Planning a symposium will draw about 200 attendees is a major project. As this is a corporate event with internal budget allocated $1500 per attendance for a 3-day symposium with free access to all arranged personal development workshops. The tasks involved in hosting such an event is considerable and involve selecting workshop leads, choosing development training themes, contacting exhibitors, making internal arrangements, planning the workshops, and on and on. Sydney is selected as host city/branch for the 2022 Corporate Symposium in the beginning of July (4th July 2022). The objectives for the event are three: (1) to deliver a high-quality, value-added training workshops that would be useful for the attending staff, (2) to establish a corporate social network platform that would reflect well on collaborations, and (3) to meet strict financial criteria. The first task after selecting the city and hotel facilities is to put together the project team and workshop leads. This includes managers in charge of each of the tracks, the social program, the local arrangements, and all the other details.
The project team needs to organize this event using a functional approach. The team have most of the primary responsibilities, with members from five other branches assisting in other duties. Next is the development of the work breakdown structure and the Gantt chart of activity schedules. As shown in Table 1, scheduling all the work for a major event such as this is an overwhelming effort. The 2022 Symposium offers 15 workshops composed of development activities and case studies.
Your tasks:
This case study provides you with an opportunity of drawing on your acquired project planning, scheduling, budgeting and quality management skills and materials covered in this course. Overall, you are responsible for developing a project scope statement document, a project schedule, a cost management plan and a quality management plan for the case study.
You are required to answer the SECTION 2 below to perform the following tasks in addition to the descriptions in the INSTRUCTIONS provided on a separate file. You MUST attempt all requirements in this given case study.
Section 2
2-1) Project scheduling
• Construct an original Gantt chart for the project using project activities given in Table 1.
• Conduct a critical path analysis and carefully apply the 3-point estimate technique on identified critical activities to develop an estimated project schedule. It is assumed that the critical activities will remain the same in a risk-free environment. On the other hand, without an appropriate risk management, the durations of critical activities creep by 30%
• Perform a final schedule analysis using the results obtained from project scheduling conducted in the previous stages.
2-2) Cost management planning
• Apply a diverse set of cost estimating tools to clearly justify the cost of activities.
• Develop and aggregate the cost of resources needed to complete each activity and determine the detailed budget of the project. Your cost estimate must incorporate relevant resources given in Table 3 for each group of the given activities. Both cost estimate and a budget baseline must be produced in alignment with the estimated project schedule.
• Develop and clearly demonstrate the resource allocation and cost management planning components in your Cost Management Plan.
• The cost management plan must include Earn Value Analysis (EVA) as a compulsory cost control tool to be utilised along with other cost control tools in this project. The application of EVA must be clearly demonstrated