Posted: December 17th, 2014

importance of Quality Management accompanied by a Quality Management Strategy/Plan

importance of Quality Management accompanied by a Quality Management Strategy/Plan

A discussion on the importance of Quality Management accompanied by a Quality Management Strategy/Plan for this project. The strategy should be defined early on and then applied to the project. A Quality Register to manage all your quality activities is expected. Approx. 750 words for this part based on PRINCE2

Please read carefully through the assignment brief and the other group member to understand my part.

Please produce quality management strategy and plan and their products based on the other three deliverables stated in the assignment brief.

BPMA701
Project Management Foundations
Group Assignment
A Trip to remember
1st draft 8 November 2014

Hand in date: January 6th 2015

The published learning outcomes for this module are:
1.    critically examine why projects succeed or fail
2.    evaluate the organizational implications of project management
3.    critically assess the project management principles
4.    critically assess the main principles and technical competences that make up project management
5.    initiate a project within an organizational context
This assignment is designed to assess learning outcomes 1, 2, 4 and 5
The assignment, which is to be done in groups of four, requires the production of a report which will contain a presentation of its contents as an appendix

The project brief follows:
Following the merger of two travel agents, the first with offices in all major UK cities and the second with a strong Internet presence, the strategy of the new company is to provide exciting and adventurous holidays.
The first company specialised in holidays by airplane to most countries in Europe and the Middle East and has an extensive portfolio of hotels with which it cooperates. The second company has links with travel agents in Australia and the Americas.
The new company, Lynn Uni, plans to organise a) holidays with adventure at the destination (e.g. rafting, mountaineering, caving, banji jumping etc.) and b) holidays where the travel itself is the adventure.
Two executives have been assigned the implementation of the strategy, John Huston for the former and Dana Andrews for the latter.
Dana Andrews has had his consultations and is thinking of setting up driving trips from London to destinations such as Ulaanbaatar, Istanbul, Timbuktu, Kampala, Archangel, Helsinki, Banjul and Alexandria.
Dana is also thinking of organizing adventure trips across Africa, Asia, Australia and South America.
Lynn Uni is no soliciting for trip ideas. They are giving £3,000 for each idea the pick, plus 5% of the turnover.
Your company is one of the biders pitching their idea for Lynn Uni to pick.
The holiday trip you organise is for 12 people, to travel by air to a country in Asia, America or Africa and then go by land to at least to other countries before flying back to London. A stay of at least two nights in a capital city is required. It is hoped the first such trip will take place in February 2016, but we need the costings and route by January 2015 to have time to organise our marketing material.

You need to propose a route and an itinerary and to ensure that the travellers will travel there and back within the budget and comfort you will decide (and define).
Your deliverables are:
?    A final report (see below)
?    An A4 double sided brochure advertising the trip you design
?    A list of instructions and a checklist to be given to each traveller when they pay
?    A PowerPoint presentation of the trip, aimed at a commercial audience
?    Anything else you think we should provide our customers with
Your final report will contain your costed travel plans and the following four deliverables:
1.    A discussion on the importance of having a Business Case accompanied by a Business Case and a Benefits Review Plan.
2.    A discussion of the importance of producing project plans accompanied by a plan for this project (WBS and Network) – by the project manager
3.    A discussion on the importance of Quality Management accompanied by a Quality Management Strategy/Plan for this project. The strategy should be defined early on and then applied to the project. A Quality Register to manage all your quality activities is expected.
4.    A discussion on the importance of having a sound communication plan accompanied by a Communication Management Plan for this project. A RACI has to be produced as part of this plan.
In addition, each member of the group is required to include a reflective statement.

The Main Task
Each member of the group will undertake one of the above deliverables – but as you see, these are interconnected, so while all four will contribute to the common parts of the report, only one of you will write that section that is allocated to you. You will also need to share the responsibility of developing the project’s deliverables.
You should produce one report where the four parts above and their author are clearly identifiable. At the end of your report you will include a PowerPoint presentation of your ideas about the trip in this project and its importance to the new company (not more than 12 slides, each with clear speaker notes). The audience of the presentation is the commercial client, Lynn Uni, and not the academic community, but there has to be one slide at least for the Business Case, the project plan, the way you ensured that your deliverable was fit for purpose and the way you managed the stakeholders. These four items should be in the slides to convince the audience that you have done a professional job.
Throughout, you have to be imaginative, apply your knowledge from the lecture material and use your background reading to write an essay explaining the advantage of the project management technique you are using (Business Case, Planning, Quality and Communication). You must also show evidence of having consulted the project management literature. A reference list must be included.

You are to deliver one report which should contain three distinct sections: A commercial section, an academic section and your reflections. Where and how you position these and how you use the appendices is up to you.
The commercial section will focus on the trip you’ve designed; the route, the experience you want your customers to have, the itinerary, the brochure, the costings, the financial projections and anything else you deem is necessary to make it exciting for the Lynn Uni executives.
The academic part should contain the four essays above (on Business Case, plans, quality and communication), each with its own references.
The reflections should be thorough and well referenced. While it should be honest, you should try and explain your efforts, the group dynamics and the efficacy of the method your team used, using .the appropriate literature to support your justifications.

Mark Allocation
The assignment contains four elements: A commercially focused report, a set of four academic essays, a PowerPoint presentation and four reflective statements, one from each group member. Your final assignment mark will be a combination of individual and group contributions.
The commercial section of the report is worth 30% of the total mark; in most cases this mark will be the same for all group members.
The academic essay is also worth 30% of the total mark. Each member will get the marks of their own section, but please remember that the management products linked to the academic essay have to be consistent.
The presentation is worth 20%. Half will be a group mark, allocated for the whole presentation and half will be an individual mark, for the individual contribution. It is important that you take care to produce a professional presentation; for example, you should choose an appropriate font for the presentation, not just cut-and-paste the report’s text.
The reflective statement, worth 20%, is an individual mark. Please remember the reflective statement is an important statement that needs to reflect on the objectives, your contribution, what you could have done better, your role in the team and your appreciation of how successful you’ve been as an individual and as a team player. The reflection affords an opportunity for a well-structured and referenced essay,
Example.
The whole report is worth 60% when marked as one self-contained report.
The section explaining the importance of the Business Case and its influence on a project, produced by Member A, is worth 58%.
The section explaining the importance of and how the project plan for this project was arrived at, produced by Member B is worth 54%
The section explaining the Quality Management Strategy, its importance and its implementation, written by Member C is worth 72%
The section explaining the Communication Management Strategy, its importance and its application, written by Member D is worth 54%
The presentation is relatively good and obtains an overall mark of 62%, but the individual contributions are variable, ranging from 52% to 68% – see table.
The reflection statements are also variable, with Member C scoring a distinctive 70% but Member D scoring a below the pass-line 48%.
In this case the assignment marks for the group members are shown in the table below:
Individual
Essay    Report
Group
mark    Presentation    Presentation
Group    Reflection    Assignment Mark
Individual
Member A    56    60    60    62    53
Member B    54    60    62    62    61
Member C    72    60    68    62    70
Member D    54    60    52    62    48

Project Management
The assignment itself is a mini project, so it is expected that one of you will act as coordinator. The tasks are interlinked and someone will have to take responsibility of the final report.
If the group declares the member who put the whole report together by maintaining the master copy, then that member will get a bonus of up to 5%.

Some possible deliverables
Each group needs to decide the project deliverables. Deliverables are split between project outputs (e.g. the route) and management documents. Some main management documents have already been mentioned and it is easy to recognise that these form the crux of the Project Initiation Documentation (PID) Some other management deliverables you may wish to develop are: A vision statement, a Project Product Description, a Scope statement, Product Descriptions etc.

Submission
You must submit an electronic version of your report to Blackboard and a hardcopy to the module leader. The hardcopy will contain items that cannot be submitted online (e.g. anything from MS Project). You should also email your PowerPoint slides.
The hard copy must be bound and look professional.
A live presentation of your work is required, but if you want to provide a visual or audio presentation instead of a live presentation, that will be acceptable.
Work that is suspected to be plagiarised my lead to you being called for an oral examination to support your report’s findings.
You should always retain a copy of your work until a final mark (in July?) is agreed, just in case something goes wrong and your mark is misplaced.

The Report (60% of the assignment)
Your report should look professional and read as one piece of work.
An executive summary, an introduction, a main body, a conclusion and references are expected.
The whole report should not exceed 3000 words. A word count is expected.
It should be easy to ascertain who the author of each section is. Lack of clarity may lose marks.
Diagrams, tables and appendices do not contribute to the word count.
The PowerPoint slides should include notes. The slides should indicate care for visual presentation. A straight copy and paste of report sections is usually not visually appealing.
The Presentation (20% of the assignment)
As part of this assignment you need to do a brief presentation of your work. This will be either a) a live presentation to your module leader and a second marker, or b) a filmed presentation that will be visible to the module leader and the second marker (YouTube?), in a format to be agreed.
The presentation needs to be exciting but to also convince the executives that you know what you are talking about.
A reflective statement (20% of the assignment)
Each member will write an evaluation of the project, how it was run, how it should have been run if you were to start it again and an evaluation of your contribution to the work.
A personal statement without evidence and with no references will have missed the point. If claims are made, the entry to the activity log should be mentioned.
Assumptions
This is a fairly open assignment where you need to identify your route and your quality criteria. You should avoid making assumptions without checking them. If you have an assumption/question, you should email the module leader for clarification. Answers to questions will appear on Blackboard and will become part of the assignment, so you are advised to check all the assumptions before you hand in your work.
The last questions to be answered on Blackboard will be a week before the deadline.
Questions that have been answered before will be ignored, so please ensure you consult Blackboard before you fire off a question.

Group Dynamics
Working in a group requires coordination and commitment. Meetings need to be arranged and adhered to. You should clearly distinguish between meetings, where reports are received and work allocated, and brainstorm workshops, where ideas are floated and decisions are forged. The type of meeting you will choose and the venue has to be decided fairly early in the project (e.g. at the university, virtual, using Skype etc.)
You need to keep a log of activities describing the main happenings while working together. This log will have to be signed and attached to the work you submit. The log activities have to map onto the WBS.
If a member does not pull their weight, the rest of the group need to provide evidence that a meeting was arranged and tasks allocated, before we can decide if anyone was at fault. Failure to keep a log of activities will result in the whole team being penalized if one member defaults.
Entries should be in a summarized form, giving sufficient details to identify contributions of group members. In particular we are interested in brief comments on the major stages that required analysis and discussion. We are also interested to hear of any key issues and problems that your group had to address.
The log of activities may look like this:
Date    Activity    Member    Problems/Outcome/Discussion

A well designed and documented log of activities may add up to 5% to the group mark. The absence of such a log may result in a group losing up to 3% of their mark.
Good luck

Here is a website to give you an idea of the kind of thing we expect:
http://www.mailtravel.co.uk/holiday/route-66-for-solo-travellers-819b2f40ae3e4096e7865d79b980efc5-n1821/overview

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