Making It Happen: A Non-Technical Guide to Project Management

21.1. Doing this One Right

We had the first project team meeting that day, and following Martha's process, produced our first objective statement. I met with Stu the next morning and he signed it.

As it turned out, most of the design process had already been completed by the marketing folks. Mind you, it wasn't in a very presentable format, but now that I understood a little about how the design process worked and what it was supposed to produce, we had no difficulty generating a good, detailed design inside of three days. It described exactly what the situation would be like the moment before we opened the show.

Stu signed that off quickly as well.

Next we created the execution plan, which turned out to be every bit as complicated as the one for remodeling the plant. I was amazed at the number of activities that go into organizing something of this nature. Through it all, I simply acted as facilitator to ensure the process flowed smoothly. Once my new project team got used to the idea that I wanted—make that needed—their input, things went well.

For our first pass at the dependency chart, I borrowed Amanda to help input the plan to the project management software. Time was of the essence, and she had developed a very slick two-person procedure for transferring the information from the planning board. We hadn't forgotten our horrendous first experience with inputting the plan to the computer.

After all of the activities and resources had been input, we discovered that we could ...