Project Management
I’m bonkers about planning something and I’m crazy about appreciative leadership. I have over 40 years’ experience of managing and supporting charities and social projects in local authorities, national organisations, local communities, and churches. I love it when beneficiaries (customers, users, punters) are part of the ideas making, the planning and the delivery whenever and wherever possible. I have delayed a project or three making sure that we get the right people in the room. My community development mantra is that the people experiencing a problem know only too well how to have it fixed. I despair that so often they don’t get a chance to say so before some new wonder project has gone wrong.
As I have often been a transition manager, picking up a bit of chaos or carrying a project from a committee’s idea to active working, my style of project management starts with listening and dreaming with people. Then there’s an absolute heap of more listening and reading and chatting and testing reality. Then we plan. Then we try it out, learn, change, drop, decide and move along. We use some frameworks designed by other people (like Gantt charts) and some frameworks I’ve designed (like the Stakeholder/Finance/Resource/Outcome chart or the Service/Output/Demand matrix). For me, a project management framework helps channel the passion of a social project into a structure which encourages minds to focus and objectives to be achieved. I like to focus on changes we want to make and sensible use of money. This is especially important with a charity’s need to show that they are using their hard-won donations and funding the way they were expected to.
Because I do actually love doing all this, I’ve also been teaching it. For quite a while. Then wrote a book because the DSC, who I delivered training for, asked for it. Now it is their text book. Because I’ve taught so long and worked with so very many charities, social enterprises, constituted bodies, groups with good ideas, I have learned an enormous amount about a range of different organisations and how they operate. I’m confident I can help you be creative, flexible, well planned and sensibly monitored for most projects you have in mind. If I can’t help, I’ll tell you.
Contact me here.