Project MGMT Project Plan PowerPoint  you will be creating a PowerPoint presentation of the project plan that you have been creating throughout this course. As you are creating the presentation, you w

Running head: PROJECT OUTSOURCING AND CLOSURE 0

Project Outsourcing and Closure

Project Outsourcing

Project Components for Outsourcing

Preparing promotional material is one part of the project that will be outsourced. Since the preparation of the promotional materials is foreseen to consume more time, outsourcing this will allow the company to have more time to concentrate on other parts of the project. This improves the focus of the company towards the project by allowing the employees to focus on other time-conscious activities. Furthermore, internal resources will be freed so that employees can use them on value-adding processes (Bi et al., 2017). Unhappiness and inefficiencies of the employees in creating promotional materials will be eliminated.

Safeguarding commuter routes should also be outsourced. This is because outsourcing the process will greatly help reduce cut costs in training security officers to conduct the process. For example, outsourcing will reduce unnecessary expenses that could be incurred in operation and labor, which reduces the overhead costs and makes it attractive to outsource.

Parts with Best Chance of being on Schedule

Some of the parts of the project that have the best chance of being on the schedule include preparing promotional material, securing the walk route, and initiating the event. However, concerns might arise in some parts like selling merchandize and obtaining the license for hosting the event. This is because obtaining a license might lag behind due to uncontrollable factors like delays in providing all the required information in time or a long duration that may be taken to process the event permit/license.

Project Status Monitoring

Monitoring the project will be done by determining the work done for each of the project tasks. The project tasks in the work breakdown structure will be subdivided into finer grains to reduce errors caused by overoptimistic estimations. The status of the project could also be monitored through tracking project milestones (Kerzner, 2017). For example, completion of preparing promotional materials, obtaining the participation license, and selling the branded merchandise for the event can be considered to be project milestones. This will help to monitor the progress of the project.

Ensuring Project Stays on Schedule

To ensure the project stays on schedule, the project manager should plan for the unexpected issues (Hammad, 2018). Planning for the unexpected should include allocating some time for unknown issues to give room for the project to maneuver yet still be able to be completed on schedule. Communication in a coordinated manner is also very critical to ensure everyone is on the same page and the project remains on schedule. Communications allow everyone to articulate areas of concern so that the project manager can either add more resources in order to ensure the project remains on schedule.

Project Closure Process

Some of the activities included during project wrap-up include:

A formal sign-off from the ALS Association. This will indicate that the donations collected before the walk had been delivered to the associations, which was the objective of conducting the walk. There should also a formal sign-off by the employees who will have pledged their long-term support for the ALS Association.

The second wrap-up activity should be to analyze the final product. In this case, final product analysis will involve conducting an evaluation to ascertain whether the planned results (more than $5,000 donation and the 10% employee pledge for long-term support for the ALS Association) had been reached or not. The end results should meet 100% of the planned features during project planning for the project to be complete.

The third activity should be to release the resources to the association. After the deliverables of the project have been confirmed and formal sign-off by the association, the donation and the 10% employee pledge for long-term support for the ALS Association should be released to the association. The correct policy of the association should be followed when releasing the resources to the association (Zohrehvandi et al., 2017).

The next activity should be to close other third party subcontractors or vendors involved in the project. For example, all the third-party vendors or subcontractors involved in the project should have their contracts closed. This should happen after the final products (donation and the 10% employee pledge for long-term support for the ALS Association) have been delivered as the contracts are meaningless after acceptance of the deliverables.

The other activity is to index the project files. The indexing of the project files involves compiling all the documentation and project files to the key stakeholders. These files could be archived as they can be used in the future.

Finally, the last activity should be to celebrate the success of the project. All the members and stakeholders involved in the project should be included in the celebrations. The celebration should make the project team members and the stakeholders feel and enjoy the success of the project. Such celebrations should not be ignored but should be planned well as they give morale to the team.

References

Bi, H. L., Jia, X., Lu, F. Q., & Huang, M. (2017). Schedule risk management of its outsourcing project using negotiation mechanism. In Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management 2016 (pp. 29-33). Atlantis Press, Paris.

Hammad, M. W. (2018). Estimating, Allocating and Managing Schedule and Cost Contingency in Construction Projects.

Kerzner, H. (2017). Project management metrics, KPIs, and dashboards: a guide to measuring and monitoring project performance. John Wiley & Sons.

Zohrehvandi, S., Khalilzadeh, M., Hajizadeh, M., & Cheraghi, E. (2017). Planning the project closure phase in combined cycle power plant projects. Procedia computer science, 121, 274-281.