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 theBoard.

2. A risk assessment summarising the major risks of contracting this work and your recommendations on how to reduce theserisks.

3. An estimate of the costs to prepare a bid for a contract of this type andvalue.
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 eachactivity.

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 New Business Opportunities

The CEO has instructed you to prepare a detailed report to evaluate new business opportunities for contracts in Australia. When the CEO has reviewed your report and agrees with its content it will be presented to the company Board of Directors with recommendations to them to bid for this new work.

Your task is in parts, as detailed here:

Part 1: Executive summary to the Board

This part of the assignment is in the form of a 1 page (of text) summary plus suitable attachments summarising the significant risks (a before & after risk map and a list of risks with recommended mitigation) involved with executing this type of contract work, and a summary of the cost, and schedule (summary by department and work phase) to bid for the work. The attachments should not cover more than four pages and preferably just 2.

Part 2: Risk assessment summarising the major risks of contracting this work.

The risk assessment and recommendations for mitigation must be summarised and reference made to significant difficulties reported in the press about existing contracts of this type. The attachments to the report will include a professional risk assessment for a typical project in this area and include a risk management plan (of not less than 12 risks ranked by significance, showing the treatment of risks) and a before and after risk matrix (of the 5 most significant risks).

Part 3 & 4: Estimate of the costs and a schedule to prepare a tender bid for a contract of this type.
For this you need to establish a budget estimate on an ‘Excel' spread sheet for yourself (you are the bid manager) and project team involved in bid preparation:

Plan and schedule activities and resources to complete the report in the time allocated. Schedule to be prepared using ‘Microsoft Project 2010'or later software. (Available as 60 Day free trial, see the references).

Part 3 Estimate Preparation: Additional information for this item
You have been advised by other colleagues that generally for design and construct contracts of $200 to 500 million the total cost to prepare a bid may be expected to cost about $300,000 and take some 4 months to complete.

Establish a budget estimate on an ‘Excel' spread sheet:

- An hourly cost rate for each of the individuals and departments assigned to the report preparation is to be used as the basis for the estimate.

- Refer to the table below for a list of staff, annual salaries and resources on the team. Annual salary is the total paid salary per year excluding statutory superannuationpayments.

- Each employee receives 4 weeks Annual Leave, 2 weeks Public Holidays, 2 weeks Sick Leave annually, plus a 17.5 % loading on their base salary during Annual Leave and long service leave (13 weeks after 10 years of service). Note that company policy is to make provision for the full amount for sick leave and long service leave even though employees may not take the full amount of thisleave.
- Statutory loadings (superannuation (9.5%), payroll tax (4.25%), workers compensation insurance (1.35%), other insurance (4.75%) as a percentage of total salary paid toemployee
- Ignore in the calculations any severance pay based on period of service
- Salaried employees do not receive site allowance or overtime payments
- Add business unit overheads at the rate of 19.25% of the directcosts.
- List any estimated costs for travel and accommodationseparately.
- Note: As in most organisations, the costs for the CEO salary and Board of Directors fees are paid for out of company overheads and profit and so have zero cost in yourestimate.

Part 4 Scheduling the Work

Draw up a schedule to plan your preparation of the bid, using the following information:

4.1 Planning the BidPreparation

The bid is to be completed in four months. The team activities required to prepare the report are listed below and in the approximate sequence. You are to include site visits for project evaluation initially and prior to submission of the bid. (Refer to items 4 and 14below).

You are to prepare a Gantt Chart schedule for these activities, assigning your best estimate of the duration that will be required for each. The above cost estimate that you prepare will also relate to this schedule. Some activities may have ‘Float' (called ‘Total Slack' in MS Project) and may overlap to meet the completion date specified:

start Date is 6thMarch 2017 and the calendars are to include Victorian public holidays: (See http://www.business.vic.gov.au/BUSVIC/STANDARD/PC_62304.html).

hours

4.2 DefineCalendars

Calendar 5 5 days x 38 hours

4.3 Maintaining the ActivityCodes

For internal reporting requirements during preparation of the report you need to identify:

Work Phase -

Scope Definition (Design, site visit, build strategy) Estimation (Take off, pricing, planning & contingency) Review (Internal review up to CEO review)
Submission (Final Price, Pricing Schedule, Documents & Submission) Persons Responsible:-

Departments -

Administration

Marketing

Construction

Engineering

Contracts

Estimating

Planning

Create Activity Code dictionaries and Activity Codes from the information above.

Part 5: Background Research and Report (for Submission to the CEO):

5.1 What You are required to do in Part6

To prepare the report you need to undertake a literature review of key aspects of this proposed new field of activity. Your report is to include brief information on three (3) substantially completed projects. All of the projects must be in Australia. The projects reported upon must have been constructed after 1999 and had significant risks to manage or demonstrated delays, cost overruns and other risk occurrences. They should also be of a similar size (largest to be less than three times the smallest cost) and complexity.

The purpose of this information is to inform the CEO of your company of the key aspects of the proposed new field of activity.

5.2 Background Analysis of theProjects
Prepare a brief analysis in your own words of each of the three (3) projects that you have chosen. Paragraphs of text copied and pasted from articles or downloaded from the internet are not acceptable.

The analysis should include for each project a summary of:
- Names of the Client, Project Manager and major constructioncompanies
- a description of the project, location(s), start & finishdate.
- Project delivery system(s) used (see Chapter 2.4 of yournotes).
- Key construction methods & temporary infrastructure required to carry out theworks.
- $ value of project, converted to today's dollars (Aust. Bureau of Statistics indices to be used for escalation overtime).
- Risks encountered on the project such as risks that contribute to cost & time overruns and any contractor response to therisks.

The analysis should then list for each risk or group of risks,
- A description of the risks the projectencountered
- the schedule, cost and other impact ofeach
- As best you can discover, what caused the impact and what could or should have been done to treat (mitigate, avoid, transfer etc.) therisk.

References are to be acknowledged in an appendix and cross referenced to the text.

This assignment is to be prepared and submitted by individual students. Although you may discuss this assignment with other students the work must be your own without receiving undue assistance.
The Swinburne University policy on plagiarism applies to this assignment and students are required to submit work which is of their own making. Undue assistance from current or past students work especially includes the application of ‘templates' from that students work.

Assignment Submission Requirements:

- Electronic copy of all files including supporting documents and the schedule are to be uploaded via the ‘Assignment' section of Blackboard before the closingtime.

References:
Pole. L.J, Cost Engineering for Project Success, an Australian Perspective, Edition 2013 Microsoft Project - 60 Day free trial software:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/evaluate-project-professional-2016
or this:
https://www.projectmanager.com/pricing?utm_source=bing&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=sitelink

Note: MS Project will not function effectively in the "out of the box" downloaded form. The MSP software is much more user friendly when you upload and open the Eastwood Harris MSP Template which provides a Quick Access Toolbar.
(Refer to the files provided in the Final Assignment section of Blackboard).

Manuals and learning material for MS Project 2013: "99 tricks and traps for Microsoft Office Project 2013 : the casual user's "survival guide""