The School Bus Initiative: A Lesson in the Power of Projects

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Organizational Culture  

This article is inspired by a radio ad that I recently heard. (There’s a sentence I never expected to write.) I was in the car when a commercial came on for one of the local school boards. I was expecting it to be informing people that they still had spaces open for the new school year, and inviting parents to register their kids. But it was something quite different.

It was informing parents that the board had arranged a session at one of the area schools for before the new year started. It was aimed at children who had never taken a school bus before, and was designed to help them become familiar with the process. Kids and parents were invited to meet the drivers, get a tour of the buses being used, and learn about the different processes to keep everyone safe.

Maybe it’s a common thing in some areas, but this is the first time that I had come across anything like it—and it struck me as an excellent idea.

Every project matters
This simple event was a great example of how projects can make a real difference—and how they don’t have to be massive endeavors to achieve that. I don’t know how much work went into organizing this preview, nor what the budget was, but it wouldn’t have been massive. (The local radio station donates air time to community causes, and this probably fell under that.)

The endeavor would only have been a…

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