WEDDING PLANNING

Wedding Planning

Wedding Planning

The Wedding Project

One of the most significant days in a person's life is her wedding day! To ensure that such a momentous event goes off without a hitch, appropriate planning is required. And when it comes to wedding planning, picking one's partner could very well be the easiest of the planning decisions to make. Months will be spent prior to the wedding researching vendors, comparing products and prices, meeting with photographers, hotel managers, and many more wedding vendors to determine how to save costs on each wedding item (Hammond, 2007).

"The absence of a clearly defined project plan consistently shows up as the major reason for project failures," (Gray & Lawson, 2005, p. 118). Without an implementation plan that outlines budgets, how important tasks should be organized, and what the contingencies are in the event that something goes awry, could result in what should be one of the happiest days of someone's life turning into a complete disaster. "The success of your whole day depends on your to organize, plan, and budget," (Hammond, 2007, para. 1).

The stakeholders in a wedding project are numerous. Naturally the bride and groom are the biggest stakeholders. But also included in this list of stakeholders will be family, members of the wedding party, guests, wedding vendors, and the officiate.

Research shows that the average couple in Fayetteville, North Carolina will spend $20,940 on a wedding (McMurray, 2007). This budget does not include cost for a honeymoon, engagement ring, bridal consultant, or wedding planner. A wedding budget is absolutely essential to planning a wedding and in fact should be one of the very first things that a marrying couple should do (Callaway, 2007). Further, a typical wedding takes months to plan. There are arrangements to make, items to order, and logistics to work out. Our happy couple may expect to pay more for their particular wedding since this couple would like to tie the knot as soon as possible; doing so will come at a price. Often, expediting key activities within a project leads to increased cost of the project (Gray & Lawson, 2005).

Because the couple has a combined income of $60,000 per year, I will use a top-down approach to the budgeting. Instead of determining the budget by breaking down the wedding into the individual components of the wedding project and summing them together to arrive at the couple's budget, I will ...