Planning and Execution

Improving health in your community

You are working for a local health authority in a country of your choice. You have been asked to develop a proposal for a project which would be delivered in your local area. The project should seek to improve life choices made by people within the community within which that organisation works. The aim is to improve the overall quality of adult health and reduce the cost of managing preventable long-term illnesses such as heart disease, stroke and certain cancers which are related to lifestyles. The project should seek to increase awareness of risks which could lead to long-term illness. Your have been asked to prepare a project proposal for review by a committee which will decide whether to fund the project. The project should last for about one year and you will be the project manager.

Scenarios such as this never contain full information. You may therefore make any reasonable assumptions about this scenario that are appropriate for answering the assignment questions.

Assignment Tasks

Task 1 – 20 Marks

Perform an analysis of the project stakeholders. (20 marks)

Task 2 – 20 Marks

Using literature, define a procedure for capturing and managing project requirements. (8 marks) Apply the procedure to the community health case. (8 marks) Briefly discuss why project requirements are not always correct. (4 marks)

Task 3 – 20 Marks

Explain how you propose to manage the project. The focus areas which the committee want to hear about are: resourcing (5 marks); planning (5 marks); monitoring/reporting (5 marks); and cost management (5 marks).

Task 4 – 20 Marks

The chair of the review committee sent you an email saying that she has heard a lot of good things about agile project management, and asking should we use agile for this project? Critically evaluate the potential use of agile for the community health project (10 marks). Explain and justify your decision about whether to propose agile or a traditional (waterfall) approach. (10 marks)

Task 5 – 20 Marks

The committee chair sent you another email asking: how will we know if this project has succeeded and delivered good value for the investment made? Explain approaches for evaluating the outcomes of the project (10 marks) and for evaluating the project processes (planning and execution). (10 marks)