Entertainment at the Wapping Fair includes a bag piper

Although bag pipe music is an acquired pleasure, I have learned to enjoy it. I admire the dedication it takes to master this instrument as I have heard that it is a very difficult instrument to learn to play.

Yes! We won first place

Yes! We won first place in concessions at the Wapping fair. Customers say these are the best baked potatoes ever.

"I love it when a plan comes together"

This is the final week of Project SPUD. The lead team has worked diligently for the past six weeks, with a flurry of activity over the past three days. The booth will be erected in the next 12 hours and we will be open for business.

If you attend the Wapping fair, then please stop by our booth and purchase a potato. You will be glad that you did.

It has been a fabulous journey and I am thrilled to have been involved with such a positive group of volunteers from Wapping Community Church.

As a quick snapshot of this project's activities:
1. We have designed and printed custom order forms for customers.
2. Designed and printed signs for the booth, to display our name and prices.
3. Resolved 46 issues that made it onto the issue log.
4. Scheduled workers in 3 hours slots for the entire four day event.
5. Estimated, and procured supplies to sell 1,000 potatoes
6. Scheduled four days of oven baking for potatoes
7. Coordinated transporters to convey hot potatoes to booth.

This promises to be an exciting and fun-filled weekend. Project SPUD team rocks!!

Body sized coolers

We need body-sized coolers for the booth at Wapping Community Church.

Every person laughs when I say that we need a "body - sized" cooler. This accurate description is the perfect example of a complete description in project managment. Nobody has said "how many cubic feet would that be?" or "What color should it be".

Instantly, every person on the team knows what I say when I talk of a "body sized cooler".

What adjectives are you using on your projects to perfectly and accurately describe your project requirements? What is a "body sized cooler" in your world?

Project SPUD Week 5

We are into week five now, and only two weeks to go before the big event. Our plans are falling into place and as a member of the lead team commented last week "The volume of open issues is decreasing while the volume of closed issues is increasing". This is one measure of our progress.

We have a draft project budget drawn up, we have schedules for the kitchen crew and the worker crew at the booth of Wapping Community Fair. We also have people assigned to the various roles, such as SPUD transporter a communication system in the works for people to contact each other. Our escalation plan is in place for emergencies during the event.

Honestly, I must say that I see this as the phase of the project where we are completely comfortable with the progress of the project and are getting to the point where we want it done now. So much talk has been necessary to get to this point, but now I am looking forward to putting our plans into action and holding the event. I think if the project was a few weeks longer, we would start to lose momentum and people would start to lose interest.

From this, I learn that projects of this nature should be long enough to plan appropriately, but not so long that people become content to attend planning meetings and waffle on, merely to attend the meetings. A volunteer project such as Project SPUD only needs enough planning to plan appropriately, and then we must move. Volunteer projects can be over-planned and it is up to the Project Manager to keep things on track.

This week we are finalizing arrangements and next week the confirmations will be made with volunteers to fill their scheduled slots. My gut feel is that we are about five days ahead of schedule at this time. If we were to lose a few days right now, it would not have any impact to the project.

However, this is state was reached through the outstanding work of many volunteers. I can't say enough good things about the people who are working on Project SPUD and supporting the effort.

Project SPUD Special report

I just received photos of a Baked Potato vendor that worked a County fair in our area. These are excellent photos of what our customers expect, and I am thrilled to have these photos to present at our weekly project SPUD leadership meeting this evening.

This is no laughing matter. Helping a volunteer effort to sell baked potatoes requires top-notch intelligence that includes photos from competing potato baking vendors.

(Yeah right. After all, this is a volunteer project, although the photos are extremely helpful in planning to the Project SPUD leadership team).

Project SPUD Week 4

The kitchen crew coordinated, and held the supremely successful dry-run this past Sunday. We determined that we can bake a maximum of 90 jumbo potatoes in the ovens at a time. It takes 90 minutes to bake a batch of jumbo sized potatoes.

We also discovered that the toppings that we will offer to customers at the Wapping Community Fair, are totally delicious. (We elected to eat the sample potatoes and toppings after the dry-run). We also estimated the total amount of supplies that will be needed for the big event.

This week, we order the aprons and hats for volunteers.

The project is moving along nicely, with just over 2 weeks left until the big event. Progress to date is due to the enormous number of volunteer hours that have already been donated to this cause by good people stepping up and taking the lead on small tasks.

We still have open questions that we would like to have answers to. These seemingly simple answers have proven to be elusive so far.

1. How many potatoes have sold at similar events in the past? If we expect 20,000 fair goers, how many will purchase potatoes?
2. When will customers purchase them? At lunchtime on Saturday or on Saturday evening?
3. Which toppings have proven to be winners in the past?

Without these answers we are moving forward with our best estimates. If you have run a baked potato booth at a fair ground, please share your thoughts as a comment on this posting.

Project SPUD - Week 3.5

Wow!! Time is really flying now. In three days we have the dry-run for the booth. On Sunday at 3 PM we fire up the ovens and start the timer to see how long it will take to bake a sample of potatoes.

Then we will run them along the makeshift assembly line and add delicious toppings in our mock-up tent booth. After the dry-run we will adjust our plans and review the lessons learned to refine our schedule for the big event on Sept 11 - Sept 13 at Wapping Community Fair.

I am also glad to report that volunteers are signing up at a rapid pace and this project has all the indications of a monumental success.

Wish us luck as we cross the half-way mark of our community project.

Project SPUD Week 2

Ahh!! The early phases of a volunteer project.

This week we recruited three chiefs for our leadership team. We now have a treasurer and a hospitality hostess to welcome customers at our food booth at the Wapping Community fair. We also have a "Booth setup and break down chief" to erect the tent, transport all the equipment to the booth and then take it all down again after the fair.

I clarified some of the roles and responsibilities based on our meeting last week and the email exchanges among the team leaders this week. We found out that potatoes are graded in counts. A restaurant serves 80 to 90 count size potatoes. Larger potatoes are in the 50 to 60 count range. Who knew?

Tonight we will discuss the open issues at our lead team meeting:
1. Where will we find a chief cook and "booth worker team" chief? These are critical lead roles for our project to be successful.
2. Where are we going to get potatoes? What size of potatoes are needed?
3. Are we going to support a local charity with the profits from our food booth? I have come to learn that food booths are more profitable when they support, in part, a charitable cause outside of their own main cause.

Watch this space - more to come on project SPUD.

Project SPUD Week 1

We held the project kickoff meeting on 8/2/2009 at 9 AM. Our first task is to fill the roles of "Kitchen chief", "Booth setup chief", "Marketing chief", and so on.

We have created a structure for weekly meetings to ensure that we communicate frequently and build relationships within the team. We will be meeting at Wapping Church on Sunday evenings.

The project is off to a good start, with enthusiastic and knowledgeable leaders. Watch this space for further updates.

Unveiling Project SPUD

I was approached this week to manage a project for my church - I don't know where they got the idea that a PMP could help out with this :)

Project SPUD is our code name. We are going to host a booth at the Wapping Fair on the weekend of Sept 10 - 13, 2009 and sell baked potatoes with toppings.

It seems simple, right? Well, we already have 4 pages of plans, including trying to estimate quantities of orders and rate of sale.

This is a fun community project and I am looking forward to working with the fine folks at Wapping Community College over the next 6 weeks.

It is a great way to give back, see project management in action for volunteer efforts and expose regular folk to the benefits of applying project management discipline.

Watch this space for more to come on Project SPUD.

(Believe me, we will use the fewest spreadsheets imaginable, and a very simple project dashboard. I will die a happy man if I never see a Green, Red or Yellow spreadsheet in my life again).