The Cooma Monaro Progress Association Project - Assignment Example

Reflective essay-report Name Institution Contents Contents 2 The Cooma Monaro Progress Association project 3 Model of the project 3 The culture aspect 4 My weakness in this project 5 Weaknesses of the project 5 Lessons from this project 7 The Cooma Monaro Progress Association project The Cooma Monaro Progress Association and the University of Canberra joint Work Integrated Learning Program was an event that contributed to shaping my life in a better way. As an intern, my duties and responsibilities included assisting the teachers at the Cooma Monaro Progress Association and the University of Canberra joint Work Integrated Learning Program with their event management ns programs. The Cooma Monaro Progress Association was started as a way to manage various ends of semester projects. The main idea behind this project was to provide people with a platform for catering services and a chance to celebrate the end of the semester successfully. The project had many issues that in my opinion contributed to the failure of the same during the time that I was working at the center. These issues have been discussed in this report. Ahola & Davies (2012, p. 663) state that it does not matter how huge a particular project is. What matters is the way in which the various managers in the project implement the project. In other words, the experience and the capacity of the various management of the various projects that the organization may engage itself in. For the Cooma Monaro Progress Association project, the teachers who taught at the University of Canberra were the ones responsible for the full implementation of the project. They came up with the idea themselves and also came with strategies to implement the project. There were no professionals involved in this project. Model of the project The model of the project was simple. The various teachers used to make advertisement about an upcoming event. Then they posted these adverts to the relative email addresses. From there, it was a game of waiting for response from the various students to confirm whether they would attend or not. There was no way of ascertaining the number of people who would attend the events. As a business student in the university and working as an intern in this project, there are several issues that I saw which in my opinion led to slow or even lack of success in this project. The following paragraphs highlight these issues. In business management and project handling, it is important to integrate the issue of cultural tolerance in the project. The culture aspect In organizational behavior theory, cultural tolerance at the workplace and project management forms a very basic concept. In an environment such as university of Canberra where the Cooma Monaro Progress Association project was held, there is presence of a variety of people who have different variations when it comes to cultural ethnicities. These people need to be treated with caution because the aspect of culture is a very sensitive issue. Bryde (2003, p.778) states that an organization which respects the cultural affiliations of the various organizations is more capable of accomplishing its objectives as compared to another organization which does not tolerate culture.  Longman &Mullins (2004, p. 55) agree with Bryde (2003, p.778) and they state that for any project to become a success, there must be the presence of the combined efforts of the various players in the game. For instance, every personnel involved in the project must ensure that they work hard to the accomplishment of the goals of the project. When everybody works to the accomplishment of the project, it becomes easier to achieve these in form of team work (Parker et al 2013, p.555). Teamwork is a very unique and fast way of achieving what the project seeks to achieve (Crawford 2013, p.318). My weakness in this project As one of the persons trusted with putting the project together, I realized that I have a particular weakness. My weakness lay in the fact that I am not very patient. When we posted sent the email addresses to various people, I was always having a hard time waiting for responses. Sometimes I suggested to my supervisors that we change the module of inviting these students from using emails to other radical forms such as door to door campaigns. In my opinion, these door to door campaigns had a higher chance of getting feedback from the students. It was also a way of learning more about the strengths and the weaknesses of the project based on the responses and the feedback we would get from these students. The teachers believed that their model of operation and seeking clients was better and we continued using the same. Weaknesses of the project As a reflection, there are several apparent weaknesses that I have identified with this project. The basic one was the fact that most of the advertising theta we used to do was through the email. Sending emails did not guarantee immediate response. Matter of fact, most people never replied to these emails. As the days to the event drew near, there was a lot of speculation on how the events should be handled. Some of the teachers had speculative figures of the number of people who would attend the event. Most times, this figure was never correct which always resulted into a lot of chaos when the actual day arrived. Sometimes the number of people who attended the events were fewer than the number of people the event was organized for. This resulted into a lot of wastage. At other times, the number of people attending the event became larger than the ones planned for. This created confusion for the demand was higher than the supply. As one of the ways of trying to manage this confusion, the various teachers tried to make follow-ups on the invitation emails they sent out. However, most times people never responded to these emails. There was no concrete way of knowing with absolute certainty the number of people who had booked to be present at the event. This made prior preparations very difficult. When designing a particular project, it is very important to ensure that all the proponent of the project has been taken care of. For instance, prior knowledge of the number of people that a particular project is to serve is very vital. When one has an idea of the number of people that a certain project is designed to serve, it becomes easier to know how much resources are needed for the planning stages. This minimizes the risk factor in the project (Sanchez et al 2009, p. 15; Parker et al p. 4). In a project, all avenues need to be taken care of. The avenues through which risk factor comes in should be identified in advance and covered up through taking measures that are geared towards the accomplishment of the goals and objectives of the project at hand (Chughtai 2013, p. 3; McInnes 2013, p.1). Another issue that I identified in this project is the fact that some of the equipment that we booked from the reception could not be provided due to reception people’s communication gaps. This often left us in awkward positions when the due dates for the event came to be. Sometimes when the date came, this is the time that we ran up and down trying to look for the service providers of the various equipments we needed for the event. When we could not find them, we had no option but to hire these equipments from other providers who proved to be extremely expensive. The issue in this case was communication gaps that existed between us and the providers of these equipments. When an order was placed, the teachers did not take the time to follow these orders up and hence they did not find a reason to deliver them to us. It was the prerogative of the teachers to make a follow up once the order was placed to ensure that the equipments were received on time. This would have avoided additional costs that came with lack of follow-ups at the last minute. Lessons from this project We made event running sheet before the event held, but it could not be performance due to many reasons that some people came late, some activities delayed. This made the event look disorganized and in confusion. Most of the activities that had been placed on the listing could not be performed when people came late. This is because the hiring of the grounds and the equipments was on a clock. Any deviation from the scheduled time would have translated into more payments for the same. The cost factor prevented most of these events from happening. People who attended the event were not willing to pay extra money to cater for those contingencies and because of this, there was no alternative but to stop running the events when the time exhausted. From this internship, I learnt that management styles are very key in determining the success or failure of a particular business endeavor. The manner in which a particular project was designed is very instrumental in determining the success or the failure of a particular project. References Ahola , T & Davies, M 2012, ‘Insights for the governance of large projects-Analysis of Organization Theory and ProjectManagement: Administering Uncertainty inNorwegian Offshore Oil by Stinchcombe and Heimer,’ International Journal of Managing Projects in Business,Vol. 5 No. 4, pp. 661-679. Bryde,DJ 2003, ‘Project management concepts, methods and application’, International Journal of Operations & Production Management, Vol. 23, No. 7, pp.775 – 793. Chughtai, A 2013, “Impact of Job Involvement on In-Role Job Performance and Organizational Citizenship Behaviour”. Retrieved December, 2013 from http://ibam.com/pubs/jbam/articles/vol9/no2/jbam_9_2_4.pdf Crawford, L, Craig, L, Bhishna, B, 2013, ‘Participatory project management for improved disaster resilience’, International Journal of Disaster Resilience in the Built Environment, Vol. 4, no. 3, pp.317 - 333 Longman, A & Mullins, J 2004, ‘Project management: key tool for implementing strategy’, Journal of Business Strategy, Vol. 25, no.5, pp.54 – 60. McInnes, R 2013, “Workforce Diversity: Changing the Way You Do Business.” Retrieved December, 2013 from < http://www.diversityworld.com/Diversity/workforce_diversity.htm > Parker, D & Joshua,C, Ana, R, Raghuvar, DP 2013, ‘Integration of project-based management and change management: Intervention methodology’, International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management, Vol. 62, no. 5, pp.534 – 544. Sanchez,H, Robert,B, Bourgault, M & Pellerin, R 2009, ‘Risk management applied to projects, programs, and portfolios’, International Journal of Managing Projects in Business, Vol. 2, no.1, pp.14 - 35 Read More