I thought that planning a project for passing exams would be too boring, so instead I chose to give them an opportunity to take a peek at life from an unusual perspective.
Building began from an unfamiliar to children question: imagine yourself in 5 or 10 years. Describe an outcome of your activity in this period.
What you achieved, where are you, what are you doing, etc.
It hasn’t been an easy thing to do. Try it yourself.
They were falling into describing personal condition, like: I am a famous doctor, or I finished university.
Though the last one matches the description, but misses the period 5 or 10 years.
It took us 20 minutes to resolve this, and “I am a famous doctor”, transformed into, “The patients I treat have a second chance”.
This looks like an outcome of an activity, which is great, but not enough.
How can we achieve it? What critical factors are playing a role in it?
That means the next logical step has been to describe them. And here again we face another issue.
We are using abstract verbs and collocations. Like I am professional of a good doctor.
Which is good, but leads nowhere.
At this point, I explained to them the difference between good verbs and bad ones.
With some effort, we were able to complete this step and formulated at least one good CSF.
But goal and CSF are only useful, if they lead to the next action, which is the whole point of this exercise.
To give children understanding that the bigger the task, the harder to get to the right first step.
In a sense, it’s the same principle as two previous steps have, be careful with formulation, avoid everything abstract and keep your eyes and ears open to logical gaps, which is also an important point, as it proves another crucial thing.
Logic in project management is critical to a successful outcome of a project.
