Project Management with a Team of Volunteers Lessons Learned- the Hard Way

Project Management with a team of volunteers – Lessons Learned- The hard way!

By Jean Sidebottom

I was newly certified with my Project Management Professional (PMP) Certification and was excited to be able to take my newly refined skills out for a spin. I have spent the better part of thirty years in the construction industry as an electrical engineer and project manager, but PMI fundamentals were relatively new to me. The electrical construction industry in the United States is much more familiar with National Electrical Contractors

Association NECA formats and structures and that was where my training and experience lay.

Shortly after studying for and passing the PMP exam, I was given the opportunity to be the director of marketing for a non-profit organization which was holding a special event and desired my help to market it. The original scope of work presented to me included a program guide to be handed out at the event with all of its editorial content as well as solicited paid advertising. Soliciting Sponsorships for certain activities to be held at the event was also included. Helping to create social media content and assisting with the event website also fell within the team’s project scope. Of course, advertising sales materials and other marketing materials were needed to be created and utilized. As we began this volunteer project, I thought I had a grasp of the scope of work, an understanding of the chain of command, and the people who would be stakeholders needing communication from us and who would provide needed information. It was time,

I thought, to start the planning. I was given the names and contact information for the three people who were already assigned the graphic presentation of the guide, who would be responsible for social media posting and the person who was in charge of the website; in short – my team members.

Since this was a volunteer group I knew that none were trained in Project Management processes so I thought that it would be up to me to create the format for the project with me asking them to fill in the actual data needed to get the planning phase completed. In my new PMP exuberance, I spent several weeks putting together preliminary activity lists and a Scope of Work (SOW) document format. I even created a preliminary network diagram. All of this work was done with the intent of getting it to the marketing committee for their review, input, additions and suggestions. I was so proud!

Once created, I sent the documents to my sponsor, the executive director of the organization and to all the committee members. The sent emails requested their input as to whether I had missed any activity, what the duration they anticipated for the activities listed, which could be concurrently done, what anticipated problems they had for each of the activities listed and possible solutions for any risks they could anticipate. I thought we were off and running.

The response was unexpected and eye opening. The man who was to handle the website returned an email with the information that they were only responsible for the IT part of the website and that “content” needed to be discussed with someone else. He wasn’t interested in filling out or reviewing any of my questions because he didn’t think it applied to his part of the project. The woman who was responsible for social media decided to become passive aggressive and didn’t reply to my email for several weeks. Then when I asked if she had received my email and had any comments on what I had supplied, I got the reply that she had conducted social media for hundreds of events, knew what she had to do and had no intention of wasting her time with my “silly busy work”.

The woman who was going to handle the production of the program guide responded that she had produced prior program guides for this organization (as well as others) in the past; knew what she needed to do and had no intention of wasting time with my “work intensive forms” and questions.

In my construction project management experience, I had never had team members bluntly refuse to provide input and dismiss any advance “planning” effort as time wasting. You can guess I was taken aback and I had absolutely no authority to demand their compliance. Please remember that none of these team members were selected by me, and I was not selected by any of them. We had never worked together and didn’t know each other. In hindsight, I should have made an effort to get to know them before I tried to implement any project management strategy. Since they were located all over the eastern seaboard and contact had to be done over the computer (or Skype when schedules allowed) having a “kickoff party” wasn’t in the works. Trying to create a sense of “team” was going to prove problematic. Trying to get them to understand what Project

Management meant was going to be impossible. They each saw their parts of the project as individual pieces of work and that their responsibilities began and ended with those boundaries. Putting it all together wasn’t their concern.

Lesson number one – for a team to manage a project – any team, any project – they all have to understand what project management means. They don’t have to know the formats, the forms, or even the processes; but they need to understand that initiating and planning has to happen before managing and doing the work can be accomplished and they have to be willing to play a part in it. In short, the team has to be educated into what is expected of them, in addition to their individual piece of work and willingly agree to do it.

I decided that I would have to backtrack. I decided that any PMP formatting would have to be done by myself and that I would try a strategy of just coaxing my team and stakeholders to provide me with information that they would need to successfully complete their part of the project and that as time went by the team concept would grow as we each did our part. Wrong!

The executive director of the non-profit organization was my sponsor for the marketing project and the person that I most needed to get on board. I thought that if I could get her to “buy in” to my project management plan, then I would have her support to do what needed to get done. Her response was to solve immediate issues in short-term solution tactics and Band-Aid the problems. She made the decision that it was probably a personality conflict and announced that social media and the website would be out of my team’s scope of work. It reduced my team’s workload and the number of team members, but created a situation where no one was in charge of seeing that those two pieces of the marketing puzzle would be adequately handled. The already over burdened executive director (sponsor) tried to handle both of those jobs and never had the time to give them the time and structure they needed.

My sponsor also assured me that she had worked with the woman doing the production in the past and she was “fabulous”. This meant that I needed to just “let her do her thing”.

During the process, my sponsor often went directly to my team member to discuss the program guide and simply cc’d me so I could stay in the loop. I don’t normally have a problem with direct contact with team members to expedite communication paths, but in this instance I felt it was another example of being under-minded, especially when I found out about decisions made after the fact.

The second lesson learned- the hard way- was that in order for a volunteer based project to be successful everyone’s “buy in” has to be accomplished as activity number one. In

PMP speak, the project charter has to be accepted by the team members as well as the sponsor and primary stakeholders. Complete understanding of what the project entails, who will be responsible for each of the elements, what level of authority is required and given and an agreement (buy-in) by all team members needs to be in place before any project management plan can be successfully implemented. This is not the norm in non- volunteer projects. A formal Charter that is signed and agreed often happens before team members are even assigned. If I had contacted each team member first and asked if they had experience completing similar projects in the past and what they needed from me, we would still have had to create a project management plan, but they would have had prior contact from me and may have been more willing to answer my questions and provide the information that needed to go into planning. They might still have refused to do any project management paperwork on it but they wouldn’t have been turned off from my first attempt at strategy, which they saw as controlling.

Once I realized that PMP processes weren’t going to be willingly followed by my team members, it became even more critical for me to stay on top of the structure of the project. I created and implemented numerous documents including; Deliverable requirements, delivery logs, stakeholder communications plans, and I firmed up the

Network Diagram so that I could check off milestones and what the next required activity was so I could then go to my volunteer team members to ask where we stood with that activity focus.

I worked off the network diagram the entire length of the project. I created risk assessments on what could happen and I suggested to my sponsor possible solutions to problems if they were to arise. I kept a deliverable log, I maintained communications with stakeholders requesting information needed for the program and I issued status reports to stakeholders. At the same time, I created data bases of potential sponsors and advertisers for the event and created and sent advertising packets as well as did follow up contacts. We were able to successfully solicit enough advertising to almost pay for the forty four page program guide’s printing.

Since the scope of the marketing project was reduced by the sponsor to primarily seeing that the program guide got completed, we have to view the end project as a success – it happened on time for the event and it made money. On the other hand, “Marketing” of the event can’t be considered successful. If marketing was meant to publicize the event, get people excited and registered for the event, as well as providing the program guide, then the marketing project failed. Unfortunately, the social media and website were removed from our scope of work and they were absolutely crucial to the success of the overall marketing project. When they fell by the way-side, the success of the marketing for the event was compromised. In the end, attendance was only about half of what the organization had expected. I believe that the lack of “getting the word out” that is often done through social media and websites are directly responsible for that shortfall.

And that is the third lesson learned. When you are working with volunteers, including the sponsor, it is the Project Manager’s responsibility to see that the team and the sponsor understands that it is a “ single project” and agree on what is needed to complete all elements that absolutely must be included in that project. You can’t take crucial elements out and still try to complete the puzzle. If you start a project and the scope gets reduced, a new assessment of whether the project can be completed in part needs to be clearly determined. All of the problems that arose in this project came directly from not getting the proper buy in from the sponsor and all the team members before trying to implement the goals and objectives of the project. Some of the lack in buy-in direct result from the team members (and the sponsor) being volunteers and having limited exposure to project concepts. Other problems were created because I was a new PMP project manager, trying to use new skills. This project environment was not typical to my area of expertise and I was dealing with people who had entirely different skill sets from what is typical in my professional experience.

The Project got completed. The Event held. Lessons were learned. The Hard Way.