Assume that you are the project manager for the construction of 10 conference facilities in your organization’s building in Florida. A statement of work has been given to you, and contracts have already been awarded. The project will require you to do the following for one of the conference facilities:
Install new electrical outlets and light fixtures: ABC Electrical Company (fixed price contract $20,500, week 1)
Install multimedia capability: Sound Masters, Inc. (fixed price contract $40,000, week 1 and $23,300, week 4)
Finish walls and apply custom paint color—Ocean Blue #4495: K&G Painters (cost reimbursable contract $24,990, week 2)
Install carpeting (color # 9984) and window shades (color # 5574): Best Flooring and Windows (fixed price contract $46,340, half in week 2 and half in week 3)
Install new furniture to match wall color (#4495), including 20 custom-made tables and 80 extra plush ergonomic chairs with wheels: Custom Furniture Experts, LLC (cost reimbursable contract $87,300, one quarter in week 1 and balance in week 4)
Artwork showing the best features of your organization’s products. This artwork and framing has not been purchased yet
Complete inspection and acceptance within one month
The 10 conference facilities will be worked on sequentially. Each conference facility is completed and ready for inspection before work can begin on the next facility. That means that your project is 10 months long and consists of 10 subprojects for each conference facility.
This is a high-visibility project, and the completion date is firm because your company is hosting a very important client meeting in the first conference facility in 45 days. The balance of the conference facilities have similar meetings already set up for their projected completion dates. Defaulting on the schedule is not an option.
You have a project team to help with the oversight and inspection of the project, which includes you and two technicians. Your salary is $1,050 per week and your technicians earn $13 per hour. You expect both of them to work 20 hours per week for the first three weeks and 40 hours in the last week of each conference facility subproject. However, one of your technicians may have surgery scheduled before the end of your first conference room subproject, which will result in you working additional hours. The decision on the surgery has not yet been made by his doctors. You will work 30 hours each week, without taking the potential employee absence into account. Your company overhead rate is 89% of labor and is not applied to vendor contracts. All materials are included in the vendor contracts. Artwork for a room this size could run between $10,000 and $15,000, depending on the quality of the frames. Your organization’s leaders want to impress their clients in this new facility, so you assume that the highest quality frames should be purchased. Hurricane season just began, and you have seen reports of a major storm heading toward your town. You may have to evacuate, or worse yet, the facility could be damaged by the storm at the end of the first week of the first conference facility subproject. Evacuation would cause a one-week slip, and facility damage could cause a three-week slip, which would affect all the subsequent subprojects.
It is important that all contractors perform their work according to their contractual schedule. Any slip of one contractor will impact the next contractor’s beginning date.
Using this information, create a time-phased budget baseline on a spreadsheet. This baseline will consist of the incremental cost for each week, in addition to a cumulative cost for each week for 10 months.
Answer the following questions:
What difficulties did you have in preparing a time-phased budget baseline?
What assumptions were you forced to make?
What are the risks associated with this project? List the risks in a table, along with their potential impact and probability in separate columns.
How do the contract types add to your project risk?
How do schedule considerations add to your project risk?
Which risks have the greatest potential to disrupt your project? Why?
Do you think you need contingency for this project? Why? How much?
What role do your risks play in your contingency estimate?
Submit the project baseline in an Excel spreadsheet. Show all calculation in the spreadsheet. Submit responses to the questions in a separate Word document.