BUS353: Merlion Holiday Pte Ltd is a travel agency that focuses on outbound tours to Europe, Australia and the United States of America: Project Management Assignment, SUSS, Singapore

Case Scenario

Merlion Holiday Pte Ltd is a travel agency that focuses on outbound tours to Europe, Australia and the United States of America. With the COVID19 outbreak, its business has ground to a complete halt. Thanks to the quick Wage Support Scheme Government response, Merlion Holiday has been able to keep its core employees, though it had to let go of non-essential staff.

Even with this, it could not sustain itself over the long term. Hence the CEO, Mr Jack Chua, had to come with alternative business strategies to save his business. He observed that the local COVID19 infection rates had improved dramatically when compared to that of other countries. While many international borders remained closed, Singapore was opening up and encouraging its residents to patronise the local hospitality industry.

The Government has even given out hospitality vouchers to its citizens! Jack saw an opportunity to re-focus his business on inbound tours, not for overseas tourists, but for local Singaporeans and decided to venture into staycation packages.

His idea was to partner with local hotels, bus companies, tour guides and places of interest to run local tours complete with hotel stays, meals, entertainment and visits to places of interest. These other businesses are also desperate for customers. Merlion would focus on planning, marketing and selling these staycation packages.

Jack has formed a full-time project team to work on this new range of products. The team consists of Joseph Teo, Farah Liyana, and Rajesh Ganesan. Currently, Joseph is the company’s Tours Operations Manager, Farah Liyana is the Administration Manager and Rajesh is the Sales Manager.

As Jack had other businesses to attend to, he decided to put Rajesh in charge of the project. Along with forming the project team, Jack has formulated the following charter: develop viably 3-day staycation packages along with schedule, costing, pricing and marketing plans.

The project will formally start on 1 Feb 2021 and include the first staycation package. The project should end with a project review meeting to be conducted anytime within a week of the first staycation. It must take into account all relevant public holidays in Singapore. A total of $8,000 has been set aside for the project.

The project team understood the seriousness of their mission. There are 3 major activities to be carried out: Admin & Coordination, Product Development and Marketing. The team discussed among themselves and came out with the collective plan shown in table 1 below.

Question 1(a)

(i) Appraise the type of project organisation being used in the case study.
(ii) Examine why a strong team identity is important among the service partners assigned to participate in a staycation package.
(iii) Suggest any two (2) ways this team identity can be developed.
(iv) The CEO is concerned that a substantial 40% of the budget had been allocated for online marketing. By performing bottom-up cost estimation, propose to the CEO how online marketing costs can be reduced. Real evidence must be produced to support your answer.

Question 1(b)

(i) Arrange the activities of Table 1 into the 3 areas of work.
(ii) Discuss how you would assign the members of the Project Team to the 3 areas of work; i.e. Admin & Coordination, Staycation Product Development and Marketing.
(iii) Draw a 3-level WBS chart with the task owners (i.e. persons-in-charge) clearly indicated

Question 2(a)

Using the information in Table 1 and your answer to question 1(b):

(i) Create a Project Plan using Microsoft Project software showing the Budgeted Project Cost and the Gantt Chart. The cost table must include information on Total Project Cost and how it is broken down into other activity costs. The Gantt Chart must show the following columns along with a suitable bar chart: Task Name, Duration, Start Date,

Finish Date, Predecessors and Resource Names. Just before the project started, the CEO spoke to Rajesh, looking grim. Company finances were bad. The first staycation must be conducted over the weekend of 14-16 May.

(ii) Evaluate the impact of this requirement on the project schedule in the Gantt Chart that you have prepared. Suggest suitable remedies as necessary

Question 2(b)

(i) Identify one (1) risk that could affect each of the following areas of the project: Technical, External, Organisation, Project Management (1 risk per area).
(ii) Assess these risks in terms of the impact that they might have on the project.
(iii) Formulate a suitable Risk Response for each of these 4 risks.
Note: Your Risk Responses must be based on at least three (3) of the following 4 types: Avoid, Retain, Mitigate, Transfer. For example, your answers cannot all be using “Mitigate” or any one or two of the other 3 types. You may present your answer in the form of a table with the following columns: Risk Number, Risk Description, Risk Consequence, Risk Response Type, Risk Response Action.