Budget
Staffing and Personnel
The proposed project of the Health Care System Improvements for the Eastern Michigan University will require involving a team of five people at the first stage of its implementation. Hiring these five professionals and paying their salaries for the period of 1 year will amount to $50,000.
Travel
Local
The project will involve local travelling for the purposes of consulting, purchase of necessary materials and equipment, and potential unforeseen travel expenses associated with the need to transport the urgently delivered equipment or arrival of a member of the project team. These expenses will total $5,000.
Interstate
The interstate travel will also be involved mainly for the purposes of allowing all the selected members of the project team to arrive at the Eastern Michigan University. The interstate travel will involve $6,000.
Foreign
Based on the scope of the project, no foreign travel will be involved in the activities aimed at improving the health care system at the EMU. Therefore, no additional costs will be needed.
Consulting Expenses
The proper implementation of the proposed project will involve consulting by the qualified specialists in the areas of health care, student administration, and project management. The total cost of the consulting will amount to $8,000.
Services and Materials
Office Materials
The project proposed will require an office for the team to reside and the office materials including paper, computers, software and hardware. The total estimated cost of the office materials for the project will amount to $8,000.
Communication Expenses (telephone, internet)
The project will embrace all the campus and non-campus facilities of the EMU and will require communication with the suppliers of materials and equipment as well as with the project team members. Telephone connection and internet will be the two communication types used during the project and involving $3,000 of expenses.
Training Materials
Training materials for the Health Care System Improvements project will include only the educational literature and guidance for the use of the project diagnostic equipment that will require $5,000.
Equipment
Finally, equipment will be the most important part of the project. The innovative equipment for diagnostics and treatment of illnesses ranging from flu to various infectious diseases will be required at the estimated cost of $50,000.
Total Direct Costs
Total Indirect Costs
The indirect costs are the costs that might arise from the project although they are not stipulated in the list of direct expenses and include costs for some additional transportation, training, travel, or equipment maintenance and repair work and are estimated at the level of $20,000.
Total Costs
Therefore, total costs for the project are the sum of direct and indirect costs involved, i. e. $155,000.
Revenue Generation Methods
The project will have two main methods of revenue generation. First, the modern diagnostic equipment and professional healthcare team will allow solving the EMU students’ health issues early and save costs involved into further hospital based treatment. Second, the project team will have the opportunity to work also with non-campus health issues and patients, and thus generate revenue.
Assessment and Evaluation
General Notions
Assessment and effectiveness evaluation procedures are vital for any project involving human resource and outside funding as the project sponsors need to know how the money they provide are spent and how effective the work they fund is (McClellan & Stringer, 2009, p. 560). For this purposes, two specific types of evaluation are designed, i. e. formative and summative, together with two evaluation directions, i. e. inside and outside evaluation.
Evaluation and Budget Agreement
One of the most important aspects of evaluation and assessment procedures is their agreement with the estimated budget of the project and the consideration of the budgeting concerns during the process of success evaluation and cost-effectiveness assessment procedures (MacKinnon & Associates, 2004, p. 143). For the proposed project, the assessment of agreement with the budget constraints will be carried out through the processes of summative and outside evaluation, with the former being the account of results of the project and the latter being objective in its judgments.
Evaluation Types
Formative Evaluation
The formative evaluation technique will be used in the project during its proposal stage as far as this type of evaluation focuses of the process-related part of the project (MacKinnon & Associates, 2004, p. 98). In other words, in the proposed project the formative evaluation technique will be used to monitor the conformity of implemented methods with goals and expected outcomes of the project.
Summative Evaluation
The summative evaluation will be implemented after the project is carried out in order to assess its results and relate the actual project outcomes with the expected ones (McClellan & Stringer, 2009, p. 533). This means that summative evaluation will consider the agreement of the project with the budget, assess the effectiveness of the funds’ use and project as a whole on the basis of two criteria, i. e. dynamics of the rate of illnesses in the EMU and the rate of successful treatment procedures that did not demand students to address any other healthcare facility but EMU project team.
Evaluation Directions
Inside Evaluation
The proposed project will use the combination of inside and outside evaluation to provide cost-effective and at the same time objective work and control of budget funds’ use. The pros of inside evaluation include lower costs and better knowledge of situation by evaluator, while the cons include potential subjectivity or bias on part of the evaluator (McClellan & Stringer, 2009, p. 192).
Outside Evaluation
The outside evaluation has the opposite pros and cons, on the one hand being the costly and more difficult procedure as the evaluator will need time to get into the course of the project, but on the other hand providing better grounds for objectivity and precision of evaluation results (McClellan & Stringer, 2009, p. 193). Accordingly, the proposed project will use both the inside and outside evaluation types to ensure the objective and cost-effective evaluation process.
Common Pitfalls and Mistakes
The common pitfalls of the evaluation process include the excessive focus on the goal and the too general assessment carried out not precisely enough to make sure the data show that the result is achieved even if actually it is not. To avoid this most common mistake the assessment of the project results should be carried out by different people that those that designed the project goals. Finally, the evaluators should be unaware of the expected outcomes and should collect the actual data so that they could be further compared to the expected outcomes.
References
MacKinnon, F.J.D., & Associates (2004). Rentz’s Student affairs practice in higher education (3rd ed.) Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas Publishers.
McClellan, G.S. & Stringer, J. (2009). The Handbook of Student Affairs Administration (3rd ed.) San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.