Over the course of 6 months, 6 workshops and 22 meetings, my team brought together 1 project – the IET Quiz Night: Celebrating Women in STEM. As part of the 2018 IET Leadership Programme cohort, we sharpened and honed both our project management and leadership skills, overcame many challenges and pushed ourselves to achieve more than we thought we could.
As a team, we were split into 3 groups – marketing, logistics and operations. We had a mentor that helped guide us through the project and keep us on track. However, all the work was accomplished ourselves in order to give us a real taste of project management. Most notably, however, was that this was done in a safe environment where we were allowed to fail without consequence, and this allowed my team and I to explore and develop our skills confidently.
As part of bringing our event to life, we faced several challenges. One was marketing. With most of us being engineers, marketing was a new skill. Therefore, throughout the 6 months we had for our project, we undervalued the importance of marketing early. As a consequence, as the date of our event neared, our attendance numbers suffered so much that we had to push the event back a week. In the end, with some last minute marketing, we managed to increase our ticket sales. Most importantly, however, we learnt the fundamental necessity marketing was to our quiz night. And we began to realize we were not only learning the skills necessary for project management, but also event management.
Across the 6 months we undertook this project, we were also balancing university and, in some cases, jobs. Through this we learnt not only more sophisticated time management skills, but also the techniques of cultivating and maintaining a team’s motivation, focus and momentum. These skills will serve us well in the future when we begin to take on more leadership roles within other teams and projects.
One of the major benefits of undertaking a project such as our quiz night is the ability to take the time to reflect. It’s through reflection that we were able to pinpoint our major weaknesses and learn from them. One such weakness was our risk management skills. At the very start of a project, we had created a risk management plan to help monitor our progress and throw up any red flags when we were straying from our planned project timeline. However, we then made the mistake of not actually using our risk management plan, instead focusing only on our Gantt charts. In hindsight, we realized if we had actually implemented our risk management plan, we could have avoided a lot of issues and solved others much quicker.
One part of our project that we could have monitored better with a risk management plan is our budget. For our budget, we had to balance trying to break even with maintaining the level of quality a professional event demands. As a result, we had to go with a cheaper venue, cheaper catering and cancel additional decorations altogether. However, we kept the professional quizmaster to ensure the core of the event, the quiz, was up to standard and enjoyable. With a risk management plan, we now know we could have made decisions faster on what we planned to prioritize and what could be sacrificed to save on money spent.
In the end, the stand out of the IET Leadership Programme was the supportive community that were passionate in seeing us grow and develop as young professionals. Without the volunteered time the mentors and other programme leaders had dedicated to the IET Leadership Programme, we, the cohort, couldn’t have come so far in developing our leadership ability, project management skills and confidence.
- Elizabeth Stinton