Question
CASE
Manchester United Soccer Club
Nicolette Larson was loading the dishwasher with her husband, Kevin, and telling him
abut the first meeting of the Manchester United Tournament Organising Committee.
Nicolette, a self-confessed “soccer mom”, had been elected tournament director and
was responsible for organising the club’s first summer tournament.
Manchester United Soccer Club (MUSC) located in Manchester, New Hampshire,
was formed in 1992 as a way of bringing recreational players to higher level of
competition and preparing them for the State Olympic Development Program and or
high school teams. The club’s board of directors decided in the fall to sponsor a
summer invitational soccer tournament to generate revenue. Given the boom in
youth soccer, hosting summer tournaments has become a popular method for raising
funds. MUSC team regularly compete in three to four tournaments each summer at
different locations in New England. These tournaments have been reported to
generate between $50,000 and $70,000 for the host club.
MUSC needs additional revenue to refurbish and expand the number of soccer fields
at the Rock Rimmon soccer complex. Funds would also be used to augment the
club’s scholarship program, which provides financial aid to players who cannot afford
the $450 annual club dues.
Nicolette gave her husband a blow-by-blow account of what transpired during the first
tournament committee meeting that night. She started the meeting by having
everyone introduce themselves and by proclaiming how excited she as that the club
was going to sponsor it own tournament. She then suggested that the committee
brainstorm what needed to be done to pull off the event; she would record their ideas
on a flipchart.
What emerged was a free-for-all of ideas and suggestions. One member immediately
stressed the importance of having qualified referees and spent several minutes
describing in detail how his son’s team was robbed in a poorly officiated
championship game. This was followed by other stories of injustice on the soccer
field. Another member suggested that they needed to quickly contact the local
colleges to see if they could use their fields. The committee spent more than 30
minutes talking about how they should screen teams and how much they should
charge as an entry fee. An argument broke out over whether they should reward the
winning teams in each age bracket with medals or trophies. Many members felt that
medals were too cheap, while others thought the trophies would be too expensive.
Someone suggested that they seek local corporate sponsor to help fund the
tournament. The proposed sale of tournament T-shirts and sweatshirts was followed
by a general critique of the different shirts parents had acquired at different
tournaments. One member advocated that they recruit an artist he knew to develop a
unique silk-screen design for the tournament. The meeting adjourned 30 minutes late
with only half of the members remaining until the end. Nicolette drove home with
seven sheets of ideas and a headache. As Kevin poured a glass of water for the two aspirin Nicolette was about to take, he
tried to comfort her by saying that organising this tournament would be a big project
not unlike the projects he works on at his engineering and design firm. He offered to
sit down with her the next night and help her plan the project. He suggested that the
first thing they needed to do was to develop a WBS for the project
1. Make a list of the major deliverable for the pro ject and use them to develop a draft of the work breakdown structure for the tournament that contains at least three levels of detail what are the major deliverables associated with hosting an even such as a soccer tournament?
2. How would developing a WBS alleviate some of the problems that occurred during first meeting?
3. Where can Nicolette find additional information to help her develop WBS structure?
4. How could Nicolette and her Task force can use the WBS to generate the cost estimates for the tournament? Why would this be useful information?
