Meet Gary Aziz …
Gary is a Bunjalung man and the owner of the Green Leaf Cafe in inner Brisbane which specialises in indigenous vegetarian ‘bush tucker’. He and his wife Rena have owned the café for five years and have a permanent team of five staff including three chefs and two produce growers. They have 15-20 casual staff they need to manage who include part-time students. They rent a large garden plot from which they source most of their produce. They also have an arrangement to source indigenous food ingredients, organic milk and cheese from boutique farmers outside Brisbane.
The Green Leaf Café is hoping to expand and as a result Gary and others in the team have been focusing on project managing new initiatives. This includes increasing customer awareness, expanding into providing catering services to corporate clients, overseeing the design and building of new facilities including a larger eating premises, refurbished food preparation areas and building new cool rooms and refrigeration.
Gary's duties include:
- confirming the quality of project outcomes according to expectations of the Green Leaf Café
- consulting and communicating with relevant stakeholders and team members to generate their input and engagement in planning, implementing and reviewing the projec
- providing support to Green Leaf café team members involved in a project to achieve their deliverables and to transition them back to their normal work duties after the project has finished.
As one of the owners Gary is often responsible for signing off project documentation as the delegating authority.
In this module, you will learn the skills and knowledge that enable Gary to perform his role relating to undertaking project work:
- Establish project parameters
- Develop project plan
- Administer and monitor project
- Finalise and review project.
There will be opportunities for you to develop your knowledge and skills throughout the module, so you are ready for your assessment. This includes looking at Green Leaf Café policies and procedures relating to undertaking project work.
Let us begin by asking Gary the following three questions
Gary responds:
We have plans to expand and want to increase customer awareness, so we are currently running two projects to help us do this. The first is a series of advertisements on local radio, the second is creating a social media profile. We also have plans to move into other markets, including extending our footprint into corporate catering. This is a big move and along with recruiting more people it will mean several projects over the next 12 months to enable the expansion. We have several exciting projects on the boil including overseeing the design and building of new facilities in Brisbane so we can cater for more walk-by customers. At the same time, we are going to completely refurbish the food preparation areas to allow us to prepare vegan meals and products. Down the track we hope to enter into a partnership to service aged care facilities which from my own experience do not cater as well as they can for the growing number of residents who are vegetarian.
Gary responds:
Firstly, people management skills. Although I am usually the ‘delegating authority’ for projects because I approve the budgets and sign off on project reports and so on, there are occasions when I am not around, especially as the business expands. In some of our projects (especially the larger more complex projects) I am not always available and cannot be present when each task is being accomplished by the team members. Therefore, I need people with skills to accomplish the tasks with minimum supervision. The various tasks in a project are done by team members with skills and expertise that fit the tasks.
Secondly, planning and organising skills. I need to be able to develop and implement plans to manage projects that can involve diverse stakeholders and they will often have competing demands. There is a lot of decision-making that goes into undertaking project work so we need to be able to systematically gather and analyse information and evaluate options to make informed decisions that will make the project a success and help us achieve our gaols.
Gary responds:
We follow a standard approach to project management based on the Australian Institute of Project Management (AIPM) guidelines and standards. However, we have adapted some of the project planning documentation including the project scope and project plan templates to suit our projects.
Regardless of the type and size of the project we always start with identifying our project scope, because this allows us to establish an overall plan for implementing a project. At the same time, we identify and get to know the stakeholders. This may be an external consultant, local government or planning authorities. In other cases, the stakeholder may be a corporate client. This is a critical step and one that people will overlook especially in smaller projects. However, speaking from experience including some projects that failed, getting all the team members and stakeholders on the same page is important and can make or break a project.
