Planning the Event
Here is a six step checklist to help you plan your event......
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Defining and Agreeing the
Project This first step requires the vision for the project or event to be written down, and agreed in principle by whoever needs to agree it eg. the church council. Whilst it will be very much in outline, it should be reasonably specific. A three sentence structure may help - firstly defining the goal, "the aim", then "what will happen" and thirdly "how it will feel". Here's an example, "We want the whole community to celebrate the Millennium as the birthday of Jesus. By running a street party in each neighbourhood, and inviting every household, we aim to create a real feeling of celebration and community spirit." |
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Gathering a Project Team Unless the project or event is small, it's going to need more than one person to run it. A Project Team may sound rather formal, but can empower people to feel they share in the project, and can be useful in communicating the idea throughout the whole church community. For more details on building effective team relationships, look at our module "Effective Teams". |
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Getting the Scope Right At this stage we need to start taking some tough decisions. How big can the project be? What's the likely budget implications? Can we afford this? What's it going to be like? Taking the earlier example, this phase will consider how broad an area will be covered, whether the street parties can be subsidised, what the publicity budget will be, and other areas. It will end by preparing a more detailed proposal, often including a budget submission for agreement by the church council or other authorities. |
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Detailed Planning What needs to be done? By when, and by whom? These three questions are the core of the detailed planning phase. It's probably best to first of all break the project down into major steps or areas, and then move onto sub-divide. This will help the project team get a good overview first, and avoid getting bogged down with one area of detail. A written checklist can ensure that everyone is clear what they need to do, and the timings required. |
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Monitor and Review Subsequent team meetings will often use this checklist as the base, updating it as each team member gives a progress update. New tasks will need to be added as issues arise, and as others are completed. For a longer project, these review meetings may generate "Project Updates" to keep the rest of the church, and the church council informed of progress. |
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Resolving Issues It's inevitable that issues will arise. One key function of the project team is to try to predict these, and work together to avoid issues getting too big. This will require good team collaboration, and for members to be open in sharing the pitfalls with each other in a constructive way. It can be helpful for Step Three, the Scoping phase, to include some clarification of how much authority can be delegated to the Project Team. This can allow them to make progress, without always having to refer back to the Minister or Church Council. The resolving of issues is one of the key areas that will make the difference between the event being a superb success, and being OK. There have been many events affected by unresolved issues which lead to the event being second best. Resolving issues does not mean that the project team always get what they want. Rather, it leads to the reason behind the request being fully satisfied by either the orginal, or an alternative solution.. |
