This project will prepare you for being able to constantly seek opportunities for increasing revenue and reducing costs
When I have an entire management team attending a workshop I sometimes add on a 'Profit Improvement Project'. I also believe that the PIP will provide evidence of a return on the investment made in providing the workshop to the team that attended my workshop. Please see below for the briefing to my latest workshop participants.
Mel Brooks Associates
Finance, Accounting and Budgeting Workshop: Profit Improvement Project
‘Project June 200’
Workshop Group Project
Start date: 21st April 2009
Due date: 30th June 2009
Presentations to Management: Date to be arranged. Mr B will invite members of the panel.
Your group is to meet on a regular basis to discuss ways in which additional revenue can be generated by the hotel by which you are employed or how cost savings can be achieved. The amounts that each group is required to achieve should, over the next year, be at least R200,000.
Once you have generated your ideas you can commence writing up a proposal to management giving exact details of:
o how the additional revenue or cost saving will be achieved
o the estimated amount that will be generated by additional revenue or cost savings
o what, if any, resistance will your proposals meet with and,
o how any resistance met with will be overcome.
In addition your assignment should demonstrate what you have learned from the workshop by linking your ideas to all of the material covered. So costing will play a role, how people will be affected needs to be considered, how people will be motivated to cooperate in implementing your ideas will require reference to Managing People and Marketing.
All proposals must be the groups own, unaided, original work. A write-up of projects which you have participated in, in the past, or are aware of, or you are currently working on will not be acceptable. Neither will the proposals of vendors be acceptable as your work.
Any material that you present that is not your own must be referenced as to source. Please read the note on plagiarism.
"Plagiarism is the practice of claiming or implying original authorship of (or incorporating material from) someone else's written or creative work, in whole or in part, into one's own without adequate acknowledgement. Unlike cases of forgery, in which the authenticity of the writing, document, or some other kind of object itself is in question, plagiarism is concerned with the issue of false attribution.
Within academia, plagiarism by students, professors, or researchers is considered academic dishonesty or academic fraud and offenders are subject to academic censure. In journalism, plagiarism is considered a breach of journalistic ethics, and reporters caught plagiarizing typically face disciplinary measures ranging from suspension to termination. Some individuals caught plagiarizing in academic or journalistic contexts claim that they plagiarized unintentionally, by failing to include quotations or give the appropriate citation. While plagiarism in scholarship and journalism has a centuries-old history, the development of the Internet, where articles appear as electronic text, has made the physical act of copying the work of others much easier, simply by copying and pasting text from one web page to another".(Source: Wikipedia)
Project Length: To do justice to the proposal it will need to be approximately 3,500 words in length excluding references and annexures.
Each group project should, on its cover page, have a table containing the full names all the group members and the groups view on each member’s contribution toward the completion of the assignment.
Notes:
1. Please remember that each group is to nominate a spokesperson who will email me the selected name of the group by the 27th April. The group spokesperson will become my contact for the duration of the project.
2. I suggest that group meetings take place on a weekly basis. At your first meeting group members should put forward ideas they have for discussion. These should be reviewed and those with the most practical merit should be researched and put into the proposal format required. Please note that if any capital expenditure is required the proposal must comply with the capital budgeting requirements as outlined at the workshop.
3. I am here to assist you at all stages of your project. Please keep me posted on your progress. I will also be happy to review, and comment on, any ideas or draft proposals during the course of the next two months. I will also review the final proposals prior to the project due date (30th June 2009).
Good luck! This project will prepare you for being able to constantly seek opportunities for increasing revenue and reducing costs – the role of all managers.
