Teachable Moments: Project Management Tackles the Mountains

Anatoly has been a project manager since 2000 and is the founder of Expedition Project Management. In 2003, he obtained his certification and received a master's degree in project management. He has conducted more than 20 Microsoft EPM deployments in Ukraine and the CIS. Throughout his entire career he has applied his consulting expertise to complete more than 10 projects in the fields of construction, industry, IT and software development.

 

Teachable moments are formed when you have done something--regardless of the outcome--and learned from the experience. Learning makes us better at what we do and provides a great opportunity to develop others and sharpen skills. We’ve compiled our best Teachable Moments from our community members for you to learn from and share with other project managers.

The Independence Day of Ukraine was drawing near and my team and I wanted to spend the holiday not just boozing, but profitably and interesting. The first constraint of the project was simply the term of the expedition and the duration of our preparation for it. The second constraint we took was a shortage of mountain altitude, so we chose Musala Mount, the highest point of Bulgaria. Finally, our third constraint was guided solely by our greed--we had to meet the limited budget of $300 a piece.

We started the kickoff meeting as any competent project managers would--by studying the lessons learned from our last project. With just a month to organize our ascent, we quickly created our Project Charter, Expedition Procurement Management Plan and Expedition Communications Management Plan.

Then we focused on the schedule of the expedition preparation. The main stages were:

• The logistics of purchasing of the tickets to Kyiv-Sofia-Kyiv
• Prepare the documents for …

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