1) You are Michael, the director of external affairs for a national not-for-profit green energy research center that doe

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1) You are Michael, the director of external affairs for a
national not-for-profit green energy research center that does
research on emerging energy technologies. The center’s work depends
on funding from multiple sources, including the general public,
individual estates, and grants from corporations, foundations, and
the federal government. Your department prepares an annual report
of the center’s accomplishments and financial status for the board
of members. It is mostly text with a few charts and tables, all
black and white, with a simple cover. It is voluminous and pretty
dry reading. It is inexpensive to produce other than the effort to
pull together the content, which requires time to request and
expedite information from the center s other departments. At the
last board meeting, the board members suggested the annual report
be upscaled into a document that could be used for marketing and
promotional purposes. They want you to mail the next annual report
to the center s various stakeholders, past donors, and targeted
high-potential future donors. The board feels that such a document
is needed to get the center in the same league with other large
not-for-profit organizations with which it feels it competes for
donations and funds. The board feels that the annual report could
be used to inform these stakeholders about the advances the center
is making in its research efforts and its strong fiscal management
for effectively using the funding and donations it receives. You
will need to produce a shorter, simpler, easy-to-read annual report
that shows the benefits of the center s research and the impact on
people s lives. You will include pictures from various energy
establishments that are using the results of the center’s research.
You also will include testimonials from energy consumers both
government and private who have benefited from the center’s
research. The report must be eye-catching. It needs to be
multicolor, contain a lot of pictures and easy-to-understand
graphics, and be written in a style that can be understood by the
average adult potential donor. This is a significant undertaking
for your department, which includes three other staff members. You
will have to contract out some of the activities and may have to
travel to several energy facilities around the country to take
photos and get testimonials. You will also need to put the design,
printing, and distribution out to bid to various contractors to
submit proposals and prices to you. You estimate that approximately
5 million copies need to be printed and mailed. It is now March 1.
The board asks you to come to its next meeting on April 15 to
present a detailed plan, schedule, and budget for how you will
complete the project. The board wants the annual report in the mail
by October 15, so potential donors will receive it around the
holiday season when they may be in a giving mood. The center’s
fiscal year ends August 30, and its financial statements should be
available by September 15. However, the nonfinancial information
for the report can start to be pulled together right after the
April 15 board meeting. Fortunately, you are taking a project
management course in the evenings at the local university and see
this as an opportunity to apply what you have been learning. You
know that this is a big project and that the board has high
expectations. You want to be sure you meet their expectations and
get them to approve the budget that you will need for this project.
However, they will only do that if they are confident that you have
a detailed plan for how you will get it all done. You and your
staff have six weeks to prepare a plan to present to the board on
April 15. If approved, you will have six months, from April 15 to
October 15, to implement the plan and complete the project. Your
staff consists of Shi Meng, a marketing specialist; Amirah, a
writer/editor; and Mercy, a staff assistant whose hobby is
photography (she is going to college part-time in the evenings to
earn a degree in photojournalism and has won several local
photography contests).
a) Establish the project objective and make a list of your
assumptions about the project.
b) Develop a proper work breakdown structure.
c) Prepare a detailed list of the specific activities that need
to be performed to accomplish the project objective.
d) For each activity, assign the person who will be
responsible.
e) Create a network diagram that shows the sequence and
dependent relationships of all the activities.
f) Develop an estimated duration for each activity.
g) Using a project start time of 0 (or May 15) and a required
project completion time of 180 days (or November 15), calculate the
ES, EF, LS, and LF times and TS for each activity. If your
calculations result in a project schedule with negative TS, revise
the project scope, activity estimated durations, and/or sequence or
dependent relationships among activities to arrive at an acceptable
baseline schedule for completing the project within 180 days (or by
November 15). Describe the revisions you made.
h) Determine the critical path and identify the activities that
make up the critical path.
i) Produce a bar chart (Gantt chart) based on the ES and EF
times from the schedule in item 6