Starting a Successful Project

Considerations for our first group meeting

The beginning of a project is crucial for its successful outcome. This is my main learning of the first week, as Leslie showed us an example of a very complex challenge she worked on in a tight time frame. They succeeded because the kick-off was managed well and the whole process was outlined clearly.

From the first week’s input I take away the following aspects to consider when starting a project:

• Build a team spirit Make all team members aware of their own motivation to join this project and set a common ground for the whole group: Why do we do this?

• Get started Decide on first performance-oriented goals and milestones to create urgency and waste no time: What can we start with and until when?

• Foster individual and common responsibility Assign roles and tasks: Who takes care of what?

• Plan the process and control its compliance Layout the whole project according to the Design Thinking Process:

Design Thinking Approach (Nielsen Norman Group, 1998-2019)

• Get inspired and create new ideas Generate new inputs regularly and spend time together: Where can we go to get some new insights? (museums, exhibitions, talks, movies)

• Leadership role Be task and relationship oriented

For the ocean plastic project that started the next week, I wanted to keep these points in mind in order to create a good start for our team work.

In the next session, the first meeting with the project team went really well and I was able to influence the discussions so that all the points I identified as important in the first lecture were covered and documented.

• Build a team spirit We took some time for reflection of our personal objective to work on this topic and the achievements we would like to reach and agreed on a powerful common basis for our project. Our common motivation for this project is the fear that pollution will lead to the destruction of human’s place on earth. We would like to focus on the problem plastic causes to the environment because it is a part of every day’s life of nearly every person with a direct contribution to environmental pollution. Therefore, a campaign can have a great impact. The sea creatures are a vital part of our campaign because they provide an important ecosystem service and they are the innocent victims of human’s selfishness. Humans have a choice, but they don’t.

• Get started and foster individual and common responsibility We decided on starting the project in a structured way according to the design thinking process, with secondary research. For this, we brainstormed areas that required a more detailed understanding, split up the research amongst all team members and agreed on a date to present the findings to each other. . What is the plastic problem, what impact does it have on the oceans and sea creatures? . Why do people prefer to use plastic? Why is it so cheap? . Which campaigns are there already around this topic? . What is the life cycle of a plastic bag and how does it end up in the ocean? . What is the importance of animals for the ecosystem and what is the importance of the ocean for human survival on earth?

• Plan the process and control its compliance After this first research we will set up a project plan with more detailed to-dos and milestones and we will decide on a target group for the campaign.

• Get inspired and create new ideas For this, we collected ideas already of shops we could visit and movies we could watch. But, until now, no concrete appointments have been made to put these ideas into action.

Besides this, we collected our first ideas of how to tackle the challenge, but we agreed to go into the ideation phase after the research to base the ideas on profound reasoning and hopefully useful insights.

In retrospective I am very glad that everyone in the team appreciated the suggestion to bring a structure to the first meeting. Also, we all agreed on the steps to be taken, especially to start with defining our motivation, which was highlighted the same day in a lecture as well and to do some research before starting with the ideation. Especially the motivated and engaged team spirit was fun and everyone was willing to take over responsibility in the group which made the splitting up of tasks easy.

For the next meeting the set-up of a project plan and the distribution of further roles is my focus.

Reference List:

Nielsen Norman Group (1998-2019) Design Thinking 101. Available at: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/design-thinking/ (Accessed: 26 January 2019).