Note to Not-for-Profits:
Make Good
Use of
Volunteers
Not-for-profits may not have
giant budgets, but they do
have a resource that makes
for-profit organizations envious: volunteer labor. The problem is that volunteer management takes time and effort to
do well. Many not-for-profit
project managers, stretched
thin and short-staffed, find
themselves too busy to make
good use of volunteers.
Ms. White, a former PMI
Board member, recommends
writing volunteer handbooks
with complete job descriptions, and then interviewing
prospective volunteers to
match them with appropriate opportunities and explain
expectations that accompany
the position.
It’s a lot of work, she
acknowledges, but the result
can be a set of highly skilled,
dedicated workers who are
donating their time. When
Ms. White manages projects
with volunteers, she factors in
the approximate per-hour replacement value of the labor
provided by volunteers, to
better quantify their impact.
quickly. Leverage what you have: your passions and your determination. Allow
your vendors to empathize with you—it is key to saving costs.”
2) Maintain the team’s focus—every day.
So much of good project management is about smart planning, intense focus
on goals and daily discipline—not money. Startups and not-for-profit teams
without contingency funds to handle unexpected challenges can look to agile
approaches, such as a daily Scrum meeting, to keep things on track.
“Spend 10 to 15 minutes every morning with
your team in a stand-up meeting, looking at
the work that’s been done, that’s in progress
and that needs to be done, focusing on today’s
priorities and near-term priorities,” says Karen
R.J. White, PMP, PMI Fellow, author of
Practical Project Management for Agile Nonprofits and
adjunct professor at Marlboro College Center for
Graduate and Professional Studies, Brattleboro,
Vermont, USA.
“You can do that by standing in front of
a visual portrayal of the project’s sched-
ule, with a flipchart or whiteboard
handy. Use sticky notes placed on
the schedule to mark the status of
each component. Issues are captured on the
flipchart,” Ms. White says. “Any issues that arise
should be taken up outside the meetings. If you
do that, you’ll be surprised how quickly you can
update a project’s schedule status.”
Bostjan Bregar, CEO of The 4th Office, a London, England-based maker
of cloud-based collaboration software, says organizations’ biggest challenge
is focusing resources on what is most critical for success. That doesn’t mean
stifling innovation and adaptation, but it does mean limiting changes to stay
within the project’s established scope. “Empowerment, agility and creativity
must be harnessed within an organized structure that helps teams stay focused
on what is important,” Mr. Bregar says.
“Spend 10 to 15
minutes every
morning with your
team in a stand-up
meeting, looking
at the work that’s
been done, that’s in
progress and that
needs to be done.”
—Karen R.J. White, PMP, PMI Fellow,
Marlboro College Center for Graduate
and Professional Studies, Brattleboro,
Vermont, USA
