Field Project – Team 1 : Support Sickle Cell patients by drinking Coffee

Our project was to sponsor a Catering Company at BIBF for few days to support a charity in Bahrain. We have considered some options for the charity we wanted to raise awareness of and the same for the coffee shop we wanted to make the deal with.

We were thinking about two charities, this first was “Bahrain Society for Sickle Cell Disease Patients” and the other charity was “Bahrain Cancer Society”. We decided first to contact “Bahrain Society for Sickle Cell Disease Patients” because of the increase in death among their patients in this year comparing to couple of years back. We had a good response from the society and agreed to work together.

Also we put some options for selecting catering company or coffee shop and started communicating with some of them like COSTA Coffee, American Bagel, and Al-Abraaj Restaurant. In addition to communicating to these companies we had a backup plan of dealing with the local cafeteria in BIBF in case we could not manage to agree with one of them.

We managed to get to an agreement with COSTA Coffee and Al-Abraaj restaurant, but we decided to go with COSTA only because of the time constrain.

We have created the project plan using Microsoft Project software and assigned the tasks between us, below are some of the tasks:

  • Searching for catering company, and make a deal with it.
  • Searching for Charity.
  • Get a required approval from BIBF and other if needed
  • Arrange meeting between Sponsoring Company and BIBF to make a setup and discuss their requirement and provide all facilities they need.
  • Arrange for meeting with charity society to discuss their input in project
  • Follow up the Coffee shop installation
  • Media cover, and informing the BIBF student and Staff about the project.
  • Closing the project

We think the main reason behind our success in the project is defining our goal and put a plan for conducting the project, distributing the task according to the capability of team member, following the project at different stages, have a conference call at each stage to discuss the difficulties we face.

There were many challenges in our project, starting from the limited period we have to do the whole project which was around 2.5 weeks only and which was not negotiable, and the fact that we are one of the smallest teams (4 members), ending to the fact that the regulations in Bahrain restrict fund raising without a prior approval which normally takes one month to obtained!

We believe we did good work regarding creating awareness about the society between the students in BIBF considering the number of booklets distributed. But on the other hand the funds generated from this project were not up to the expectation.

Our advice for any team doing similar projects are:

  1. Take enough time in planning, but don’t over plan, especially when your total project time is very limited.
  2. Make your estimation according to real figure.
  3. Conduct survey/questioner before start.

We learned a lot of lessons from this project:

  1. There is big gap between science and art in project management
  2. Define goal, very important to success the project.
  3. Assign tasks to the members with right skills.
  4. Main reason behind success of project is your team.
  5. The team should know the goal of project to make it succeed.
  6. Relationship between the project manager and project team should be strong enough.

 

Setting up COSTA mini branch

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After setting up COSTA

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Putting Project name stickers

 

 

MGT598_COSTA_02 MGT598_COSTA_03  MGT598_COSTA_05

 

 

Team members with Prof.

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Team members with class mates, Prof, and our guest speaker.

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10 thoughts on “Field Project – Team 1 : Support Sickle Cell patients by drinking Coffee

  1. First of all, I think your idea to donate money to the Bahrain Society of Sickle Cell Disease Patients was a great cause due to the increase in death rates because of Sickle Cell in Bahrain. It seems like a worth cause, that other people would be aware of. The set up for your coffee shop also looked great. I like your suggestion on having a conference call at each stage. I will use this idea in my upcoming project to make sure we discuss difficulties we are having, or simply to keep everyone on the same page. I will also considering using your idea of distributing booklets at our event, to help further raise awareness about the charity we choose to donate to.

  2. I believe the idea of supporting charity like the Society of Sickle Cell Disease Patients or Cancer Society by delivering coffee and breakfast is really good idea. I liked how they initially planned every out and they constantly communicated to ensure that everyone is on track. I believe communication is very important for a short project with limited resources. It have also provided good lessons-learned and recommendations for other teams.

  3. The biggest takeaway I got from this post-mortem is the idea that you shouldn’t over plan. At the end of the day, if you over plan, you leave yourself less flexible and able to change plans if need be. I have always found it best to have a strong sense of focus and mission, but be flexible on the day of the event to adjust to unforeseen stumble blocks.

  4. I really like the lesson – “there is a big gap between science and art in project management.” I find this to be very true, and something I struggle with. I can teach an event manager the science – what steps need to be taken, timelines, etc, but I have struggled to teach the art. In events, we frequently have to manage the event based on our gut feelings. Guests look restless, lets move up the next course, etc. I am not sure how to train someone to recognize these subtleties of event management and project management. It is an interesting lesson and question.

  5. This is a very interesting project and it’s obvious that the teamed learned a great deal about project management while completing this project. It appears that the team did a good job coming up with alternative options in case something did not work out as expected with one of the vendors.

    I’m curious if the team believes something could have been done differently in order to increase the total donation amount?

    Great job!

  6. This project has some really good lessons and take-aways that could benefit all the groups in the class. Having a back up plan is something that all groups should have. a relationship or agreement can fall apart at any moment, to have a successful project a manager has to plan for everything. The other lesson is the defined goals. I think a set of goals will help guide a group in the direction and everything should be planned around those goals.

  7. After reading through their project outline, areas of success and lessons learned i believe this team did a lot of things correctly at every stage of the project that allowed them to be so successful in the end. The first thing that i took note of is the prep work they put in to make sure every aspect of the project would run smoothly. As the team themselves pointed out, “defining our goal and put a plan for conducting the project, distributing the task according to the capability of team member, following the project at different stages, have a conference call at each stage to discuss the difficulties we face”. These pre-planning factors were a major part of their success and could be a huge factor in the success or failure of any undertaken project. Analyzing the completion of every stage of the project ensures that the entire project plan will come together as a whole and result in a quality finished product. The major takeaway that i took from their lessons learned, is the “define the goal” piece that is very important to the end result and especially a positive end result to any project. I think alot of projects go down the wrong road at some point along the way due to the team loosing site of the initial project goal or definition of the project in itself. If the project definition is always checked and discussed at every step of the project it becomes very difficult to veer of course at point along the way.

  8. Well done team!
    It seems like you had implemented the plan as outlined. Though, it is a challenging aspect when it comes to making things happen in a project or event management. In real life, we see people structure a plan yet the implementation is accomplished through a different path, just for the sake of completing the project and sometimes you see it work and other times not. This could even put the team into pressure and risk; the risk of wasting time to rethink of a way to accomplish the task, and risk of uncertainty –whether they are doing it the right way or not. Reaching to this point makes your think, is the person in charge of planning capable of doing so or lacks the skills of putting together a plan versus an implementation process? Therefore, this lead us to your point stated above which is; “Assign tasks to the members with right skills” – in other words, assigning the right person for the right job is a crucial step in planning!

  9. I must admit that I was amazed by this project. I am sure that putting this together was not an easy job nevertheless, it appears that with proper planning and team work sky is the limit. I am not a regular coffee person nevertheless, for the sake of support, I myself purchased coffee a number of times from this kiosk to support the project and I am sure that many others where impressed and encouraged to do the same. glad to see one of the learning outcomes being assigning tasks to the right person. It is indeed critical to ensure that the person has the right set of skills to achieve the allocated time and any misalignment is likely to result in delays which you already appear to have overtaken. well done.

  10. Looking back, I remember when I first saw Costa Coffee’s stand at BIBF with the sign that said it’s a work of DePaul MBA students. I was honestly amazed and wondered how could the team pull this off. Having a look at your project post above, it is evident the team initiated the planning correctly, establishing backup plans and proper task distribution. Using the proper tools and methodologies certainly aided your team to deliver the plan you sought. I personally enjoyed having Costa’s hot chocolate during that time,Thank you 🙂

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