Wednesday, August 15, 2007

The Team Sarcoma Starter Kit

When I first started planning my work for the Liddy Shriver Sarcoma Iniative, I envisioned using my project management skills to create a formalized project plan for a defined, repeatable process for conducting a team sarcoma. The week in Vermont taught me that the PM approach was doomed before it began. If the folks in Vermont represented our target audience, which they did, it was clear they would run screaming from anything that looked like more work for them, and nothing looks more like work than a Work Breakdown Structure. What the heck I was thinking?

What I learned in VT was of the "can't put into words" variety, but it resulted in a total restructuring of the Plan into a user-friendly "Team Sarcoma Starter Kit". The new name and organization of the material is designed to be easy to use by a busy person who isn't necessarily interested in spending a lot of time on their team, but wants to make what time they do spend as profitable as possible. It facilitates delegating of tasks among team members as one person can offer to take on creating flyers based on the templates provided and another can focus on the media contacts. If the team is only one person, that person can pick and choose which activities to do and get off to a running start with them. There are placeholders for the Shrivers to add information that fall in their area of expertise (ex "How to Approach Cancer Centers.doc"). They can also ask current Team Sarcoma leaders of different types of events to contribute to the kit and insert that in a logically arranged way. The goal is to make it easier for the Shrivers to recruit new team leaders and reduce the amount of time managing the teams takes, as they expect to have more and larger teams in the future. So, here's the high-level outline of Version One of the disk that I sent to Bruce last week. I've volunteered to coordinate the addition of new material in order to have the Kit ready to give out when Team Sarcoma 2008 kicks off, around March. Double-click to enlarge the image.


Thanks for reading my blog!
~ Elizabeth

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