On March 28, 2011, guest speaker Cam Kowalski came in to Cyri Jones’ Project Management class. Cam is a lead airspace designer, as well as a security planner who worked as a project manager for the 2010 Vancouver Olympic games and the G8/G20 summits in Huntsville and Toronto Ontario.
As the project manager for these events, Cam was responsible for aspects such as deadlines, human resource management and other day-to-day operations. Some of the key points he emphasized were to understand the task at hand and to understand your working partner’s roles and responsibilities. He said that no matter what it was important to Be the Boss! Sometimes this was not easy as altogether there was about 250 persons who looked to him for guidance and assurance.
Some of the things he and his team worked on was to carefully lay our their plans utilizing pictoral depictions, so that everyone knew their goal, knew where the team was headed as a whole, and were able to follow up on areas that fell through. Many times people would want to point fingers at others but by keeping everything organized and by seperating duties in a concise manner, this was never considered an option.
One thing that I will always remember about Cam’s speech, he noted “Plan for the worst, hope for the best”.
