Related Advancement
- Service requirements for Boy Scout advancement
- Personal Finance and Family Life merit badges. Merit badges that require projects, including Backpacking, Bird Study, Camping, Emergency Preparedness, Fish and Wildlife Management, Mammal Study, Soil and Water Conservation, and Woodwork
- Eagle Scout service project requirement
What Is Project Management?
Project management is an approach to ensure that all required project work undertaken to create a product, service, or result is planned and completed to meet the time, cost, and quality specifications. This includes:
- Determining strategies to ensure everyone’s expectations are met and all the needed people and other resources—such as supplies, equipment, and facilities—are identified, planned for, and acquired
- Defining high-quality project standards
- Identifying potential risks and then determining effective ways to manage those risks
- Procuring products and services according to the organization’s procedures
- Communicating the project’s progress to the people and organizations involved on a regular basis
Five Stages of Team-Based Project Planning
Most of what we do in Scouting can be considered team-based projects of a small to moderate size. A five-stage approach has been shown to be particularly effective for such projects. These stages include:
Prepare a project overview that summarizes the specific goals and objectives of the project.- Develop a work breakdown structure that identifies the tasks to be completed and the order in which they should be done. (This leads to the writing of a detailed project plan.)
- Assign responsibilities for specific activities or tasks to each project team member.
- Put the plan into action and track its progress.
- Prepare a closeout report that compares the original goals and objectives to the final outcome.
Project Manager
– A project manager is the person responsible for ensuring a project achieves its goals and objectives. This position is normally assigned by someone within the organization. That someone could be the CEO, the project sponsor, or a group of peers. Depending on the project, the project team itself may choose its project manager.
– On a Scouting project, the project manager might be the senior patrol leader, or the Scout organizing the project to meet the requirements for Eagle.
Stakeholder
– Project stakeholders are the people (or organizations) who are involved or have an interest, either positive or negative, in the project and project outcome. Project stakeholders may include
customers, clients, suppliers, vendors, and those who actively contribute.
– On a Scouting project, stakeholders could include the organization that is the recipient of a service project, as well as all those involved in carrying out the project.
Project Sponsor
– A project sponsor is the person who provides financial and other needed resources for the project; he or she is also responsible for providing the management oversight. The project sponsor is available to support the project manager and is responsible for signing off on the project’s outcome. This individual is a stakeholder and can be internal or external to the organization.
– On a Scouting project, the sponsor might be the unit committee chair, the head of the chartered organization, or the head of the organization benefiting from the project.
Team Member
– Project team members are the people who work on the project and contribute to its success. The project manager and project sponsor define the team member roles and responsibilities. A team member may be employed by the organization responsible for the project or could be a third party expert, vendor, supplier, contractor, or volunteer.
– On a Scouting project, team members are the Scouts and adult volunteers who will work on the project.
SMART Goals
A good goal can be measured by the following criteria:
S—Specific: Is it specific in targeting an objective?
M—Measurable: What are the measurable indicators of progress or success?
A—Attainable: Is it attainable by someone on the team?
R—Relevant: Does the goal support the unit’s project and overall vision? Is it an appropriate goal within the current context of the unit?
T—Time-based: When will the project be completed?
makes is falling into the “activity trap.” This occurs when the team jumps into action and assumes that it can figure out what it needs to do after the first task. Doing so often wastes time and resources, to say nothing of the frustration and disappointment team members feel.
Project Closeout
When the project is complete, there are still two important things to do. One is to recognize your team members. Remember, celebration is an important part of a high-performance team. The second is to make a postmortem report. This evaluation should be written, and it should include an analysis of several questions:
- Were the goals and objectives met?
- Was the project completed on time?
- How might we make things run better next time? This written report will enable you or your successor to reflect on what happened and to consider ways to avoid in the future some of the pitfalls you may have encountered.
Recycle Regatta
– This month’s meetings revolve largely around a recycle regatta held at the end of the month. What’s a recycle regatta? It’s much like the raingutter regatta—the sailing equivalent of the pinewood derby—except the boats are made from recycled materials instead of kits.
– You can acquire building materials from recycling bins and supplement them with additional supplies, including leftover foam
insulation, duct tape, glue, and whatever else you can dream up. You then race the boats down 10-foot sections of rain gutters (with end caps in place) filled with water.
Sample Materials
– Hulls: juice boxes, slabs of foam insulation, 8-ounce water bottles, 20-ounce soda bottles, juice pouches, ice pop sticks (to create a raft design)
–Masts: straws, skewers, small dowels, pencils
– Sails: construction paper, index cards, cut-up cereal boxes, small chip bags, juice pouches Avoid newsprint and other materials that can get waterlogged, as well as thick pieces of foam, which stick to the gutters and make a mess when broken.
– 
Note: ScoutStuff.org sells a Raingutter Regatta® Inflatable Raceway, No. 612687, that provides an easy alternative to fabricating a rain-gutter race course.