Thursday, January 17, 2013

Small Project in need of some BIG Plans

Our church earned and award through the city to distribute food to the community every quarter.  The Project manager (Coordinator) of the project had participated in a full food back before but never a temporary set-up.  The project would always have 200 -300 clients serviced in a single day.  On the day of the event volunteers stated showing up at about 6:00 a.m. to truck loads food, shopping for meat was needed at the local grocery store, bagging and sorting food.  The single most frustrating part of the project was the coordination and utilization of volunteers. Most events we had plenty of volunteers however many went underutilized. Based on Portny, Mantel, Meredith, Shafer, Sutton, & Kramer,2008, suggest that every project passes through the following phases:
1.      Conceive phase: and idea is born.
2.     Define phase: a plan is developed.
3.     Start phase: a team is formed.
4.     Perform phase: the work is done.
5.     Close phase: the project is ended
Under the guidance of a project manager, projects move through these 5 stages.  I believe the project went through each of the fives it was steps 2-4 where I believe things fell apart.  I am not quite sure if a formal plan was developed however I do know a committee of stakeholders and experts was not established.  Teams were not formed until the day of the event.  The work was done however not in the most efficient and fair manner. For this project as soon as one ended the new planning should have began.  The deliverables were accomplished far beyond expectations and continued to grow each quarter, however at what level of frustration to the volunteers and the coordinator.  While the seemed like a small, easy, well intended project it needed some big planning.
Resource
Portny, S. E., Mantel, S. J., Meredith, J. R., Shafer, S. M., Sutton, M. M., & Kramer, B. E. (2008). Project management: Planning, scheduling, and controlling projects. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.





















2 comments:

  1. Barbara,

    You make a great point about pre-planning for an event with volunteers. How would you plan for an event such as this where one is never sure of the number of volunteers that will show up on the event day? Also, what specific things would you do to inform and utilize volunteers that came to serve?

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  2. Barbara,
    After reading through several blogs, planning seems to be the number one downfall for the project managers, just like it was in your example. The course text gives several examples of pitfalls that can be detected early on in a project, and I noticed that the majority of those pitfalls have something to do with planning. If you had asked me prior to this about project management, I would have responded about the work that goes on during the project. I can see now, that successful project management starts well before any of that work gets started.

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