Project Management P
Fight Climate Change
Tatiana Kent
Neacy Contreras
Samuel Slobom
Johnny Martinez
May 12, 2020
Table of Contents
Executive Summary…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………1
Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….……...1
Stakeholder Analysis……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………....2
Communication and Reporting Plan.……………………………………………………………………………………………………....2
SOW……………………….……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………....2
Project Description & Plan……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………....3
Risk Analysis Plan…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………....7
Lessons Learned………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………8
Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..…….8
Appendices…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….........10
1
Executive Summary
The unfortunate truth and reality of today is this - climate change is a global issue and
affects living organisms, every day. As this issue increases, from changing weather patterns that
minimize food production to the rising sea levels that create stress for several industries, this
ongoing issue is unprecedented in scale and will continue to damage the way of living if no
drastic action is done. Adjusting the toxic output humans emit and educating others will lessen
the speed of climate change. It is essential to educate the youth on climate change because
sometimes, the common reaction is to hope that someone else will resolve the problem.
Fight Climate Change is a nonprofit organization with a simple goal – for the next
generation to learn about climate change and to take action in order to save the planet. The
organization will partner with schools from grades K-12 and have volunteers teach in the
classroom on basic fundamentals such as recycling, policy reform, and how to live zero-waste.
The organization will work with subject matter experts to create the most accurate learning
material. Fight Climate Change will give the youth the necessary tools and resources to
positively change this planet.
Introduction
Fight Climate Change will focus its programs on kids in California. The non-profit will
focus its mission in San Diego and once it is established, we will open branches throughout the
state of California such as Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, and San Francisco. With its guided
purpose to educate the youth, based on age, the programs will focus on five emission factors:
1. Built environment and transportation
2. Energy
3. Solid Waste
4. Water and wastewater
5. Agriculture and conservation
After collaborating with the subject matter experts to create a curriculum, Fight Climate Change will have trained volunteers spend multiple days with a class to teach the cause and effect of climate change and most importantly, what they can do in their lives to respond. For example, high school students will be taught on how to engage with their local, state, and federal government on policies preserving the environment and what industries emit the most harm to the planet.
We believe it is important to teach the youth because it is a challenging subject, but a necessity to understand, especially at a young age. Climate change is sometimes not taught in schools, only skimmed over, or presented to the youth as a theory rather than a fact or as an ongoing debate about science. Our goal is within 3 years of launching the program, 25% of K-12
2
students in California will participate in our program and 100% of those participants are enrolled in conservation community groups.
Stakeholder Analysis
Fight Climate Change is a program that has far-reaching stakeholders. In order to
analyze our stakeholders and determine the importance of each one we must first partition
them into internal and external categories. Our team found that Fight Climate Change’s internal
stakeholders would be: our project sponsors, the team, Subject Matter Experts (IT and
Education), Programmers and Publishers, and lastly the finance and marketing departments.
Our external stakeholders were found to be: children and families within the program, the
Unified School District, Local stores (changing customer behavior), Local communities (better
conservation efforts), other non-profit organizations, Volunteers, and Teachers that adopt the
program. Using a rate average method, we used variables such as power, interest, influence,
impact, urgency, and legitimacy. Using those variables and rating their level of importance per
category using 1-3 we average those values to find which stakeholders are of most importance.
For example, we had found that SME, Sponsors, and our team have the most weight out of all
of our stakeholders. Please refer to Appendix A for our complete stakeholder analysis.
Communication and Reporting Plan
Our methods of communication to our stakeholders needed to be discussed. We
partitioned out who we are going to be communicating with into groups such as Core team
members, our executive team, and the general public. The core team members are designed to
meet face to face, communicate over email regularly, and attend weekly meetings. Our
executive team would have milestone reviews and videoconferencing as well as face to face
meetings. To conclude, the general public will be receiving information via numerous channels
of communication: Newspaper/magazines, social media, local Tv News stations, radio, etc. As
for the entire project, the highest level to report to would be the core team members as well as
the project sponsor. However, the project sponsor will inevitably make the last decision.
SOW
A statement of work creates a description of the project's work requirements. Within
the SOW you will find our project-specific activities that we deemed to be key activities to our
operation. In appendix H, you will be able to see Fight Climate Change’s deliverables and
timelines for the services that we will be providing. We will be partnering with schools grades k-
3
12 and create curriculum and training programs as well as bring volunteers to equip the youth
with tools that they need for the future. As for our delivery schedule, we plan on a 121-day
schedule. We have deliverables such as: registering non-profit organization, fund raising,
selecting schools for pilot programs, prototyping, etc. With this document signed by each team
member we agree to meet all requirements and deadlines stated within the SOW.
Project Plan
The first step in developing a project schedule is to define all of the work activities. To
develop our Work Breakdown Structure, we first identified the main deliverables, and then
listed the activities that had to be completed to create each of the project deliverables. Once
the activities were finalized, we determined the project milestones that will be used as
checkpoints throughout the project duration with our Sponsor and Project Manager.
We started with the indented outline format, which could be easily edited and
rearranged. Once the WBS was finalized, we used the organizational chart format for
presentation purposes (Appendix B). This format depicts a clear flow of activities and can be
easily understood by various stakeholders.
We then used this information to create a Gantt Chart in Microsoft Projects. In the
Gantt Chart, we assigned an estimated duration for each activity, and also determined its
predecessors and relationships. Appendix C includes our current Gantt Chart. As you can see,
we are 58% complete and are on track to complete our project on time.
To add tasks to the timeline view, you first need to ensure that you can see the timeline
at the top of the Gantt Chart. Then you can click into the timeline to show the format tab.
Select the “Existing Tasks” button and pick the tasks that you wish to add to the timeline. For
our timeline view, the team selected the main deliverables and the project milestones.
Milestones are depicted as a diamond at the bottom of the timeline. Our next milestone is on
May 22nd which marks the completion of the training programs.
4
MS Projects offers several ways to assign a milestone. A milestone is an event, so its
duration is assumed to be 0 days. Therefore, any activity entered with a duration of 0 days will
be automatically flagged as a milestone in MS Projects. However, you can also mark an existing
activity as a milestone. You can do so by going into the task information screen and checking
option “Mark task as milestone” in the advanced options tab. Our first two milestones are
activities that we also identified as milestones. The other milestones are events, not activities,
which were entered with a duration of 0 days. To view your project’s milestones, you simply
filter the view of your Gantt Chart by “Milestones”.
We also used MS Projects view filter to identify the critical path, instead of manually
calculating the early/late start and early/late finish for each activity as we did in class. To view
the critical path, you simply filter the Gantt Chart view by “Critical”. You have the option to
highlight the critical activities in your Gantt Chart as well. The below screenshot shows our
project’s critical path at the beginning of the project. To see the total slack time for each
activity, you need to switch the view to the “Detail Gantt” chart. In addition to the assigned
start and finish dates, you can now see the latest start and the latest finish dates, as well as the
total slack time. Appendix D illustrates the Detail Gantt chart and the slack times for each
activity at the beginning of the project.
In MS Projects, you assign resources and budget resources in the Resource Sheet. There are
three resource types: Work, Cost and Material. To be able to track budget versus actual costs,
5
we created a custom column called “Budget Category” and then assigned the resources to 6
different categories:
1. Consultants
2. Entertainment
3. Fees
4. Material
5. Staff
6. Travel
For detailed budget tracking, we use the Resource Usage Tool that gives us cost detail
for each activity as well as a weekly cost schedule. This is a very large report. Therefore,
Appendix E includes a collapsed view for each budget category and resource. The report
displays the budget cost/work and the cost/work currently assigned to the activities. If you look
at the budget category “Staff”, you can see that the budget work hours are 3,000, but the
actual work hours projected are 3,192, which means that we are above the budget. In contrast,
we budgeted $10,000 for travel, but our actual travel cost is $7,000.
MS Projects offers a number of useful reports and dashboards that can be used as-is or
modified. We use the below critical tasks report to track the remaining critical path activities,
their percent complete, and the number of work hours remaining for each activity.
6
We use the resource overview report to track work assigned to each resource, and the
remaining work by each deliverable.
The cost overview dashboard provides a top-level overview by budget category. It
breaks down the cost into actual, remaining and cost (actual plus remaining) and the respective
budget costs. Since resource type “work” is budgeted in man-hours and not dollar amounts,
you can see the budgeted and the actual hours completed for the project.
7
Risk Analysis Plan
For our project we have broken down our risk analysis into six categories, these
categories are volunteers, finance, personal & administration, materials, legal and compliance
and programs & services. The risk we run when working volunteers is that they may lack the
experience of working with children or young adults. It is important for us to survey our
volunteers to see where the skills set and experience with children are. The risk of not properly
training our volunteers to be fully prepared to teach the students is a risk as well. Asking for
feedback from the volunteers throughout training can allow us to find discrepancies early and
avoid issues occurring while teaching the students. When it comes to the finance perspective,
we run the risk of not raising enough money to publicize our organization. One of the issues
that can lead to this result is carless reporting of funds. Having a strong management team to
monitor and be a part of the reporting will be crucial. In the personal & administration
department we run the risk of not having sufficient staff to implement our fundraising. At the
same time, we do not want to be lenient on the volunteers we choose because we want to
make sure the staff is passionate about our vision and values. The risk we run when it comes to
our materials is that they are incomplete and lack appeal to the students. We wanted to make
sure that we truly engage with our SMEs to minimize this from happening. In the legal &
compliance department we run the risk of improper tax receipting and improper document
filing to work with schools. Extra attention and delegating will be given to this matter to
minimize the possible occurrence. The final department is programs & services, we run the risk
of failing to promote or vision and organization to the community. This can be the result of
poor management failing to make sure there are no service delivery errors.
8
Lessons Learned
What worked well:
1. MS Projects provides great tools to track actual costs versus the budget. For a new
non-profit company like Fight Climate Change, MS Projects helped us align on our
expenses by identifying areas early in the project that were outside the budget.
2. The various stakeholders that we collaborated with were responsive to the goal of
Fight Climate and offered additional help. This enabled us to complete the project
on time and make the program as successful as it could be.
3. The creation of the RACI chart helps to identify and solidify the responsibilities of
each role. In a new non- profit company like Fight Climate Change with a unique
vision it is extremely important to have a strong foundation to ensure completion of
the project.
4. Stakeholder analysis as well as communication plan made the project flow with ease
considering the communication methods were all laid out.
What can be improved:
1. The timeline could have been too ambitious for the team to pursue. In the beginning
of the project, we had hoped to go-live with Fight Climate Change within 4 months.
However, after discovering the amount of work needed, and the amount of time
that is dedicated to working with school districts, a 10 or 12 month timeframe would
have been more ideal, especially if the team was seeking a work-life balance.
2. If we wanted to go by the original timeline, it would have been better to have more
face to face interaction as well as hands-on experiences with our “product”
Conclusion
From a project management perspective, forming a non-profit organization is very similar when forming a new business. There are many stakeholders at every stage of the process and in order for a successful launch, everyone involved had to put in more time than usual because the Fight Climate Change was made from the ground up. The team built a strong foundation in the beginning; understanding each other’s strengths and weaknesses, but also confirming that each team member has a passion to save the environment. This is what enabled the team to be cohesive and effective. With minimal conflicts, each team member worked on their part in a timely manner, and we supported each other when needed.
We believe that as a team, Fight Climate Change will be successful. This is a necessary program and without action, we will continue to see the catastrophic impact the world will endure in front of our eyes including our children, our children’s, and beyond. Where there is a possible chance that we can change the catastrophic impact of killing our planet to the catastrophic impact of preserving our planet, this is why Fight Climate Change ceases to exist; to protect, educate, and fight for the world we live in. We hope that with this non-profit
9
organization, we see the next generation take action on this important issue. We have a moral obligation because we are the ones to blame for adding these chemicals into the environment. The people are the cause, but we can also be the effect. To summarize, we need to take part and try to stop global warming. If the earth’s temperatures continue to rise, living things would become extinct due to high temperatures. If people mitigate global warming, the world would be cooler, and the high temperatures would decrease immensely. If everybody can come together to take a stand and end most of the climate changes that have been occurring, this world would be a safer place.
10
Appendix A
Stakeholder Analysis
11
Appendix B
WBS in Org Chart Format
12
Appendix C
Gantt Chart – Page 1
13
Appendix C
Gantt Chart – Page 2
14
Appendix D
Detail Gantt – Slack Time
15
Appendix E
Resource Usage
16
Appendix F
Timeline
17
Appendix G
Fishbone Diagram
18
Appendix H
Statement of Work
19
Appendix I
RACI Chart