Project Management

Your Project is an Enterprise

Your project for CSR in Action may not make money but you are creating a change based you on your vision.

This is entrepreneurship and there are a lot of symmetries into how you manage a CSR project and how you manage an enterprise.

Step 1: Understanding the Need

“If I had one hour to save the world, I would spend 55 minutes defining the problem and

only five minutes finding the solution.” –Albert Einstein

- Mapping Stakeholders

- Research Techniques

- Understanding the “consumer” of the project

Defining Clear Objectives

What social issue are you trying to solve?- Describe the status quo with numbers.

What impact do you wish to have with this solution? - What % improvement do you make on the status quo?

How will you know when you have achieved this impact? - What are you’re KPI’s?

Alignment

How do your objectives complement and enhance the work of others in the ecosystem?

Where do you fit in the whole process to solve the social issue? Where do you add value, where others

do not?

Planning

What activities do you need to do to achieve your desired impact?

What resources do you need to achieve your desired impact?

Does your team have access to these resources and the competencies to complete these activities?

- If not, who would have the incentive to partner with you?

Scheduling

Who will do each activity?

When will each activity be done?

When will cash be need to fund these activities and to purchase the resources you need?

Tools:

- Gantt Charts

- Critical Path Analysis

- Cash Flow Forecast

Processes

To scale your project you need to create processes which are to a large extent are autonomous without your involvement.

Without processes: Work once. Impact once.

With processes: Work once. Impact ongoing.

Validated Learning

Your project idea boils down to a set of assumptions:

- Do people really have this problem? Will your idea really solve it? Will this partner really help you?

When planning your project – identify 12-15 of the core assumptions behind your idea and identify an appropriate test to do during your pilot.

Only grow an idea when you have validated its assumptions.

The Planning Sheet

Iterative Development

Be Adaptable. Learn from interacting with customers and partners.

If you’re assumptions are proven wrong –change them.

Lean Start-Up

Famous in tech-entrepreneurship circles, the Lean Start-up highlights the need to produce the minimum viable service possible.

The aim is to get something in the hands of your users so you can begin learning what they need.

Resource

http://www.udacity.com/view#Course/ep245/CourseRev/1