Five-Star Hotel Project Planning

Project Initiation

A Docklands London-based restaurant owned by Joel and Ann has seen a major profitability success in the recent past. The restaurant receives a wide range of customers including office workers during the weekdays and local customers on weekends. Despite the current political heat surrounding the UK’s business environment due to Brexit, the restaurant managed to make a profit of £1 million the previous year. This continued profitability enabled the entrepreneurs to gain a capital base of £2.5 million, opening the way for an implementation of their long-term expansion plan. The plan is to invest in a five-star hotel serving the local community, the business class customers and London visitors. On top of the £2 million already available capital, the two entrepreneurs have approached a local bank for £2 million loans at an interest rate of 6%. It is estimated that the entire project would cost £4 million. Attached in the appendix 1 is the project’s business case.

Project Planning

The project plan will be required for purposes of defining the project and establishing its goals and objectives (Soderlund, 2004). Moreover, the plan will be an important sign of the agreement between various stakeholders such as the project manager, the governing committee, project sponsors (i.e. the bank & hotel owners), the project team and any other person affected by the project.

As illustrated in Appendix 2, the project plan will contain the project’s goals and objectives, the project purpose, scope and expectations of the project, the roles and responsibilities of all stakeholders, constraints and assumptions, the ground rules of the project, project timeline, the budget, and the conceptual design of the building (Project Management Institute, 2008).

Project Execution

This will be the third phase of the project. Herein, various physical deliverables will be drawn and presented to Joel and Ann to sign. Besides, for effective monitoring and execution of the project, various management processes will be established. Ideally, the processes will assist in time, cost, quality and risk management (Morris, 2001). Specifically, time management will be facilitated by Gantt chart (see appendix 3) and network diagrams. According to Kerzner (2001), the Gantt chart indicates the project schedule and its start and finish timelines. A major importance of the Gant chart is to define the specified duration to be taken by personnel to complete specific tasks and increase the chances of completing the project on time International (Project Management Association, 2006). On the other hand, the network diagrams are a graphical representation of how various activities of the project depend on each other and the timeline within which each activity is to be executed (Soderlund, 2004). They are useful in tracking the project deliverables from start to finish for purposes of ensuring that the activities are executed in a logical manner.

Project Closure

This will be the last stage of the project. It will entail the official closure of the hotel project and the development of all the relevant documents indicating the success levels of the project (Kerzner, 2001). Moreover, this stage will entail handing over the hotel to Joel and Ann (owners), delivering the project documentation to the owners, cancellation of supplier contracts, and informing the stakeholders that the project has been completed (Soderlund, 2004). This stage will also include a post-implementation review to establish the key success areas and to point out learned lessons.

References

International Project Management Association. (IPMA). (2006). In International Project Management Association competence baseline, version 3. Nijkerk, the Netherlands.

Kerzner, P. (2001) Project Management - A Systems Approach to Planning, Scheduling and Controlling, 7th Edition, John Wiley & Sons. New York.

Morris G. (2001). Updating the project management bodies of knowledge. Project Management Journal, 32(3), 21-30.

Project Management institute (2008) A guide to the project management body of knowledge (PMBOK Guide). Fourth edition. Newtown Square.

Söderlund J. (2004) Building theories of project management: past research ,questions for the future. International Journal of Project Management. 22(3), 183-191.