Since we are homeschooling our children, I have a fun opportunity to add “basics of project management for elementary aged kids” to their curriculum. We recently did an assignment / activity around organizing a complex shopping trip as a distinct, temporary endeavor with requirements of efficiency and quality.
Our back to school shopping usually overlaps with making sure everyone also has appropriate clothes for the Jewish High Holidays, such as suits, dresses and other dress clothes. Additionally, this year, we were preparing for an October family wedding. With 5 kids to shop for, and some old enough to care about their own style but none old enough to drive, there was a lot to do.
In the midst of the flurry of gathering the requirements – which kids needed what stuff – it occurred to me that I could use a formal plan to manage the chaos of figuring out which kids needed to be taken to which stores, scheduled according to the sporadic windows of time my wife and I would have available for such activities.
I gathered the team, my wife and kids, and led them through an “activity definition” exercise that produced an output that we then organized into an actual WBS. This became an input to a series of shopping lists matching kids to stores. We then organized the project milestones by store and matched store by location to parental location and time windows. Parents knew ahead of time which stores to go to on which day of the week, as well as which kids were coming and what exactly needed to be bought for each – information provided by the kids themselves and organized into lists.
Using a WBS framework for helping my children in school has many applications. One child was struggling to get started on an English writing assignment, and I followed a similar process to help him organize a content plan to base his writing from. It’s really cool to see fundamental methodologies work at the most elementary levels.
RightStartPM 