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:
- 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.
- 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.
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.
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