Through my years with the Red Cross, I have become increasingly involved in bigger and bigger projects. The projects started out small — the first one a coin drive at my school. There weren’t a lot of details we had to keep track of, and we managed to raise approximately $80. This was considered a big success for the first project for a group of 5 youth Red Crossers. After that, we started getting more ambitious: 3-day blood drives, a week of eating disorder awareness projects. Before I knew it, I had managed to get myself so deep into planning projects at the Red Cross, that I was helping organize a National Youth Institute.
Like most people who work on projects with the Red Cross, I learned the usual skills of teamwork, leadership, listening to people, and hard work. But beyond that, I learned how to successfully plan something BIG from beginning to end. You may not realize this, but Project Planning is a skill to be learned. It involves juggling lots of moving people and parts towards an end goal. In the Red Cross, this becomes even more challenging because we are working with people from all over the country who have different lifestyles and abilities.
Most people think of a project as having 3 parts — picking the project, planning the project, and completing the project. I would argue that you should consider a few more steps:
- Recognize a goal.
- Choose a project to meet that goal.
- Plan how you will execute your project.
- Execute your project to achieve your goal.
- Review how you did, so that next time you (or your successors) can do an even better job.
Over the next several months, I will be going into various details about the different aspects of Project Planning and how to be successful in all of your projects, big or small. As you strive to achieve your goals — in the Red Cross and in life — remember that a well planned approach will get you to your goals in style. And I can say, this Red Cross lesson in Project Planning paid off on the biggest day(s) of my life when I managed to work with my family to organize a 4-day “Wedding Extravaganza” with 300 people attending from 13 different countries this past August when I became the very happy Mrs. Stone.
Sohini Stone, Massachusetts
Filed under: Leadership
