I work in the financial industry where there are an
abundance of rules and regulations, and disclosure laws, so I am uncomfortable
talking about anything work related. So,
for this assignment I am writing about a personal undertaking from years past.
A long time ago two of my friends and I decided to leave
home and plan a life without family, we were young and obviously not very
thoughtful back then. We started the planning for this move six
months before we actually left; we were waiting until we were all 18 years of
age.
Our planning involved coordinating travel to Paris, we
lived in England. The travel plans
incorporated local travel to get to a bus station, then taking a bus in to
London, taking another bus to Dover (coast), and taking a hovercraft to France,
then taking a train into Paris, and finally making our way to the hotel. This may not seem so daunting, but to three
inexperienced, naive, and not so independent young girls it was a lot to
handle. Besides the travel plans, we had
to determine what personal items we would bring, the best time and day to leave
without drawing attention, and allocate a budget for travel, personal expenses,
meals, and more.
We had some success in planning the travel
arrangements. Back then none of us had
computers or mobile phones as they were not as commonplace as they are now, so
we could not conduct any research on our own. We went to a travel agency where everything
was coordinated for us. I say some
success because we did not visit more than one travel agency, so have no way of
knowing if the cost was reasonable. But
we did know to contact and use the resource rather than trying to reserve
multiple tickets ourselves.
Conducting the Post-mortem as recommended by The Project
Management Minimalist: Just enough PM to
Rock Your Projects!
In comparing our planning and recommended best practices
it is easy to see how this project did not succeed.
Phase 1 – Determine Need and Feasibility
We as the stakeholders decided there was a need to do
this, affected parties were not advised.
We did not plan for any unknowns or have any contingency
plans.
We did not even consider how much money we would need.
Phase 2 – Create Project Plan
Travel was coordinated but we did not plan for long term
as in jobs, income, living expenses, education, language barriers, or even a
long term roof over our heads. We just assumed it would all fall into place.
Project schedule was really non-existent; it only covered
the first week.
Phase 3 – Create Specifications for Deliverables
We did not assign each other tasks such as responsibility
for budgeting or finding a place to live.
We did not have any responsibilities assigned to look for
jobs.
Phase 4 – Create Deliverables
Since we were not actively assigning tasks there were no
tasks to track or to communicate.
Since we did not plan for constraints or managing risks,
we did not know how to react to problems when they arose.
Phase 5 – Test and Implement Deliverables
Without proper planning and without having any strategies
or techniques defined a project cannot be effective. We ran out of money, had nowhere to live and
no projected income because of the lack of planning.
Planning for this project should have included more
brainstorming sessions during the initial discussions to identify all that
would need to be considered, and to have workarounds for issues that could have
been thought of. Budgets should have
been prepared and expenses realized. We
did not have the knowledge back then to document or track progress but best
practices now suggest using artifacts to make projects more successful,
artifacts that would have been beneficial in this project are:
Responsibility / Accountability Matrix
Work Breakdown Structure
Resource and Cost Estimates
Project Schedule with Timelines
More Communication
Reference:
Greer, M. (2010). The Project Management Minimalist:
Just Enough PM to Rock Your Projects! Laureate Education, Inc. Retrieved from
https://class.waldenu.edu/bbcswebdav/institution/USW1/201260_02/MS_INDT/EDUC_6145/Week%202/Resources/Week%202%20Resources/embedded/pm-minimalist-ver-3-laureate.pdf
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