Business Finance Homework Help

Deliverable Length: 600–1,200 words of new content; 3,000–6,000 words (10–20 pages) total

The first step will be to select a project for which you want to develop a Acquisition Project Scheduling and Cost Management plan. This project will be used as the basis for each of the assignments throughout the course and should conform to the following guidelines:

• Nontrivial: The selected project candidate should reflect a real-life project.
• Domain knowledge: You will be applying knowledge of this acquisition project to address assignments related to scheduling and cost.

Assignment

Your first task in this process will be to select a project to use as the basis of your Key Assignment. You will also create the shell document for the final project Key Assignment document deliverable that you will be working on throughout the course. As you proceed through each project phase, you will add content to each section of the final document to progressively complete the final project delivery, which is the Acquisition Project Scheduling and Cost Management Plan.

The project deliverables are the following:

• Submit your project proposal to your instructor for approval.
• Acquisition Project Scheduling and Cost Management Plan document shell
  • Use Word
  • Title page
    • Course number and name
    • Project name
    • Your name
    • Date
  • Table of Contents (TOC)
    • Use an autogenerated TOC.
    • This should be on a separate page.
    • This should be a maximum of 3 levels deep.
    • Be sure to update the fields of the TOC so that it is up-to-date before submitting your project.
  • Section headings (create each heading on a new page with “TBD” as the content, except for sections listed under “New Content” below)
    • Project Outline (see what details about this section below)
    • Cost, Schedule, and Technical Performance Management (see what details below)
    • Management of Small Projects
      • Develop your small acquisition project schedule using MS Project (tasks, predecessors, duration, and resources assigned).
      • Copy a screen print of the schedule and Gantt chart into this shell.
      • Copy a screen print of the critical path network diagram, or of the Gantt screen of the Tracking Gantt view showing the critical path into this shell.
      • Describe the specific processes that you will use within each of the 5 Project Management Institute (PMI) process groups: initiating, planning, executing, monitoring, and controlling and closing.
    • Acquisition Project Guidelines
      • Update the project plan and Gantt Chart with acquisition project activities with MS Project, and copy it into this section.
      • Develop a request for proposal (RFP) template for the acquisition project with the elements discussed in the Discussion Board for this week.
      • Develop a table with the vendor evaluation criteria.
      • Diagram and describe the vendor status update process.
    • Costing Methods and Tools
      • Select 2 of the costing methods, and discuss why they will support developing a realistic budget.
        • Expert judgment
        • Analogous estimating
        • Parametric estimating
        • Bottom-up estimating
        • Three-point estimating
        • Reserve analysis
        • Cost of quality
        • Project management estimating software
        • Vendor bid analysis
      • Provide an example of computations for a few of the activities for the 2 selected methods.
      • Fill in a table similar to the example table so that your 2 different total project budgets are based on the 2 selected methods.
      • Discuss what type of contingency budget you will put in place based on the 2 budgets to mitigate an underestimation
    • Earned Value Management System
      • Discuss how an earned value analysis will be utilized for this project or Key Assignment, including the formulas to compute earned value analysis (EVA).
      • Cover the following 4 scenarios and what you should do:
        • Behind schedule and over budget: Include a sample calculation that would trigger this interpretation, along with a graph.
        • Ahead of schedule and on budget: Include a sample calculation that would trigger this interpretation, along with a sample graph.
        • Behind schedule and on budget: Include a sample calculation that would trigger this interpretation, along with a sample graph.
        • Ahead of schedule and under budget: Include a sample calculation that would trigger this interpretation, along with a sample graph.
      • Discuss for each of the above situations how you compute the final cost and end date if nothing changes with its present state.
    • Overall Cost and Schedule Performance
      • Discuss how you will monitor progress.
      • Discuss what metrics, reports, and graphs you will use to monitor progress.
      • Discuss how they would determine the cause of the variation.
      • Discuss how you will respond to deviations; (specifically around schedule compression and a contingency budget).

• New content to be inserted in document shell
  • Project Outline
    • Give a brief description of the project.
    • Discuss the overall project deliverable.
    • The material can be taken from approved proposal submitted to instructor, and this will serve as the draft for the proposal.
    • Be sure this project is approved by the instructor.
  • Cost, Schedule, and Technical Performance
    • Discuss cost techniques both in determining initial estimates and in monitoring and controlling them throughout the life of the project.
    • Determine the project schedule for the acquisition component of the overall project and include a copy of it.
    • Develop the program evaluation and review technique (PERT) and critical path method (CPM) for this Key Assignment acquisition project, and include copies of those charts in this section.
    • Describe all of the key schedule influencers that can impact a schedule positively or negatively and how you would handle them.