Complete your detailed schedule and budget:
Develop your plan to execute the project. The plan should communicate the scope, schedule, budget, and resource requirements for the project. The needs of the project will determine which components of the project plan are required. For this assignment, the following elements are required:
Regarding the assignment for Optimized and Baselined Schedule and Budget, the goal here is for you to build a detailed schedule and budget that could be used to execute the project that you have been working on individually. For each baseline, the instructor will be looking for the following items:
Scope Baseline:
Is all of the work needed to create the product, service or result of the project (product scope) as well as the work needed to accomplish the project (project scope) included in the WBS? Did you include project management tasks and deliverables? Did you include closing elements?
Are there Summary and Detail tasks and have you decomposed the WBS to at least a level 3 or 4 such that you can accurately estimate work effort and duration as well as determine the resource skill sets that will be required for the project.
Do you have milestones for each work package under a Summary task?
Schedule Baseline:
Have you estimated the work effort (hours needed to complete a task), as well as the duration (work periods ) for each Detail task in the WBS? Make sure that work effort and duration are not equal. Remember that a task that takes 8 hours to complete will not be completed in 1 day.
Is there a start and finish date for every Detailed task in the WBS?
Do all Detail tasks have a predecessor?
Have you identified the relationship between the project tasks by assigning a predecessor(s) to every Detail task in the WBS? Have you varied your use of FS, SS and FF dependency relationships?
Have you optimized the schedule by identifying tasks that can run in parallel and assigned Start-to-Start dependencies for these detail tasks? You might also consider using leads (negative lags) to accomplish optimization as well.
Have you provided a Gantt Chart to help you in communicating the schedule to the stakeholders?
Cost Baseline:
Is there an individual resource assigned to every Detail task in the WBS signifying the person or role accountable for the activity described? (Hint: do not use groups. It is not best practice because you want to be able to hold just one or two people at the most accountable for a task and it is difficult to budget based on work effort and resource rate. If you have trouble doing this, it probably indicates that you need to further decompose the task into smaller pieces of work.
Have you accounted for all of the resources required for the project including work (people) resources, material resources and cost resources. Are all of the resources assigned to a Detail task and do the work resources have rates assigned for budgetary purposes?
Have you optimized by smoothing the workload for each resource across the PMLC and assured that no resource is over-allocated?
Performance Baseline:
Have you saved your plan (baselined) so that once the work begins you can update the plan as to scope, schedule and cost and compare the plan to actuals?
The finished product should be a document from which you could run your project.
Create your project schedule and budget using Project Plan 365. For instructions on installing and using this software (made available at no cost to students), please go to Modules/Student Reference Materials/Project Plan 365 Install Instructions
Analyze the Project Plan you developed for any areas where changes can be made that will optimize the schedule for time, cost and resourcing.
Identify which steps you will take to attempt to shorten your project finish date and decrease project costs, using schedule optimization strategies. Update your project plan accordingly. Identify any over-allocated resources and make changes as needed.
Note. When you are satisfied that you have done your best to create the most efficient plan possible, save the baseline for the project plan so that you have a point in time to measure progress against and variances can be analyzed as the project progresses.
Refer to the rubric provided. Each of the sections of the plan will be evaluated for completeness and quality (i.e., realistic content) as it relates to your project.
Consider how you might approach getting your organization to revise their Project Management Plan format to ensure it meets PMBOK minimum best practices.
Use File Naming Convention: Year Month Day_Last Name_First Name_Assignment Name
Submit your completed assignment by the due date by clicking on the assignment in Canvas and uploading the Project Plan 365 file.
I have attached a template of how the project schedule should look like and as well as the project charter. Please make sure you use project 365 for this task.