Assignment 4: Project Budget – due May 1 Complete the following for assignment 4. As usual, choose a project either from your personal work, the suggested fictional project ″a band plays a gig at a small venue,″ or from any real or fictional project of your choice. Use a spreadsheet program if you like (Excel, Numbers, Smartsheet, Google Sheets, etc.), but upload your assignment as a PDF so that everyone can read it. Warm-up (Optional): Consider, how much do you anticipate your project will cost? Why do you think that? Have you ever done a similar project? If not, is there anyone you could ask, to try to determine how much it is likely to cost? Assignment: Create a project budget, showing income/resources and expenses, using your WBS as a reference to ferret out any dimension of the project where money could change hands. (Obviously, choose a project, real or imagined, that includes some financial transactions.) List anticipated resources, income, and expenses, with subtotals at the bottom of each section and then a grand total as the ″bottom line.″ Make it tidy, clear, and professional. It should inspire confidence from someone, such as an investor or project sponsor, who is trying to decide whether to fund your endeavor. Use good formatting to clarify what′s happening, such as decimal-aligning numbers, and using bold type to identify column headers, as opposed to the data. Do you have sufficient funds? If not, how will you bring your project back from the brink? Submit a budget spreadsheet for your project. Feel free to vary the numbers or other elements of your budget from reality, to protect your privacy or confidential information, or to use a project that you might want to do someday, as opposed to one that is already in progress. Be sure to include the ″bottom line″—the overall total, revealing the financial health of the project. Is it making or losing money? Review your classmates′ submissions. Are they easy to follow? Does it look like they care about the quality and presentation of this information, inspiring your confidence in their professionalism? Do you think they are being realistic in their estimations, and have they left out any significant expenses? If you have done a similar project, does their projection match what you found? Are there ways they might achieve better value? Explore (Optional): In Smartsheet, on your project sheet, add columns for budgeted and actual project expenses. At the end of the sheet, tally the total of each column, and define additional fields to track any other data that you will find helpful.
