INTRODUCTION

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CASE STUDY

You are Alexis, the director of external affairs for a national not-for-profit medical research
center that does research on disease related to aging. 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 directors. 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 the 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 hospitals, clinics and long-term care facilities that that are using the results of the
center’s research. You also will include testimonials from patients and families 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 can be written in a
style that can be understood by the average adult potential donor.

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 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
medical facilities around the country to take photos and 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 April 1. The board asks you to come to its next meeting on May 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 November 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 September
30, and its financial statements should be available by October 15. However, the nonfinancial
information for the report can start to be pulled together right after the May 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 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 May 15 to
November 15, to implement the plan and complete the project.

Your staff consists of Grace, a marketing specialist; Levi, a writer/editor; and Lakysha, 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).

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CASE QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 1

You and your team need to prepare a plan to present to the board. You must:

1. Establish the project objective, and make a list of assumptions about the project.
2. Develop a work breakdown structure.
3. Prepare a list of the specific activities that need to be performed to accomplish the project
objective.
4. For each activity, assign one person who will be responsible.
5. Create a network diagram that shows the sequence and dependent relationships of all the
activities.

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1. Project Objectives
- Establish non-profit organization research center that does research on
disease related to aging.

Project Assumption
- Project assumption should be well documented to produce a shorter, simpler,
easy-to-read annual report.
- Project assumption need to satisfy the investor’s expectation in order to
make them approve the budget that needed for this project.
- Need to seek testimonials from patients and families that benefits the
center’s research.
- Project assumption need to be validated from May 15 to Nov 15, six months
after the project budget approved by the investors.

2. Work breakdown structure

Medical
research centre

grants from federal

General public Structure
corporations government

-documented
- annual report -hospital upscaled -layout
annual report

-marketing and
-financial
-clinics promotional -permit
status
purposes

-long-term care
- chart tables -stakeholders
facilitites

- simple cover

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 3. Activities to be performed to accomplish the project objectives :
- Prepares an annual report of the center’s accomplishment
- Financial status for the board directors
- “Upscale” into a document for marketing and promotional purposes
- Email the annual report to the center’s various stakeholders, past donors,
targeted high-potential future donors
- Produces a shorter, simpler, easy to read annual report that shows the
benefits of the center’s research and the impact on people’s lives.
- Collect testimonials from patients
- Take out several staff to travel to several medical facilities around the
country to take photo and testimonial
- Put the design, printing and distribution out to bid to various contractors
- Held a meeting on 15 May to present a detailed plan, schedule and budget
- Take a project management course at the local university to apply what have
been learnt

4) For each activity, assign the person who will be responsible

Grace (Marketing Specialist) – distribution and prepare an eye catching report

Levi (Writer/editor) – design, print proposals and edit graphic that easy to understand and
contain pictures
Lakysha (Photographer) - travel to several medical facilities around the country to take photos
and get testimonials.

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5) Create a network diagram that shows the sequence and dependent relationship of all the
activities

Collect
Design
details
Prepare
Plan marketing Distribute
Edit strategy
Capture photograph
and collect
testimonials

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CASE QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 2

1. Develop an estimated duration for each activity.

2. 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.
3. Determine the critical path, and identify the activities that make up the critical path.
4. Produce a bar chart (Gantt chart) based on ES and EF times from the schedule in item 2.

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CASE QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 3

1. Using the schedule from Chapter 5, estimate the cost for each activity.
2. Determine the total budgeted cost for the project.
3. Prepared a budgeted cost by period table (similar to Figure 7.5) and a cumulative
budgeted cost (CBC) curve (similar to Figure 7.6) for the project.

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CONCLUSION

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