Project Schedule, Cost, & Procurement Management

At the next meeting, you and the team had a very productive discussion on your findings related to the identification of all of the project activities that must happen to start and finish your project. You even took a step further in working with your team members to estimate resources and cost for each of the activities. Everyone feels that it is time to present your findings to Sam and Gloria and provide them with a baseline estimate of how long this project will most likely cost in terms of time and dollars.

"Thanks for educating us on the schedule development planning," says Jerry to you. "We have some great information here, but I think it is too much detail to present to Sam and Gloria."

"I agree," says Melissa. "Does anyone have any ideas on how best to present this information?"

"We should go ahead and plug this information into a project schedule that both Sam and Gloria know and will appreciate. We ought to establish a project baseline at this time. We should define the tasks, start and finish dates, durations, predecessors (sequence of activities), resource names, and possibly cost," says Sara.

"The project schedule should account for all of the activities that must happen. It must not be less than 30–50 activities and subactivities," you say.

"Oh, that's great!" says Jim. "Do you think you can prepare it for the team by next week?"

Assignment

Tips: Start by looking at the WBS activities that you defined last week. Think about how you could decompose your work packages into activities and subactivities to complete this coffee house project. You should use all of the project artifacts (deliverables) you produced so far and the given project scenario to identify all of the activities that are needed.

You should be able to come up with 30–100 activities easily for your schedule baseline. Once those activities have been identified, finish your schedule by plugging in start and finish dates, durations, predecessor relationships, and adding cost and resource names. Resource names and cost can be added in the main summary page or directly in the resource sheet. Your project name must go in the first row, and all other activates should be indented under it. You should link all activities to summary tasks and subactivities to the main activity. You may make assumptions for any of this work, and estimates do not need to be real. You should save the finished project file as: "Week 3 deliverable_your name."