Staking A Claim on Project Management - 5KPM Project Management For Road Racing

Finally, the first meeting of the Project Management Certification course occurred this past Saturday. It put a very real voice to what I’ve been reading and learning about. It was just the day earlier than I finished the PMBOK®Guide for the second time. That’s right, I’ve read it twice, and am on my third go. The first time was just to familiarize myself with the concepts. The second was to actually highlight important and useful aspects. The third reading will be to continue reinforcement of the material, study for my eventual PMP Certification, and continue to apply the tools and techniques to the Closter 5k project through the 5KPM blog site.

With all that going on, including the start of week three at my new job, I thought this week’s post would be a little lighter than some prior posts and write a short piece about Stakeholder Management. After all, it’s where the PMBOK®Guide finishes, so the subject dovetails nicely with finishing my second reading.

In fact, it's almost as if I want to do stakeholder management planning with alongside the charter and the project scope. I know there are so many moving parts that one will inform the other but It's almost as if stakeholder management should come first. Ok, it can’t quite come first as the stakeholders are grown and identified as the project grows.

The actual stakeholder register isn’t something that will be published here as a part of the 5KPM - Project Management For Road Racing project. The privacy of my fellow volunteers won’t be made public. But the alignment of responsibilities can be published, albeit with anonymized names in the top line of the matrix.

RACI Chart	MD	SM	JO	DB	ES
Charter	I	C	R	I	I
Registration	I	R	I	I	I
Marketing	R	R	I	I	I
Shirts	A	A	C	R	C
Volunteers	A	A	I	I	R
Payments	A	A	R	I	I

Key: (Responsible, Accountable, Consult, Inform)

It’s here that the different roles within the project of conducting September’s 5k can be defined. For instance, MD is responsible for marketing. As one of the other race directors, MD is responsible for marketing the event, and accountable for much more. But MD isn’t involved in the 5KPM project. And I (SM) almost single handedly deal with the registration side of the event.

This was an interesting exercise in figuring not just who has to do what task to make the event run smoothly, but how those volunteers who are only responsible for their little area don’t have to be involved in the width and breadth of the event.