Running Case

You have been selected as the project manager for the Global Treps project. You helped to run a local shark tank like event at your college last year as part of a class project, so you have a general idea of what is involved. The schedule goal is six months, and the budget is $120,000. You favorite professor, Dr. K., and a few of her associates have agreed to fund the project. Your strengths are your organizational and leadership skills.

You are a senior, live on-campus, and get free room and board by being a resident assistant in your dorm. Bobby, a computer whiz who funded a lot of his college expenses by building websites, will be your main technical guy on the project. He goes to your college and lives off-campus. Three other people will form your core project team: Kim, a new college grad now working for a non-profit group in Vietnam; Ashok, a business student in India, and Alfreda, a student in the U.S. planning to visit her home town in Ethiopia for two months in a few months. You will hold most meetings virtually, but you can meet face-to-face with Bobby and Dr. K. as needed. You have all known each other for at least a year and are excited to make this project a success.

You and your team members will do the work part-time while you finish school or work at other jobs, but you can use up to $50,000 total to pay yourselves. You estimate that you will need another $30,000 for travel expenses, $20,000 for hardware and software, and the other $20,000 will go toward organizing events, consultants, legal/business fees, etc.

Your goal is develop a fully functioning website and test it by holding four events in four different countries. You'll make improvements to the site after those events, develop plans to scale it up, and recommend how to transition the project results into a successful business.

Recall from Chapter 4 that this system would include the following capabilities:

• Provide guidelines and templates for running a shark tank type event
• Accept donations from potential investors targeted toward specific schools or organizations wishing to host an event (similar to the popular DonorsChoose.org site, where people can fund teachers' requests)
• Accept ideas for needed new products or services
• Provide the ability for organizations to create their own custom site to solicit local participants and sharks, accept applications, and promote the winners as well as losers.

Note that you decided not to include the idea of providing an online version of the event as part of the initial project as your sponsor and team decided that physical events would be most effective. You have also decided to limit the scope of your first project to provide the ability for 20 organizations to create their own custom websites. Your team members will screen the organizations and assist people in using the site to plan their events.

You plan to hold four shark tank like events within four months, using your team members abroad to help organize and run those events, plus one at your college. Your semester has just started, so you plan to hold your event at the end of the term. The project will fund refreshments for the events and prizes for the winners, with a budget of $1,000 for each event. You don't think you'll get any donations via the new website before these events, but you'll try to have it set up to accept donations by the last month.

You will create some short videos to show people how use the site and provide suggestions for holding the events.

After testing the site and getting customer feedback, you will make some changes and document recommendations for a follow-on project. You will also create a business plan recommending how to transition this project into a real business that can make a profit after two years.

Assume that you would pay for a new website and account through an online provider. Bobby would do most of the customization/programming for the site, but you would consider outsourcing or purchasing services to provide some of the capabilities like accepting donations and developing the short videos on the site. You would also buy a new laptop and internet access for your three team members abroad so that they could share information with their contacts in those countries.

You and Dr. K. want to attend all the events as part of the project, and you might include a full face-to-face meeting with the whole team if possible.

Tasks 3)Develop a work breakdown structure for the project. Break down the work to Level 3 or Level 4, as appropriate. Use the template on the companion website and samples in this text as guides. Print the WBS in list form. Be sure the WBS is based on the project charter( created for the Chapter 4 Running Case), the project scope statement created in Task 2 above, and other relevant information.

4) Use the WBS you developed in Task 3 to begin creating a Gantt chart using your choice of software. Do not enter any durations or dependencies. Print the resulting Gantt chart on one page, and be sure to display the entire Task Name column.