Part One: Developing a Strategic Plan

Coordinating your Project

Hiring a strong project coordinator (PC) is key to the success of the project. They will collect, organize, measure, and visualize project outputs to meet efficient project timeline requirements (e.g. reporting). Their primary role is to communicate the story behind the data.

How-To

Here is a step-by-step process for coordinating your project.

Step 1

Hire a Project Coordinator.

Step 2

Thoroughly review the project goal(s); start with the project proposal and generate key questions that support the project’s overarching goals.

Step 3

Build a strategic work plan (SWP) to facilitate evaluation and create appropriate measures.

Step 4

Work with the Project Manager to build a team, develop a set of deliverables and timelines, and distribute project responsibilities.

Step 5

Hold weekly project team meetings to discuss the above – ensuring the strategy and accompanying responsibilities are clear – and rework as needed.

As with any new project and process, there are unforeseen challenges. We aim to share the challenges we met and the lessons we learned as a result.

Lessons Learned

Ensure that data is organized and aligned with reporting requirements. This makes it much easier to present information and prepare the report.

Tips

Hire a project coordinator who can pioneer data. Support team hiring was delayed until the project started to gain some momentum. Start early!
Ask yourself: what outputs have been executed, what committees/teams are involved in this project, and who is responsible for each output?
What are the current project needs and challenges, and what is the timeline?
What information is needed to report to your funding agency? For our project, it was imperative we kept track of the number of people reached (e.g. # of people trained, webinar attendees, social media followers, etc.) and the number of outputs (# of markets attended, collateral, and educational presentations, etc.)

Resources

Throughout The Stronger Together Project, we produced various resources that may be helpful to other organizations.