Post Mortem

This weeks post is about a project that I was a part of in the past as a technology teacher at a public high school.  I will discuss why the project was not as successful as everyone involved hoped it would be.


I was a new teacher at a school in Maryland and was coming in to the start of a new program that the school wanted to kick off. It was an engineering program that was successful all over the country. The school wanted me to take the reigns of the entire program. That includes the planning on how to teach it, the budget and list of materials needed. I even had to figure out a way to recruit and keep the students in my classes since all technology courses are electives I didn't have graduation requirements on my side for enrollment.
The principal and Board of Education for the district had a vested interested in the success of the program because of the money that was going into it and it being a new program they wanted it to be successful. I would call them the stakeholders for this project. I was both the ID and PM due to my long list of responsibilities. The students also played a roll in the project because they had to be successful and want to enroll and stick with the program. I also had the support of my department chair but since he didn't know the content as well as I did I only had his help with equipment restraints, space in the classrooms, and basic supplies.


The students were very successful that did enroll in the course and followed through, but even with that success there were flaws and failures in the project. I must admit that one of the problems with the project was myself, the PM. Not only was I new to the school, I was also a first year teacher out of college and had never run my own classroom before. Not only did I have to create I successful program from scratch but I also had to learn the basics, first hand, of being a teacher.


Another problem I had was that the project began in late may of the year I took it over but I didn't arrive on the scene until late July. During that time someone else was in control that didn't really know what they were doing and spent a good portion of the allocated funds on something they thought was needed but wasn't. They also began the initial student enrollment process and set up my first few classes for me. As we all know taking over a project in the middle that was run by someone else always causes problems for the new person on board.


Some of the successes were in student performance and that was due to my expertise in the content  and how I taught the material. Since I was fresh out of college I knew a lot about new technologies and math used in engineering.


One of the steps outlined by Greer as steps needed to manage a project were already taken care of for me by the previous PM. Like defining the project concept, getting support and approval. Step 2, getting my team together and starting the project, was started by the first PM, hence my being there, and then was taken over by me to find whoever I needed to help me be successful. Step 3 was already decided for me because we knew that we wanted good enrollment and retention in our courses and of course student success, money was of minor concern at this point.


In the end I feel the big problems with the project were the, what I feel, bad planning of the first PM and project team. Followed by a bad division of job responsibilities and inexperienced PM. Also since no one had done anything like this before there were a lot of people that didn't know what to do or expect. I feel to many people tried to take on to many different jobs at once to try and make this project successful.


References


Greer, M. (2010). The project management minimalist: Just enough PM to rock your projects! (Laureate custom ed.). Baltimore: Laureate Education, Inc.

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.