cost) will be $15,000,000. Material costs are expected to be $500,000 per satellite. They have estimated the design and production of the first satellite will require 100,000 labour hours and an 80 per cent learning curve is expected. Skilled labour cost is $300 per hour. Desired profit for all projects is 25 per cent of total costs.

Look at Table A5.1 & A5.2 from your textbook for the learning curves unit values. Show your calculations for all solutions (if necessary indicate any assumptions or justifications required for your answers)

a. How many labour hours should the tenth satellite require?

b. How many labour hours for the whole project of tenth satellites?

c. What price should NASA ask for the project to cover all costs and profit? Why?

d. Near the end of the project UK Government has requested a cost estimate for four satellites identical to those NASA has already produced. What price will NASA quote them? Justify the price.

Attachment:- Assignment Instruction.rar