Management Scholars Academy is into Project Management training and consultancy. We conduct PMP boot camps and PM workshops. Last month I conducted a one day Project Management workshop at Bangalore for a large financial services company. The learning objective given to me was to introduce the essential PM concepts at high level.
There were 25 participants. I asked them to form four teams and come up with a model project each and select their project manager. Team Blue came up with a project of starting a Business school. Team Green wanted to build a campus for the company in Bangalore. Team Black decided to conduct a musical extravaganza inviting A.R.Rahman. Team Burgundy opened a five star resort in a vineyard north of Bangalore.
The teams begin the project by writing a business case and the charter. They decomposed the work and arrived at the deliverables. They further decomposed a deliverable into activities, sequenced them, allocated resources and came up with the schedule. They identified other stakeholders in the projects and analyzed the varying needs of the stakeholders.
They identified the risks under different buckets, wrote the risk statements clearly, prioritized them and decided on the risk response. Then they studied the project to arrive at the quality parameters and the quality controls to be put in place. As a team they drummed up publicity for their product / service through creative advertisement. Every team came up with wonderful ideas.
As always, I got many inputs from the workshop myself. I felt that the team names can always be colours. That way, I can use the colours to introduce the six thinking hats technique developed by Edward De Bono . I should keep the blue hat to myself, I guess.
The team which built business school came up with criteria to choose faculty, criteria to induct students, criteria to select companies that will visit for campus recruitments and criteria to choose international universities to affiliate with.
The team that built the resort in the vineyard came with the logo were the sun toasts with the moon and offered a free bottle of wine for first 100 customers.
The team that organised the music programme came up with detailed list of activities in setting up the stage.
The team that wanted to build a campus for the company proactively identified the risks and came up with multi-pronged approach to mitigate them and meet the objective.
I was convinced that project management can be learnt in a fun way from this experience.
No related posts.
