Overview Of My Coordination Project
What is the project?
The project I am describing here was a small project, which included coordinating the IT, sound, and lighting professionals for a series of concerts in Boston. The short-term project coordination was offered to me by a medium-sized company who was short of qualified staff to organize a three-week series of classical concerts in public areas in and around Boston. I was only in charge to bring together the three business areas of lighting (for the stages), the sound system (for the stage), and the IT needs (ticket scanning, registration system) together and help out with communication and smaller technical errands for the three respective representatives for these operational areas. Essentially, I had to coordinate meetings between the IT professional, the sound professional, and the lighting professional, and ensure that their systems run smoothly and are able to be integrated. While IT was independent, sound and light had to work together a lot, because the effects on stage would look better. This was a smaller business project I took part in, but I believe it taught me a lot about the value of integration with context to different areas of expertise (IT, sound, light).
What is the scope, deliverable, and what are the results of the projects?
The scope of this project was a number of seven different concerts in four different locations in the Greater Boston area on seven different days within a three-week time frame. Each concert would last about two and a half hours with an interval of twenty minutes at half time, during which the concert attendees would be able to purchase small snacks, take a smoking break, or use the bathrooms. The deliverables I was reliable for within the scope of this concert series was simply the successful coordination between the business areas of IT, light, and sound. I was responsible for making sure they coordinate among themselves as well as during team meetings and ensure that for every different location all set-ups with regard to IT, sound, and light would be finished at least two hours before entry begins.
The results were successful; all integration between light and sound was a great success. Ticket registration, ticket scanners, refunds, returns, and all other IT related tasks went through without a problem. During the first concert, the ticket scanners did not manage to pick up bar codes from paper tickets that had been bent, but every affected guest would be able to enter their ticket number and then go through on time.
What constraints did you experience and how did you handle them?
Our project manager ensured that we were faced with very little constraints as for how we would handle our own tasks. He gave us a lot of freedom on how to execute all assignments; our team had very little constraints when participating in this small-scale project. Our formal constraints with regard to ticket registration were privacy concerns related to payment and contact details of guests with pre-registered tickets or pre-ordered / pre-paid tickets, because all their names, credit card information and other payment details were accessible on the concert organizer’s website and database. Apart from these legal and formal constraints that we needed to pay attention to, we had no other constraints while executing this project.
If you had to do the same project all over again, what changes would you recommend?
If I had to participate in this project again, I would definitely put the people who were supposed to be working together in touch in advance, so that they can coordinate in more detail among themselves. Our project manager only handed out a(n incomplete) list of contact details with all project employees a few days before the actual first concert, which gave my team very little time to set up modes of communication, different responsibilities, or assistance we might end up needing. This essentially ended up being a coordinative backlog we had to handle. Additionally, having entitlements and access to the ticket pre-registration system our concert organizing company was using at the time would have been helpful earlier in advance as well to familiarize myself with the software, the pathways and options, because it would have saved the guests who were picking up their pre-registered tickets lot of time when all my team members had been able to quickly navigate through the software and not make them wait until they find a guest’s registration.
