The Role of Project Management in Clean Drinking Water
Thursday, February 12th, 2009by Michelle LaBrosse, PMP
In honor of today’s worldwide twestival on Clean Drinking Water, Cheetah Learning is dedicating this day to teach people how to use Cheetah Project Management to successfully launch Clean Drinking Water projects. Now in case you just think this is a problem “over there” – consider that according to the ASCE Infrastructure Report Card, the United States scored a “D-” in their infrastructure for delivering clean drinking water.
Besides just teaching people about doing project management on clean drinking water projects we are also donating 5% of everything we sell today using the promotion code Twestival to http://www.charitywater.org/twestival for clean drinking water projects. You can help us participate by registering for any Cheetah Learning’s award winning project management courses using the promotion code Twestival (you also get 20% off Cheetah Learning’s great courses with this code). * We raised $2300 for clean water so we are running this promotion for a week now.
So, how do you get started with a clean drinking water project? First you do a project agreement. In your project agreement you identify:
1. The Scope of Your Project. This includes the reason for doing your project.
2. The Major Deliverables of Your Project and When they Will be Complete
3. Your Communication Plan with your Project Participants.
4. The Risk Tolerance Of Your Overall Project
5. Your Project Constraints (Time, Schedule, Performance)
6. Who Needs to Be On Your Project Team
Next, depending on the size of your project, you’ll want to further flush out your project plan (no pun intended). You might want to create the following expanded plans:
1. Risk Management Plan
2. Change Management Plan
3. Quality Management Plan
4. Work Break Down Structure
5. Deliverable Dependency Schedule
6. Labor and Material Cost Estimates.
7. Communication Plan (that includes your escalation policies and how you will be reporting on project performance such as Schedule and Cost Performance Indices and Earned Value).
Then you can start on the execution phase of your project. Ensuring we all have Clean Drinking Water requires more than just having a twestival about it – it requires focused and well orchestrated ACTION. This is where the rubber meets the road. Developing well thought out project plans are the first step. Following through and executing the plan is crucial. While you’re executing the plan, you need to do Risk Management and make sure that your team has what they need to meet their project deliverables.
While you are executing your project plan, you dramatically increase the chances of success if you have a way to monitor and control your project. This is where Project Management Professionals (PMPs) come in especially handy to lead your projects. Taking the measurements on project performance – with key project performance indicators such as Schedule Performance Indicators (SPI) and Cost Performance Indicators (CPI) make sure the project stays on track and moving forward. What gets measured gets done. To improve the chance of project success, as part of becoming certified, PMPs learn how to make these measurements. The PMPs who go through Cheetah Learning get an added advantage as they learn how to get the project done fast. And we can’t dilly dally when it comes to completing Clean Drinking Water projects as this is a matter of significant importance to every living human on the planet.
The last stage of your well run Clean Drinking Water project is with correctly closing out the project. There are others around the world who can use what you have learned by doing your clean drinking water project so it’s a very good idea if you document and share your lessons learned. The more we share what we learn with each other, the smarter we all become. In the area of having clean drinking water, this is imperative. We all float or sink together here as Clean Drinking Water impacts all of us all over the world.
You can get a free Project Agreement at our Free PM Tools Downloads. You can learn how to quickly launch and implement your Clean Drinking Water Project by learning Cheetah Project Management. For today’s Twestival, you can register for any Cheetah Learning course and get a 20% discount – use the promotion code Twestival.