Project Introduction
For the purposes of this project, our group decided to create a yoga class. The decision was made after considering the needs of the students and staff alike, along with the unique competencies of our group. Many people knew a lot about personal fitness and health, while others saw the benefit of introducing a program focused on the well-being of a small community. In this work, I seek to highlight the proceedings of the project, its organization and its goals. Additionally, I will also be talking in larger detail about my contribution to the team effort, and the difficulties we encountered along the way. As a whole, I consider the creation of the yoga class to be a success and a valuable learning moment for most of our team members. First, I will attempt to focus on our project plan and its deliverables.
As mentioned earlier, the goal was to create a yoga class for both the staff and the students. The project would be organized by 18 people, with the majority of manpower put to organizing the event. Overall, we had 2 positions for management, 7 for marketing, and 9 for all other considerations. This distribution gave us the opportunity to manage the operation more smoothly and meet goals on time. The yoga class was to be hosted by our team for the benefit of other students and faculty members. Social media accounts were created for marketing purposes, and surveys were created to enhance communication with participants. All considerations of the organization were managed by the largest team, who created a risk plan covering potential issues, engaged with stakeholders and coordinated the classes themselves.
Personal Contribution
As a part of the team, I was one of the project managers for the yoga class. While this position had much less to do with contributing my own labor and ideas to the project, I think that management allows all other parts of the whole to work together smoothly. I feel that without the work of myself and the other manager, much of the time the groups spent on working would have actually been wasted in coordinating tasks and setting goals. Management allowed us to work at our highest potential and make each individual shine at what they did. Personally, I attempted to work with every team member as much as I could. In particular, I continuously gathered feedback from them, proposed ideas and solutions to common problems, mitigated disagreements in-between other organizers and maintained a clear focus of the project for its entire duration. The marketing team and operations team both formulated their tasks separately before coordinating them with me, which was important to cover all of the needs of the project. A management position was new to me, but I acted within the group’s best interests and worked to make sure that everyone felt like their contribution mattered. There were certain difficulties that I would get into later, but they did not deter me from supporting others.
Difficulties
There were a number of difficulties that we encountered during project organization. Firstly, it was incredibly difficult to keep up a consistent pace and deliver on project outcomes. With things like creating promotional materials, using logistics, booking rooms and others, it was difficult to achieve the necessary outcomes without wasting any time. When a goal appeared to be more difficult to achieve than planned and when the completion of an objective was stalled by an external force, our team was forced to come up with quick solutions. In the middle of the project, we had to reason on creating better, more manageable deadlines and scaling down on some of the plans made in the past. This helped us keep the overall effort on track without sacrificing time or quality of service.
In addition, arguments and disagreements were another major problem for the effort. Teams comprised of multiple members had to work alongside each other and quickly achieve the desired outcomes. This created stress and a sense of inter-dependency, contributing to arguments. In addition, some members of the team could not agree on the best way to manage the project or achieve the desired outcomes. Because of this, the team has had to accept conflict as an inevitable part of group assignments and find pathways to compromise. As mentioned earlier, I feel that the engagement of me and the other manager in the process of overseeing group progress helped to reduce the severity of conflicts and keep people’s interests from overlapping. In addition, the process of scaling down also helped to reduce the number of arguments.
Conclusion
As mentioned in the introduction, I feel that the process of completing the yoga classes project has allowed both me and the other team members to develop our capacities immensely. As an individual, I was able to practice leadership, goal-setting, professional communication and task prioritization. Others engaged in marketing, logistics and other parts of project completion, which will no doubt help them in their future careers. Outside of our team, I think that the yoga classes have improved the experience of the campus communities and given people more opportunities to discover themselves and connect with others.