PM Network - August 2009

Keep It Local Teddy Bogdanski, a 16- year-old student living in Madison, New Jersey, USA, needed a project to achieve Eagle Scout status—but he didn’t want to do the same old thing. “Most Eagle Scout projects involve park benches or mulch,” he says. “I wanted to do something that was fun and out of the ordinary.” As fate would have it, his neighbor, Mary-Anna Holden, just happens to be the mayor of Madison. And at the time, she needed some help with a fledgling IT project.

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PHOTO COURTESY OF STACEY MCEVOY/INDEPENDENT PRESS

WHIZ KID

Ms. Holden had pitched a project to create a digital model of Madison for Google Earth, but the US$40,000 bids were far outside her budget. Enter the boy wonder. In September 2008, Ms. Holden put Mr. Bogdanski in touch with Bruce Polderman, product manager at Google Earth, who was intrigued by the project and its leader. “I’d never seen someone that age with that kind of ambition,” he says.

$The price tag for the project came in under

US$100—and

that was for

refreshments.

“

Teddy Bogdanski

THE GLUE In the end, Madison gets its spot on Google Earth while Mr. Bogdanski earns his badge— and picks up a new skill. “I have a lot of respect for project management,” he says. “The technology is just a component. The checklists, goals and project planning are the glue that holds it all together.”

I learned that good

communication is

vital when you are

running a big project,

and that you need to

do proper planning

and set clear goals

and expectations to

be successful. And

when you run into

unexpected situations,

you just have to deal

with them.

”

BUILDING UP

To get Google to help, Mr. Bogdanski says he had to “make drastic readjustments to my project plan”—jumping from 12 buildings to 65. In exchange, the company sent Mr. Polderman and two trainers, free of charge, to help.

MODEL BEHAVIOR

Taking on the role of project manager, Mr. Bogdanski first recruited his team, which included everyone from students to a licensed architect. The city’s IT manager was also brought in to handle technical support.

All of the 25 volunteers agreed to donate three consecutive nine-hour Saturdays in February 2009 to modeling sessions at the local school’s computer lab, which Mr. Bogdanski had secured as a project site. And he even pulled in his parents to pass out refreshments.

“He lined up everything,” marvels Mr. Polderman. “We walked in and there were sign-up sheets, the town was broken down by buildings, and each building was already assigned based on the expertise of the volunteers.”