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

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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

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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-

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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.

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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,

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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Appendix A

Stakeholder Analysis

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Appendix B

WBS in Org Chart Format

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Appendix C

Gantt Chart – Page 1

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Appendix C

Gantt Chart – Page 2

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Appendix D

Detail Gantt – Slack Time

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Appendix E

Resource Usage

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Appendix F

Timeline

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Appendix G

Fishbone Diagram

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Appendix H

Statement of Work

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Appendix I

RACI Chart