Group Project: Thanksgiving Dinner Party Planning

The assignment is to host a Thanksgiving dinner party with approximately 50 guests, which requires planning and execution over a period of 5 weeks. The task involves setting project objectives, creating a work breakdown structure, developing a network diagram, estimating activity durations, and calculating schedule times. The group must also determine the critical path, create a Gantt chart, estimate costs for each activity, and prepare budgeted cost tables. Additionally, they need to identify potential risks that could jeopardize the project and develop response plans.

Group Project for PROJ 600 – Thanksgiving dinner party
You will be hosting a Thanksgiving dinner party at your home on Nov 24 this year. According to the
historical data, you will roughly have 50 guests (this number could be a bit different, but you need justify
your number). Today is Wednesday, October 19, 2016. Overall, you have 5 weeks on planning this
project. You will have to decide who will be invited, what will be on your Thanksgiving menu, what fun
activities (games) will be provided to guests (especially kid guests) before the dinner, who needs help on
transportation/accommodation, when will you start cooking/baking (e.g., baking Turkeys), and other
necessities for a Thanksgiving dinner party.
Your group will
1) Establish the project objectives, and make a list of your 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 the person who will be responsible;
5) Create a network diagram that shows the sequence and dependent relationships of all the
activities;
6) Estimate the duration for each activity;
7) Using a project start time of 0 (today or as you desire) and a required project deadline of May 31
(note: you have to calculate the actual project completion time such as 180 days according to your
start time), calculate the ES, EF, LS, and LF times and total slack for each activity. If your calculations
result in a project schedule with negative total slack, revise the project scope and activity estimated
durations to arrive at an acceptable baseline schedule for completing the project by the project
deadline.
8) Determine the critical path;
9) Use the software to produce a bar chart (Gantt Chart) based on the schedule in item (7).
10) Use the responsibility assignments you made in item (4) and the baseline schedule you developed in
items (7-8) to develop a resource requirements table (similar to Figure 6.3), for each resource,
based on as-soon-as-possible (ASAP) schedule.
11) Estimate the cost for each activity using the schedule in items (7-8);
12) Determine the total budgeted cost for the project;
13) Prepare 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;
14) Identify at least four risks that could jeopardize the project;
15) Create a risk assessment matrix including a response plan for each of the risks.