CASE STUDY Group Assignment & Presentation A Not-For Profit Medical Research Center

One of your team members is the director of external affairs for a national not-for-profit medical research center that does research on diseases related to aging. The centers work depends on funding from multiple sources, including the general public, individual estates and grants from corporations, foundations and the federal government.

Your department prepares an annual report of the centers accomplishments and financial status for the board of directors. It is mostly text with a few charts and tables, all black and white, with a simple cover. It is voluminous and pretty dry reading. It is inexpensive to produce other than the effort to pull together the content, which requires time to request and expedite information from the centers other departments.

At the last board meeting, the board members suggested the annual report be improved and upscale into a document that could be used for marketing and promotional purposes. They want you to mail the next annual report to the centers various stakeholders, past donors and targeted high-potential future donors. The board feels that such a document is needed to get the center in the same league with other large not-for-profit organizations with which it feels it competes for donations and funds. The board feels that the annual report could be used to inform these stakeholders about the advances the center is making in its research efforts and its strong fiscal management for effectively using the funding and donations it receives.

You and your team will need to produce a shorter, simpler, easy-to-read annual report that shows the benefits of the centers research and the impact on peoples lives. You will include pictures from various hospitals, clinics and long-term care facilities that are using the results of the centers research. You also will include testimonials from patients and families who have benefited from the centers research. The report must be eye-catching. It needs to be multicolor, contain a lot of pictures and easy-to-understand graphics, in addition be written in a style that can be understood by the average adult potential donor.

This is a significant undertaking for your department, which includes but not limited to three other staff members. You will have to contract out some of the activities and may have to travel to several medical facilities around the country to take photos and get testimonials. You will also need to put the design, printing and distribution out to bid to various contractors to submit proposals and prices to you. You estimate that approximately five million copies need to be distributed and/or mailed.

It is now September 2021 the board asks you to come to its next meeting in December 2021 to present a very detailed plan, schedule and budget for how you will complete the project. The board wants the annual report in the mail by April 5, 2022. The centers fiscal year ends December and its financial 2 statements should be available by January 15, 2022. However, the non-financial information for the report can start to be pulled together right after the December board meeting.

Fortunately, you are taking a project management course at harward College and see this as an opportunity to apply what you have been learning. You know that this is a big project and that the board has high expectations. You want to be sure you meet their expectations and get them to approve the budget that you will need for this project.

However, they will only do that if they are confident that you have a detailed plan for how you will get it all done. You and your staff have twelve weeks to prepare a plan to present to the board during the second week of December 2021. If approved, your team will have from January 1, 2022 to March 31, 2022 to implement the plan and complete the project. Your staff is composed of the members of your assigned group. In addition to the project manager, you have among you a marketing specialist, writer/editors and a staff assistant whose hobby is photography (pretend she/he is going to college part-time in the evenings to earn a degree in photojournalism and has won several local photography contests).

Question - Develop the work breakdown structure in two formats i.e. TREE structure and TABULAR view.