Summary of a Project Management Plan for the Coventry Football Championship

Executive Summary

This document comprises a summary of a project management plan for the Coventry Football Championship. The primary goal is to organize a university football tournament that will take place in Coventry, United Kingdom (UK). The tournament will take place in August 2019 and it will attract a minimum of 30 University football clubs and approximately 10,000 football fans. The project manager has been hired by a sports events company -Sports Unlimited Ltd to make appropriate plans for the event.

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Order now

Key components of the plan will be inclusive of a feasibility analysis of the project overviewed using an appropriate project management theory and frameworks. A preparation of the initial plan to be used for the tournament will also be executed featuring the project scope, project Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) and the activities Gantt Chart. Lastly, an analysis of the project's stakeholders will be executed, which will detail how they should be managed to achieve the project's objectives.

Introduction

Project management entails planning, organizing as well as managing efforts so as to accomplish different activities meant to make a project successful. It is an important undertaking because it ensures that a proper plan for achieving strategic goals have been developed. Effective project managers position themselves in ensuring that there is a timely accomplishment of tasks. That is through breaking up projects into tasks for different teams or stakeholders to complete. Large events such as the preparation of a football tournament require efficient planning due to its magnitude and scale of activities. The following comprehensive project management plan will refine the order of executing multiple activities in preparation of the August 2019 Coventry football event.

Feasibility Study

Market Feasibility

Developing a feasibility report will be the first part of this project management plan. Just like the name implies, a feasibility study is employed to ascertain the viability of a project idea, such as confirming whether a project is technically and legally feasible and also economically justifiable (Mesly, 2017). Moreover, feasibility studies help in ascertaining the factors that can help in promoting the success of a project (Munsaka, 2013). The studies should be executed by project managers because they help in determining the workability as well as the profitability of business ventures (Havard, 2013). The following feasibility assessment will outline the evaluation of the project's market, technical and financial feasibility.

Market Trend

Football has a great market in the UK. The popularity and demand of football in the UK have increased substantially over the last decade. A report published by Magowan (2015) for BBC Sports confirmed that 800,000 football fans visited the UK in 2014 for football, generating PS684 million in revenue. Majority of the fans originated from the Republic of Ireland, Norway, Sweden and the United States (Magowan 2015). The average attendance per every football league match in the UK since 2011 to date has also been high, averaging approximately 4,500 sports fans in a match per stadium (Statistica, 2018). The statistics portray that football watching is an existing trend in the UK and there is a high demand for the sport in the nation.

Figure 1: Image showing the average attendance of football matches by local and international fans. Retrieved from the official Statistica website (Statistica, 2018).

Price Setting

The cost of football tickets in the UK is slightly higher than the cost of similar tickets in other nations like the United States. An annual research executed by the BBC sport focused on evaluating the price of watching football matches in the UK revealed that the minimum price of a single ticket to watch a football match in the UK is PS26 with the highest price going up to PS95 for a single match (BBC Sports, 2017). The research also focused on other associated costs such as the cost for a season ticket, football program, tea, pies, and adult away offers.

Figure 2: Image showing a chart of the prices of tickets charged by 13 top football teams in the UK in 2017. Retrieved from the BBC Sports official page (BBC Sports, 2017).

The BBC price for football studies is the largest of its kind in Europe and it gathers the price statistics of tickets for the entire season and matchday tickets. A total of 13 clubs situated in England, Scotland, Northern Ireland as well as Wales are considered, with some of the teams being top participators in the top leagues in the world (BBC Sports, 2017). The report affirms that football championships like the anticipated August 2019 Coventry football event can secure a sizeable revenue from the sale of tickets to fans. It is also a good projection that the sponsors of the event might profit from the match if the event is well hosted.

Location

The preferred location where the Coventry Football Championship will be held in the Ricoh Arena. The venue is preferred due to its strategic location in England, with easy access to major roads like highway M1 and M40 from London. The stadium has a sitting position of 32,609 persons at full capacity enough to cater for the expected turnout of 10,000 at the planned Coventry event in August 2019 (Gilbert, 2016). Lastly, the stadium is in close proximity to an exhibition mall and hotel for any supplies that may be needed by the event spectators.

Figure 3: Map showing the geographical position of the Ricoh Arena Retrieved from Google Maps (2018)

Target Needs

There has been a growing need for inter-universities' football competition among university football lovers in the UK. That is after a similar event was held three years ago in London and the best university football teams determined and crowned. Pressure has been asserted towards the Sports Unlimited Ltd by the university football associations across the UK for a similar event to be held. The stated planned Coventry football tournament will be an acceptance event to such requests and it will feature at least 30 university football clubs in the UK.

Competitor

In August 2019, there will be limited competition for the Coventry Football Championship event since there will be no other major football tournament will be held in the United Kingdom at the time. To date, no other football event has been announced to take place during the month of August 2019 by the UK Football Association. As such, football enthusiasts will focus on the inter-university event that will be held in Coventry. The minimum turn-out of at least 10,000 spectators at the event is expected to attain at the event and all the event's tickets will be sold out by the last day of June 2018.

Potential Improvement

Apart from the use of secondary sources to validate the proposals for this project, primary sources such as surveys will be employed. The surveys will be administered on some of the football spectators that have portrayed an interest in participating at the event. The survey will have tailored questions that will seek to investigate the expectations of the event's spectators in the Coventry football event. Also, the surveys will be distributed around the Coventry area to random people, who will acknowledge that they will not miss the Football Championship in August 2019.

Ticket Sales

The main source of revenue for the football event will be the sale of tickets. The primary driving force for the sale of the event's tickets is expected to be the headliners advertising the event that will be posted on the Coventry local newspapers. Also, the advertisements about the event that will be made through the media, posters, and artworks all over Coventry will also raise the sale of the tickets. The expected revenue from the sale of events tickets will be PS3,000,000. That is if the tickets costs are PS30 each for a single event at the stadium at the expected minimum capacity of 10,000 people and last for 30 days.

Sponsors

The primary financier of the event will be the UK Football Association and they confirmed that they will be willing to settle 50% of the event's total proposed budget. Also, 25% of the budget will be attained from companies like the Coca-Cola Corporation that will be advertising their products during the event. At the moment on Coca-Cola and Amazon have confirmed that they will be promoting their brands at the event. The remaining 25% will be sponsored by donations made by all the Universities that will be participating in the event. Early sale of the event tickets will also settle the balance in the budget that will be realized in the event of future unforeseen expenditures.

Project Scope

Project scope is part of the planning facet of project management that entails ascertaining and documenting lists of specific goals, tasks, costs, deadlines as well as other deliverables in a project (Moustafaev, 2014; Bertron et., 2012). It is also the work that needs to be undertaken so as to deliver a completed service or product with desired features as well as functions (Kloppenborg, 2014; (Bertron, et al., 2012). Having a poor project scope can lead to the execution of excessive work that is not required in the completion of a project (Anderson, et al., 2013)Objective

The primary objective of this project to promote football as a universally recognized sport that can foster healthy social connections among university students in the UK.

Functional Requirements

The following listed r...