My Experience as a Project Manager

As a teacher at Totem Middle School, I have seen a lot of change over the last couple of years.  Four years ago, TMS was named a priority school, meaning that our state test scores fell into the bottom 5% of the state.  As a priority school, the school received a grant that was intended to help turn the school around.  Through the grant, the school was able to extend the learning day, provide after school tutoring for those in need, and bring in programs that provided teachers with data about their students and help students improve academically.  

My group was asked to document this transition by creating a video presentation that showed the transformation of the school, what new programs were implemented and how they improved students’ ability to grow as learners.  We were asked to create several short 2 to 4 minute videos in which we interviewed both teachers and students, learning about each program and discussing how each of them improved the educational experiences of the students.  

As the teacher and project manager of this group, I broke up the videos between 3 different groups of students.  I place an individual student to be in charge of each group and allowed them to schedule and interview the teachers and students on their own.

The client for this project was actually the school district.  Most visibly the school’s principal was the lead client who had the final say of what was to be shot and how it was presented., But he of course still had to answer to the school district and was expected to share this with them, so that they could show it to the school board and state and national educational associations to show the growth found at the middle school over the last couple of years.

When meeting with the client, the principal, I discussed the expectation of the project and asked for a detailed description for what he wanted.  The principal was very lackadaisical and said that he was sure that with my background in video, I would be able to come up with something he liked.  Not entirely pleased with this response, I asked for more information about each program and tried to develop a plan for the videos and how they would look.

Each group produced, high quality videos that showed the students growth through the programs provided by the school, but also showed the growth of my students  over the long year of video production class.  The videos were visibly pleasant, had quality audio plus a music bed, and included graphics that helped support the information that was being shared.

As I’m sure you could guess, with unclear direction from the client, it was going to be difficult to surely meet the needs of the client and produce a video that would make the client happy.  

Some of the most glaring issues of the videos where actually the interviews themselves.  Since the questions were developed my middle schoolers, they did not have the academic feeling that the client was expecting and thus did not get the indepth answers that he was looking for.  Secondly, since I have had different groups creating different videos and I didn’t set parameters that they would have to meet, the videos did not have a similar feel because they were shot and edited in different ways.  With all of these, issues, I found myself having to rework nearly all of the project, allowing the videos to have a common feel to them.

If I was to do the project again I would definitely had done a number different things that could have kept us from having to rework the project.  First of I all I would have demanded that the client be more decisive when it came to the project itself.  I would have had him develop his own questions for the interviews so that they received the answers he was looking for.  Secondly, I would have grouped my workers differently.  Having one group shoot the interviews, one group shoot the b-roll, and another group edit the videos.  This would allow more continuity between the videos, thus giving them a similar look and feel and making them easier to watch from video to video.  By following these steps, the project could have been finished on time and presented to the school board before the end of the school year.