Learning from a Project "Post-Mortem"

Find ways to increase parent participation in workshops

    This project consists of two phases. The first phase of the project was to identify ways to increase the parents participation in workshops offered in an early childhood program. Portny, Mantel, Meredith, Shafer, Sutton, & Kramer (2008) states that a project can be large or small, and it may be planned formally or informally. The team decided to do a research through a survey to find out why there was a lack of parent participation on those workshops.

Background information

    I am working for an early childhood program that provides Early Head Start and Head Start services. This organization went from a major change through small changes in less than two years. One of the major changes was the change of services going from a child care program to a Head Start and Early Head Start programs. Families were not used to have parent involvement services and workshops to participate on. The site director tried to take the role of project manager, and decided to assign a small project to each team member of the administration staff. One of the project team members resigned from her position, and I was hired to take over her role in the organization and the project. Since I was the person responsible to provide the workshops to the parents, I decided to take the leadership of the chaotic situation.

    I considered that the project was very chaotic when I took over the other person’s role. The site director who was trying to coordinate the project was busy with other activities. I expressed my concerns about the poor communication among the project team members and some mistakes on the survey's results to the site director. After my meeting with the site director she decided to give me the role of project manager. I was the only person interest in the project, with enthusiasm and leadership to complete it. The site director took the position of functional manager's role.

    My first task was to increase communication at all means among the project team members. I opened an account with Rypple and sent initiations to all the team members and establish a communication with constant recognition to each and one of them. Soon some of the team members were motivated and committed to participate enthusiastically in the project. Some team members gave me a hard time with the project, and that made me realize how accurate the statement is "project managers have high responsibilities with little authority" (Portny et al, 2008).

    In my case, I knew what the outcomes will be for the project. We wanted to find ways to increase the participation of parents. The problem was that I did not know the needs of the project and needed to take the initiative to find out the real needs.

    Fortunately for me I was taking the course Foundations of Research, and I took my job project as my assignment project and did my research to find out why some parents were showing lack of participation. Taking this course made me realize that I needed much more work to have a less stressful project. Something that I will remember to use in future projects is to start immediately letting the ID process guide the work. I will use the statement of work to outline the purposes, objectives, constraints, and assumptions that will guide the project from start to finish (Portny et al, 2008). Another document that could be helpful during the project was the work breakdown to organize all the activities necessary to complete the project. This was a hard experience, but it gave the knowledge to identify my weakness and strengths.

    I tried to follow the recommendations from Michael Greer that state that PM and team members need to develop a list of lessons learned so I don't repeat the same mistakes. He recommends a two step process for conducting these reviews:

1.  First, prepare and circulate a whole bunch of specific questions about the project and give team members time to think about them and prepare their responses individually.
2. Next, hold a meeting and discuss the team’s responses to the questions. The result of this discussion is often a list of “Lessons Learned.”

    The benefit of the first step, done individually by team members, is that it allows the quieter, more analytical people to develop their responses to the questions without being interrupted by the more outgoing, vocal types who might otherwise dominate in the face-to-face meeting. Also, it allows everyone the time to create more thoughtful responses.

    The next phase will be to implement the suggestions from the survey to the workshops. I hope the PM can have all the support right at the beginning.  

Reference:

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.

Michael Greer’s Project Management Resources web site.  The URL is http://www.michaelgreer.com.