Social Work Project Management Plan

This document presents a detailed project management plan for a social work project. It analyzes the project scope, identifies key tasks, and utilizes tools like Work Breakdown Structure (WBS), Critical Path Analysis, and Gantt charts to illustrate the project timeline and resource allocation. The analysis concludes that the project can be completed within 12 months with a budget of $30,000.

SOCIAL WORK PROJECT

TABLE OF CONTENTS
TITLE..............................................................................................................................................1
INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................1
MAIN BODY...................................................................................................................................1
Project management.....................................................................................................................1
Project management in social work.............................................................................................2
Project details...............................................................................................................................2
Project achievements...................................................................................................................3
Project work.................................................................................................................................3
Time involved within the project.................................................................................................5
......................................................................................................................................................6
Cost of the project........................................................................................................................6
Ethical risks and consecrations....................................................................................................7
CONCLUSION................................................................................................................................7
REFERENCES................................................................................................................................8

TITLE
Prevention and reduction of addiction of alcohol and smoking within youngsters
INTRODUCTION
Social works helps in enhancing social functioning and well being of the society. Today
many health and social care organizations are focusing on various social work projects that helps
in enhancing the overall well-being of the society and which also helps in reducing bad addiction
within individuals as well (Archibald and Archibald, 2016). This project is based on prevention
and reduction of addiction of alcohol and smoking within youngsters. This assignment will
mainly focus on project management in social work, provide details of the social work project,
work breakdown structure of the project, critical path Gantt charts, project cost, resources
needed, ethical considerations and risk mitigations.
MAIN BODY
Project management
Project management can be defined as a practice of planning, initiating, controlling,
executing and closing team work in order to achieve desired goals so that success criteria can be
achieved within the specified time and allotted budget. It can also be defined as an application
through which skills, knowledge, tools and techniques related to project activities can be
achieved in order to meet the requirements of the project. Main goal of project management is to
achieve all the goals of the project within all the desired constraints of the project. All the
information related to the deliverables, goals, outcomes etc. are described at initial level only
when the development process begins. Main desirable primary constrains of a project are time,
budget, quality and scope other than this there are few more constrains of projects which are risk
management, stakeholder management, human resource, integration etc. Project management
also focusses on optimisation and allocation of required inputs so that they can be applied in
order to meet predefined objectives (Cleden 2017). In other words the main objective of project
management is to complete the project with respect to all the objectives of the client. Once all the
objectives given by the client are established all important and necessary decisions based on the
requirements of the project are taken in order to complete all objectives of the project. Complete
project management process is done in five phases which are: initiating, planning, execution,
controlling and monitoring, and lastly closing.
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Project management in social work
Project management in social work is extremely important as it helps in managing
resources, measuring outcome of social work and assessing all kinds of risk that are associated
with social work. There are various challenges that are faced by social work organisations on
daily basis. As they are trying to adopt changes within themselves and trying to bring innovation
within themselves challenges and risk for them are increasing continuously (Curleand et. al.,
2017). Many social work organisations are now trying to adopt project management within their
system in order to reduce the challenges faced by them. Project management is also important in
social work as projects in this sector consist of limited resources with less time duration which
increases the challenges within them. The main work of project management in social work is to
manage team work, team skills and soft factors such as communication as these are the main
factors that create or resolve conflicts within an organisation especially one which does social
work. Projects in this sector are of wide range and can e be either small or large. Successful
project management in social work is associated with various practises and valuable tools that
are used by social workers and project managers. It is also important in social work because of
role of a manager and a leader in social sector is quite isolated and complex as compared to
others as changes within social work projects are quite often and due to which changes within the
project are necessarily brought.
Project details
Project: This project is based prevention and reduction of addiction of alcohol and smoking
within youngsters. Alcoholism and smoking tobacco is one of the major social determinants of
the society. It has been observed that addiction of smoking and alcohol is continuously
increasing especially among youngsters. These individuals are becoming increasingly dependent
upon such things. So, this project will focus on identifying, reducing and preventing addition of
alcohol and smoking tobacco among individuals especially in youngsters.
Target group: Target group for this project are all the youngsters who are addicted to alcohol
and smoking.
Stakeholders: There are various stakeholders involved in this project which are: community
partners, case management, target audience, group counsellor, advocate and social workers.
There are four community partners involved in this project which are: NHS, Australian
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association of social workers, International social service Australia and Australian council of
social service. Target audience of the project are already described above.
organisation of the project: This project will be organised into three different parts. First part
with the help of community partners alcohol and smoking addicted youngsters will be identified.
Then with the help of social workers those individuals will be approached and asked for details.
Then with the help of group counsellor counselling will be provided to those individuals so that
their addiction for alcohol can be reduced.
Project achievements
Aim: The main aim of this project will be to prevent and reduce addiction of alcohol and
smoking among youngsters.
Objectives: Main objective of this project are:
 To identify number of individuals who are addicted to alcohol and smoking.
 To prevent addiction of alcohol and smoking to increase within Youngsters.
 To reduce addiction of alcohol and smoking among youngsters.
Deliverables: The main deliverable of this project will be reduce number of alcoholic and
smoking individuals among youngsters and second deliverable will be to reduce addiction of
alcohol among youngsters.
Monitoring and evaluating the project: Continuous monitoring and evaluation of the project
will help in evaluating whether the project is going on track or not. It also helps in identifying all
the issues that might work as a hindrance in completion of the project (Freeman, 2016).
Continuous monitoring of project deliverables will be done in different phases such as: Firstly
monitoring of target audience of this project will be done and then level of addiction among
those individuals will be seen. Then whether enough measures are being taken so that their
addiction get reduced or not will be monitored. Complete project will be evaluated based on the
work break down structure where project will be divided into smaller activities. All the activities
will be evaluated based in the time period in which they are needed to be completed.
Project work
Work Breakdown structure
Work breakdown structure is one of the most important part of a project management as
it helps in dividing complex projects into quite simpler and manageable tasks (Ju, Seo and Park,
2018). In other words according to PMBOK it is defined as deliverable oriented hierarchical
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decomposition of work that is needed to be executed by the project team. Here, work breakdown
structure of the project to prevent and reduce addiction of alcohol and smoking among
youngsters will be explained.
Project activities:
Identify aim, objectives and deliverables of the projections
identify stakeholders of the project
Identify number of alcohol and smoking addicted individuals
Identify level of addiction within the individuals
Gathering information related to alcoholic and smoking population
Interpreting the collected information
Raising awareness about ill effects of alcohol and smoking
Implementation
Monitoring and evaluation
Illustration 1: Work breakdown structure
Limits and exclusions
In this all the statements or activities are called out that are not within the scope of the
project. If these statements are not defined then it can lead stakeholders to make wrong or false
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assumptions which can put unrealistic expectation within the project in team members (Li and
Lu, 2016). For example: take legal actions is not within the scope of the project so it will be
included in limits and exclusion so that all the stakeholders do not make false assumptions and
mislead the project.
Time involved within the project
Scheduling time
Scheduling is also one of the main part of project management as it helps in planning all
the activities of a project so that the main goal, aim and objectives of the project can be priorities
and completed within the available and specified time period (Meredith, Mantel Jr and Shafer,
2017). It helps in providing enough time to the project manager so that they can complete all the
essential tasks on time. This project will be completed in almost 12 months and will start on
5/30/19 and end on 5/29/20
Critical path
Critical path can be defined as a project sequence of all network activities which helps in
identifying shortest possible path to complete the project. It also helps in identifying a linear
relationship between project activity duration and overall cost of the project.
Illustration 2: Critical path
Gantt charts
Gantt chart helps in providing a graphical illustration of a schedule that helps in planning,
tracking, scheduling a project (Nam and et.al., 2016). It plays a vital role in completion of a
project as the duration in which the activity should be completed is defined in a better manner.
Task Name Duration Start Finish
Prede
cessor
s
Resources Cost
Identify aim, objectives
and deliverables of the
projections identify
17 days Thu 5/30/19 Fri
6/21/19
Project
manager, team
members
$3000
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stakeholders of the project
Identify number of alcohol
and smoking addicted
individuals
21 days Mon
6/24/19
Mon
7/22/19 1
Community
partners, social
workers
$3500
Identify level of addiction
within the individuals 25 days Tue 7/23/19 Mon
8/26/19 2 Team members,
social workers $2500
Gathering information
related to alcoholic and
smoking population
27 days Tue 8/27/19 Wed
10/2/19 3 Social workers,
team members $5500
Interpreting the collected
information 41 days Thu 10/3/19
Thu
11/28/1
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4 Team members $2000
Raising awareness about ill
effects of alcohol and
smoking
57 days Fri 11/29/19 Mon
2/17/20 5,3 Team members,
social workers $8000
Implementation 47 days Tue 2/18/20 Wed
4/22/20 6
Team members,
counselor and
social workers
$2500
Monitoring and evaluation 27 days Thu 4/23/20 Fri
5/29/20 7 Team members $3000
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Illust
ration 3: Gantt chart
Cost of the project
Resources required to run the project
There are various resources required for completion of the project such as : community
partners who will provide necessary information on addicted alcohol and smoking youngsters,
social workers who will help in reducing these addictions, counsellors who will provide
counselling to such youngsters, team members who will ensure proper and timely completion of
the project.
Cost estimation methods
There are various kinds of cost estimation methods but the method chosen for this is
Bottom up estimation method (Schwalbe, 2015). This method is used when each and every
activity within the project is estimated and based on it overall project is estimated. This helps in
making an accurate and realistic project to be estimated.
Ethical risks and consecrations
Ethical concerns and ways it can be mitigated
There are many ethical concerns that are needed to be considered and if not done then it
can create further issues in completion of the project (van Rensburg, Thobane and Da Costa,
2018). Ethical concerns that are needed to be considered are: Discrimination among individuals
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should not be done as it can increase ethical concerns and issues within the organisations. This
ethical concern can be mitigated developing a regulatory body that will help in increasing
transparency not only within the project but within the organisation as well.
Methods of analysing and mitigating risks
One of the most common analysis method is auditing (Wang and et. al., 2017). Weekly
auditing and conducting meeting will help in analysing complete project and will also help in
reducing identified risk so that project remains on track and can be completed on time without
any ethical issue.
CONCLUSION
From the above assignment it has been summarised that project management is one of the
most important practise that helps in keeping a project on track, within budget and on time.
Project management in social work is also important as projects under social work have limited
resources are are needed to be completed on time. From the above project management analysed
it has been concluded that this complete addition social work project can be completed within 12
months with overall budget of $30,000.
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