Learning from a Project "Post-Mortem"

Project: Operation Donation for Adairsville

This project was one that I guided my students through in my classroom. We were talking about the characteristics of a great citizen and one of the words was compassionate. The day before, a tornado hit North Georgia and destroyed the city of Adairsville. I asked the students what was a way that we could show or compassion toward Adairsville’s tornado victims. They began discussing multiple ways that we could show our compassion and soon decided on a food, clothing, and shoe drive.

Phase I: Determine Need and Feasibility

How could we have improved our need-feasibility or analysis phase?

Success: We were able to collect a bulk of items that we donated to the tornado victims in Adairsville.

Failure: We should have communicated with the donation centers prior to deciding on how we wanted to help Adairsville tornado victims. By communicating with the donations centers, we could have raised money or had our school donate the items that they needed the most.

Phase II: Create Project Plan

How accurate were our original estimates of the size and effort of our project? What did we over or under estimate?

Success: We ended up having enough space to drop off all of the donations that were sent in by parents and students alike. All of my students worked well together to accomplish the same goal, which made it easy to do. My students were so excited about the good deeds that they were doing, that they all wanted to ride to Adairsville to give the donations to the victims themselves. The IB coordinator at my school assisted my students and I with this action plan, just like Portny, et al (2008) insisted that you consult with upper management about limitations regarding desired outcomes.

Failure: Next time I would plan ahead, and ask multiple parents in other classrooms to drive to Adairsville to ensure that we will have enough space. We should have planned where we were going to keep all of the donations, prior to the kick-off of the event. We ended up having to put accepted donations in any rooms that we could find. Early in the production portion we realized that we would not have enough time to construct an event, because we wanted to be immediate help for Adairsville.

Phase III: Create Specifications for Deliverables

Did all the important project players have creative input into the creation of the design specifications?

Success: I was extremely proud of the posters, flyers, and videos that my students made. They were really creative and informative at the same time. We made sure that each flyer, poster, and speech informed our audience of the name of our project, what we were doing, where we were doing it, when we were doing it, and the time.

Failure: I had some students who did not participate in this entire process, which was upsetting to me. I would have liked to give them a specific job, like a monitor. The monitor could have walked around and helped other groups with spelling and neatness on their portion of the project. However over time, team members will become more familiar with each other’s skills, knowledge, and operating style (Portny, et al., 2008).

Phase IV: Create Deliverables

Did all the important project players have creative input into the creation of the deliverables?

Success: I was proud that my students were able to come together on a collective goal. The deliverables were prepared and completed in a timely manner.

Failure: I wish we had time for the students to switch roles within the project. I think that some of my students would have done a great job in multiple roles. Because the project was time sensitive there wasn’t much time to allow students to explore the different roles of the project. We could have also improved the look and neatness of the deliverables improved if I would have allowed students to take the deliverables home to make. To ensure student involvement next time we could allow students do whatever is comfortable to them.

Phase V: Test and Implement Deliverables

Was our implementation strategy accurate and effective?

Success: The speech and video that my students made was a successful medium of delivery that informed the entire school of our project. I called multiple donation agencies to make sure they were accepting donations before we drove to Adairsville and set up a time for the volunteers to meet up and load the vehicles.

Failure: We put the posters and flyers up a couple of days before the event. However, we could have received more donations if we put the information up for a longer period of time. The donations were kept in many different places and were not organized properly.

Project managers usually write a statement of work before starting on a project. If I would have written a statement of work for this project, students would have been more organized, and would have felt a sense of responsibility if they each had to sign the statement of work. According to Portny, et al. (2008), many successful project managers think of Statements of Work as binding agreements in which project managers and their teams should commit to producing certain results. The purpose was to help the tornado victims of Adairsville by hosting a donation drive. The objectives were that the tornado victims would have a temporary relief of needed items. The constraints written would have been pertaining to our time sensitive project and assumptions were that we thought we knew what the tornado victims needed. In reality we should have investigated and found out what they needed.

References

Portny, S., Mantel, S., Meredith, J., Shafer, S., Sutton, M., & Kramer, B. (2008). Project management planning, scheduling, and controlling projects. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.