Making a Party out of Project Management: Chapter 2 - Planning the Party - Part 3 of 3

Some of Abby’s friends were pretty busy with summer jobs, sports camps, and family vacations, but everyone was happy to offer help where they could. They let her know when they could spare time and when they would be away, and Abby made a calendar to keep track of when everyone was available to help out. Professional project managers do this as well, assembling what is called the resource calendar. Often, people on a project at work have other jobs or projects that they spend some of their time on, requiring a project manager to know when a team member is or is not available to help with the project. This is a little different from the project calendar, which tells the hours and days of the week in which the whole project team generally works. In a professional work setting, the project calendar usually has working hours set during the workday Monday through Friday, with weekends and holidays typically kept as non-working days [7].

[7] If you decide to work in project management, don’t be shocked by the request to work an occasional weekend or two for a special event like the startup of the system created by your project, often referred to as the “go-live”.

It was a priority for Abby to include her friends and parents in as much of the project as she could, including the planning. Not only would it make everyone feel included and needed, causing them to work harder and be more committed to the project, but they would also bring great ideas and skills that Abby wouldn’t have on her own. Luckily, Abby had several close friends and of course, her parents were eager to help. But there was a catch – in order to use all this help effectively, Abby needed a way to keep all the roles, responsibilities, and relationships organized, and to ensure everyone had the knowledge and skills they would need to succeed in their jobs.

So, Abby set about creating an overall structure for her human resource management plan, making an organizational chart (“org chart” for short) for who would perform what roles on the project, as well as a RACI matrix to ensure good coordination between everybody. She engaged in networking, asking neighbors for advice on how to manage her team and what they thought would make the party a success. Mom and Dad provided expert judgment about how to help and take care of everyone working on the project (providing snacks, drinks, and encouragement) based on their years of life experience and working with kids.

After setting up a general outline, Abby began to fill in the details of her human resource management plan. She added her friends to specific places on her org chart and RACI matrix based on what work items they would help complete. With roles clearly laid out across the main work items of the project, Abby knew which friends to talk to about getting each of the items done. Part of her human resource management plan was a staffing management plan, which would include how Abby would provide team members with job and safety training they would need for their tasks [8].

[8] On larger projects, a staffing management plan may include a staff acquisition plan to define the ideal candidate for each role, and a staff release plan documenting when each project team member’s work on the project is expected to end, as sometimes team members are only involved in a project for part of its duration. Larger projects may also have compliance requirements that affect staffing options, such as contractual, union, or regulatory requirements.

So, Abby thought through and wrote down the training that would be needed for each role. For example, she would train those setting up balloons on how to tie them down correctly so they wouldn’t come loose and float away, and how to use a ruler to curl up the ends of the balloon strings to make them look fancier. There would also need to be some safety training, like ensuring those who arranged the picnic tables at the park lifted the tables with their legs, not their backs. In addition to this training, Abby would brief everyone on certain safety points to keep in mind, like moving very slowly with hot or sharp items, cutting away from oneself and others if a knife or scissors had to be used and keeping their fingers away from the cutting path.

Birthday party project organizational (org) chart.

RACI matrix for food, décor, and games.

Abby wanted everyone on her team to feel valued and supported as they helped her to get the party ready. In addition to thanking everybody for a job well done as they accomplished big tasks and helping anyone who struggled to keep up, she ensured everyone had snacks and drinks to keep them going.

“Thanks for bringing us these snacks, Abby! I really love these cheese crackers – they’re my favorite!” one of her friends exclaimed.

“Thank all of you for all the help you’re giving me! Everything’s been going really well because of all you’re doing!” replied Abby, happily.

With most things getting done ahead of schedule, Abby decided the team had time to take a break and relax for a little bit, helping them to keep their energy and motivation up.

“How will everyone know what they need to know, when they need to know it?” Abby thought to herself, after she finished planning how to manage her team. “Actually, I need to tell other people (stakeholders) certain things, not just my project team!”

By now, Abby had caught on to a useful pattern – don’t just pick up the phone or start sending texts and e-mails, first make a plan to figure out the best way to communicate with everyone. She would need to review her initial communications plan and do more work to plan communications management. Different people would need different communications at different times and in different ways. The big thing that Abby needed to help her further refine her communications plan was her trusty stakeholder register, which would remind her of who had some kind of interest, or stake, in Nathan’s party.

Reviewing the stakeholder register to assess communications needs.

Abby sat back for a minute to ponder what should be added to this plan. What communications do I need to have with my team to lead them to complete the project successfully? How about people who are just attending the party? Mom and Dad would need certain communications, both as her and Nathan’s parents and as the project sponsors. As she went down her list of stakeholders, ideas started to flow for how to best share information with each, as well as what information she would need from them, too. She even thought about how to keep her number one stakeholder, Nathan himself, from learning about anything that would ruin the surprise of the party.

The activity of reviewing communications needed to and from each stakeholder is called communication requirements analysis. Understanding these requirements allowed Abby to understand how information should flow between the stakeholders and to identify possible challenges with communications ahead of time. One thing Abby wanted to avoid was everybody trying to communicate directly with everyone else about the project work, as this would overwhelm her and lead to complete chaos. In fact, there’s even a formula to show how messy that can be:

So, if Abby and nine other people all communicated directly with each other about project work, there would be:

Having played “telephone” before, Abby knew how messages getting passed around to different people keep gradually changing over time. She imagined how rampant misunderstandings would be, even on a small project like this, if there was no thought put into the flow of information ahead of time.

This work really convinced Abby that she was right to give some thought to how to effectively communicate with everyone on her team. To structure the project communications, returned to her org chart. Abby thought it would make good sense to put a few of her friends on each major portion of the WBS, and to structure her org chart to look like the WBS. She would have specific friends working on each main aspect of the party – they would send and receive communications specifically for the part of the WBS they were working on. Those working on food wouldn’t have to worry about communicating project details with those working on décor, for example.

Birthday party project org chart with communication flows.

After detailing that, Abby went a step further and added plans for communicating with a few other groups of stakeholders – Mom and Dad and the party guests. She wrote down specific communications they would need and who on her team would help Abby to provide those communications. Again, Abby designed this flow to ensure messages sent to stakeholders would be clear, accurate, and consistent.

The need for clear, accurate, and consistent communication got Abby thinking that she also needed to consider communication technology, communication models and communication methods that would work best for everyone. For technology, Abby kept it simple – face-to-face communication with her project team, e-mail and phone calls with the vendor, and face-to-face, calls, and texts with Mom and Dad. Depending on the invitees, some would need paper card invitations and some would prefer e-mail invites. This combination would be a good blend of communications tools people had available, that they liked to use, and that worked well for their stake in the project.

Luckily for Abby, she learned about the richness, or warmth, of communications modes in speech class last school year. Each of these different ways of communicating would require good judgment about which to use and when. Phone calls would be rich in vocal cues like tone and emphasis of key syllables, e-mails would be very thoughtfully worded and include attachments or screenshots, and texts would be very short and to the point. When would a model be a poor choice? One example could be trying to text someone a long set of instructions that would be better covered face to face or by e-mail.

After thinking through the strengths and weaknesses of different communication modes, Abby made decisions about when to use each one and how to ensure everyone got all the information they needed. Sometimes, it would work best to have the information where people can grab it when they need it, like standard birthday package information on a party shop’s website. This is an example of a pull communication. Other information would be better delivered by a push communication, where the sender tells the receivers about updates on a regular time interval or some event that triggers a communication. Updates to let Mom and Dad know that certain party preparations are all set would be a good example of this. Both of these examples generally don’t require much back and forth, also known as interactive communication. An e-mail thread between Abby and a party shop about package details or a phone call with Mom and Dad to discuss buying an extra item for the party would be good examples of interactive communication.

Some communications are one-to-one or one-to-many, but there is also a lot of group communication to collectively talk through how to best do something on a project, in the form of meetings. Abby was already doing this with her team to brainstorm requirements, and as they bounced ideas off of each other, a requirement mentioned by one person sometimes caused another person to think of another requirement. Later, she would also need to hold another meeting when it came time to set up the picnic shelter where the party would be, to ensure everyone would understand the plan for setting that up and have a chance to ask any questions.

Taking all of this into consideration, Abby had a good idea of the best way to communicate depending on the stakeholder and the situation, and how to use each technology to maximize clarity of communication. Of course, some follow-up and deeper discussion would be needed to clear up confusion, but Abby had a good plan to limit problems from unclear or incomplete communications. Below is a table of thoughts Abby put together about each type of communication, and how each one might work best for each different group of stakeholders on the project.

Communications plan for communicating with stakeholders.

Some of Abby’s communications would go out on a regular basis, like showing her team how they were progressing on getting all the prep work done for the party. Other communications would only be sent out as they were needed [9], like if Abby needed to ask her parents about reserving the kitchen table on Friday afternoon to provide extra workspace during that time.

[9] Sometimes called ad-hoc communications.

Next post in the series: Making a Party out of Project Management: Chapter 3 - Figuring Out the Details - Part 1 of 4