Assume you work for a small electronics organization. You have just been asked by your division manager, Noah Tolk, to organize a two-day, off-site, year-in-review and “what’s next” management retreat. The division manager has explained that he hopes the retreat will accomplish the following goals:
· Provide an opportunity to celebrate recent accomplishments.
· Enhance community and interdepartmental cooperation within the organization.
· Provide time and space, without distraction, to focus on big-picture issues facing the organization.
· Increase managers’ ideas about, understanding of, and buy-in to a set of strategic initiatives for the coming year.
Noah is concerned that a lack of interdepartmental cooperation and understanding is causing delays in customer service, compromising the organization’s ability to get new products to market, and, in general, limiting the organization’s performance.
Approximately 25 managers will attend the retreat, which is to be held off-site but within driving distance of the company offices. Noah has asked that the program be organized so that there are sessions/activities devoted to the following:
· Highlighting key accomplishments of each area.
· Gathering input to shape next year’s divisional strategic initiative.
· Informal team building and energizing the team for the year ahead.
The retreat should occur sometime in the next three months. Resources allocated to the retreat include $15,000 to pay for facilities, materials, and services; two hours per week per project team member; and 20 total hours of administrative time. Noah would like to see a draft plan for the retreat in four weeks and would like a written report two weeks after the retreat. That follow-up report should briefly describe the retreat itself and the project that created it.
Your assignment is to do the following:
1. Identify the project’s intended results (expressed in several sentences), measures (a bulleted list of five to seven key measures), and the challenges likely to arise (a bulleted list of five to seven likely challenges). You can go beyond the situation described above when identifying performance metrics.
2. Identify the three most significant lessons learned from your past project experiences that you feel might be relevant to the retreat project.
3. Put together a closure plan for this project. Your closure plan should include closure activities during the project as well as those at the end of the project.