Project Management Free

When we finished event design, next step is scheduling the event using the event project management method. Project management has existed nearly 100 years. In modern society; project management has been used more and more widely by firms. In the event industry, managers prefer to use project management help themselves to manage their event. Hence, this report will describe how does project management apply to my event, and I will discuss and analyse the reason why so many firms using project management and distinguish the traditional project management and modern project management.

Introduce project management and Risk management

In modern society, most firms faced a phenomenon: how to complete complex growing project and finish their product or service life cycles. These challenges appeared due to the awareness of the time-based competition and a quality mandate for continuous improvement. Not only firms need planning a big project, in daily life, people also may need to plan a wedding schedule or preparing for study. A project is identified as a temporary process to undertake to create a unique product, service or result (PMI 2008). Project management is the application of knowledge, skills, tolls, and techniques to project activities to meet the project requirements. Generally, project is a long time job taking several months or years. Hence, as Heizer and Render mentioned (2008), it can be divided three phases: planning, scheduling and controlling. Planning process is setting a goal, defining the project, and team organization. Mostly, the big firms will create a temporary organization before planning. For assisting teams to work best, work should be defined more specific and a clearly deadline. Do a breakdown structure of a product at first, then imagine as a guest of the event, derive the product as more as specific into tasks.

The second stage of project management is project scheduling that involves sequencing and allotting time to all project activities. During this stage, manager needs to decide how long each activity will take and compute how many people and materials will be needed at each stage of production. There are three popular techniques to allow managers to plan and schedule is Gantt charts, PERT and CPM (Heizer and Render 2008). My project used Gantt Chart to schedule programme. Gantt Chart is a project schedule, usually created by the project manager using computer software, the superimposes project activities, with their precedence relationships and estimated duration times on a time line. No matter which means managers used, these methods all easy to understand and clearly show the relationship of each activities to others and the whole project, even including the potential delays and also can allocate resources like people, money and materials. The last stage is project controlling. The control of large projects involves close monitoring of resources, costs, quality and budgets. At the control stage, purposes of it are using a feedback loop to revise the project plan and shift resources to where they are needed most. PERT and CPM and Gantt Chart still be used widely at this stage.

Risk management combine with project management

As a body of knowledge, project management distilled from the experience of countless projects around the world (O’Toole and Mikolaitis, 2002). It divides corporate event management into severial areas of responsibility, like scope, content, time, homan resources, cost, procurement, risk, communication (O’Toole and Mikolaitis, 2002). For industry profeesionals, health, safety and risk management is a key part of event planning, they all need be factored in the very start of the process and should be considered during every part of the planning process. (Bladen, 2012) Risk management process should be an on-going activity, the reason is risk management run through the entire event. Risk is a measure of the probability and consequence of not reaching a defined project goal.

We learn project management method to management a project, therefore, I treat risk management as a project to manage. Hence, combining the project management process and risk management process, firstly, manager should to plan risk. The risk planning offer an method to make decisions based on assumptions and accepted methods, incorportainng best practices and achieve maximum benefit (Silvers, 2010). Doing a risk planning can improved communications between departments; managers also can use of resources more efficiently. Compare with who dosen’t planning hazards, the benefit of risk planning is more quicker recognition of risks. Before analyse the risk of event, managers need to make sure the context of their event (Tarlow 2002 & Bowdin 2010). As my event as example, my event is an family outdoor event during an sumer weekend. It is a two one-off community event. Forecasted two thousand will be attend, attendees of the event will be children and families. Next step is risk assessment. At this stage, manager should identify the hazards. My event theme is an afternoon tea party including tea & cake fair, tea lecture, kite flying activity and music concert.

I divide these materials into five groups: Food and water group, lighting and electrical group, weather group, crowd controll group and emergency group. Before identify hazard, managers can review historical records to take knowledge about possible risk in the departed events. In my event, the possible hazard may happen in tea & cake fair including food poisoning, scald staffs and visitors, hurt by knife and fork, unhappy visitors abuse staff or artists, fire hazard and power cut. In kite flying, biting, child missing, pet hurting may cause harm to people.

In risk management, There seven tools and techniques of identify risks can help managers, including documentation reviews, assumptions analysis, information gathering techniques, checklist analysis, SWOT analysis, diagramming techniques, and expert judgment. After identify the hazards, managers need to evaloate the risks and decide on precautions. For examples, unhappy visitors may abuse staff or entertainment. The measure to control risk is managers on hand to intervene and security to be called if necessary, the level of this hazard is low. More example like child is bite by snake, to lower the risk of snakebites, manager can posting signs at the danger site, and reminding people to leave snakes alone and stay away from tall grass. Organizing an emergency team before the event open and posting signs conduct patients to the nearest emergency tent. After assessment and analyse risks, an important thing is record all data and result and implement them. The last step is review these assessment and update if necessary, because risk management run through of the whole event management.

Actually, in the process of risk management, I not only comply with the steps of risk management, I also utilize the project management. The project management first step is planning and doing work breakdown structure. When I comprehend the event context, I divide event into its major subcomponents, such as prepare, risk assessment, risk management, and risk management is divided into six subtask: food and water group, lighting group, weather group, electrical group, crowd control and emergency group. Then I used Gantt chart to schedule project in project scheduling stage. In this stage, managers plan all activities, resolve all specific tasks, confirm the event start time and every task’s duration time, allocate resource sort of material, cost and worker. But using Gantt Chart, managers are compelled to find out the certainly duration of tasks.

When you give someone too much work to do in the time available, it is not suitable for using Gantt Chart, neither nor a large project (Shone and Bryn, 2004). That is the limitation of the Gantt Chart. There are two popular techniques are program evaluation and review technique (PERT) and the critical path method (CPM) (Heizer and Render, 2008). The framework of PERT and CPM is similar as the process of Gantt Chart. The different part is PERT and CPM confirm the relationships among the activities before the assign time and cost estimate to each activity. The longest time path computed through the network, is a major part of controlling a project (Heizer, Jay and Render Barry 2008). Then use the network to help plan and schedule. While the difference between PERT and CPM is the former used three time to estimate and compute expected values for the activity, but the latter assumes tasks time is known, therefore, only requires one time factor for each activity.

Advantage of project management

In modern social, everything needs producing economies and responds quickly to change. Utilizing project management to manage event project indeed offers a number of advantages. It is a systematic approach that can be improved with every event (O’Toole and Mikolaitis, 2002). As an event project management is a complex and cockamamie process, while the project management establishes schedules and tasks, managers can easily follow the process to the arrangement what should they do and when they have to do it. Secondly, it avoids the risk that the event’s success relies on one person (O’Toole and Mikolaitis, 2002). Project management has a clearly system with documentation, everyone can easily understand the event with the clear communication and teams. People work more productively in teams than individually; in the modern project management, managers and team members can mutual supervision for reaching higher quality event. Thirdly it uses common terminology therefore facilitates more clearly (O’Toole and Mikolaitis, 2002). For example, event management team members or managers need communicating tasks with other departments like finance and marketing department, while the project management terminology is part of the language of those departments as well.

Therefore project management can be used as a transparent system for communication. Not only communication, the entire project management method has been used by other department (O’Toole and Mikolaitis, 2002), for instance, in the finance department, they also used project management to plan and uranalysis finance part of the project. Next, it ensures accountability to the stakeholders. Stakeholder management is a fundamental knowledge area of project management. (Glenn Bowdin[et al.]. 2010.) Project management can document data and information. Hence, event managers can report to stakeholders at any time. Furthermore, the process of event management can be seen by project management (O’Toole and Mikolaitis, 2002). In the traditional project management, managers just see the event day, no matter how much work has been done, if the event succeeds, the work will be approved. Now this situation can change, every work and material allocating will be recorded. One of the project management output is the corporate event manual. According to his manual, managers can train staffs and volunteers expeditiously. Last, using project management even development worker’s transferable skills. (O’Toole and Mikolaitis, 2002)

Disadvantage of project management

Although project management brings loads of benefits, it still has limitations in some area. Firstly, project management is difficult to keep stakeholders number and requirement. Therefore the event company has to keep an eye on every stakeholder in case of any changes. Secondly, marketing cannot be identified because of market keeping changes. As the fundamental principle of marketing, event should have the ability to respond to market changes. While the changes of marketing , thinking about marketing cannot response on the event management working sheet. But using marketing tools like marketing segmentation, consumer decision profiling can reduce uncertainty. Event design as a large element of the event is cannot describe easily.

The work of volunteers is difficult to quantify, it is more random arrangement on the event day. Finance like marketing is a changing result. Finance may be found at any time. Until event finished, the costs of event can be defined. Traditional project management have disable to record the keeping changing factors. The temporary infrastructure and resources and short-term contracts cannot do a plentiful detail analysis, every aspect of the management must be continually assessed according to its effect on the deadline. While as a project management tool, it cannot allow creativity appears in a system. Unless manager not treats these tools as a support system for the event, they may make the creativity disappear, particularly in a special event.

Compare traditional and project management

The traditional company model, with its pyramid structure of responsibilities and authority and functional departments, cannot change quickly enough.The complexity of traditional structured programming has created a need to break the overall task done by software into smaller units. The units or objects are then recombined in various configurations to produce the desired results. This pattern of breaking up the work into manageable tasks is the basis for project management. (O’Toole, William and Mikolaitis, Phyllis 2002)

Traditional management focus on continuing operations, however the modern project management more focused on the one-time revolutionary development of a new product (Bowenkamp and Kleiner 1987). At the life-cycle aspect of management, traditional management is a single product life-cycle phase, while the new project management is more feasible, design, production, turn-over and start-up and project termination. When focus on the each task of traditional project management, we can find these tasks are mostly in the similar situation and the other little ‘new’ problems can be expected. In order for this, each unique task needs a unique organization, therefore, project management needs various organizations or combinations of organizations.

Reference

BLADEN, CHARLES (ED.) (2012). Events management an introduction. Milton Park, Routledge.

GLENN BOWDIN[ET AL.]. (2010.). Events management. Oxford, Butterworth-Heinemann.

HEIZER, JAY AND RENDER BARRY (2008). Operations management. Harlow, Prentice International.

O’TOOLE, WILLIAM AND MIKOLAITIS, PHYLLIS (2002). Corporate Event Project Management. New York, Wiley.

PMI (2008). A guide to the project management body of knowledge. Newtown Square, Project Management Institute.

ROBERT D. BOWENKAMP AND BRIAN H. KLEINER (1987). How to be a successful project manager. Industrial Management & Data Systems, 87 (3), 3-6.

SHONE, ANTON AND PARRY, BRYN (2004). Successful event management. Hampshire, Thomson.

SILVERS, Julia R (2010). Risk management for meetings and events. Oxford, Butterworth-Heinemann.

TARLOW, Peter E. (2002). Event risk management and safety. New York, Wiley.