I just returned from my cousin's wedding dinner. Usual ceremony, same "rituals" and some idiosyncratic highlights during the event of course. Best part of it was I unexpectedly met some old school friends like Bryan Gan, Yau Chong and Alex. It's being really long time since I last spoke to them. One good thing about attending a wedding dinner huh, :)
The main thing I want to say in this post is about defining a wedding as a project, more specifically a Profitable Project. You may already heard from many of your relatives, friends and colleagues who got married about making a handsome monetary gain after helding up their wedding dinner. The myth is "Is it really that easy to make a profit out of it?"
There are some fundamental issues when you try to figure out the answer for this question. First of all, we don't have the luxury of historical data at our disposal to support our arguments. Even if the data do exists, it may be difficult to obtain approval to access them because couples want to keep them private and confidential. Common data quality issues definitely will cripple your analysis.
Nonetheless, you still can manage your wedding like a project. A project is restricted by all kinds of constraints as outlined in the PMBOK, mainly time, cost and resources constraints. Making estimations in this case is not easy since most of us don't have prior experiences in projects of such natures nor we have access to quality past projects information from other parties. This constitutes a significant project risk and it must be mitigated by having a robust plan and effective communications between all the project stakeholders to ensure that their expectations are aligned.
Assuming ideal scenario after the project completion, we don't need to perform the project again in our lifetime. By standing still with this critical assumption, we must define our profitability KPI. What will be the reasonable achievable profit target? 10% from the project budget? Maybe 20%?
You can perform the normal NPV, IRR and ROI analysis on your forecast cashflows but the analysis must not include benefits too far into the future because such inclusions might distorts your analysis and you might be tempted to allocate unnecessarily more money to finance your wedding. Be realistic and pragmatic.
Draw a gantt chart to identify your WBS and make sure that the gantt chart is updated from time to time. Keep an eye on milestones and critical paths to avoid possible pitfalls in your plan.
Ok, enough for now. Not sure when I will have the mood to write Part Two. :p
2 comments:
what needed most in a project handling still experience, no matter what kind of data u have to back u up, scientific research bla bla bla... so, advise to all, if u really want a profitable wedding dinner, get married a few times and learn from your experience and i'm sure ur wedding dinner will be more profitable from 1 to another!! cheers!!! but may be not... if i received a wedding invitation from a same person for a few times, i may not be attending lol.. hahah, so after all, you can only tell if its profitable after you experienced it!!
LOL.
I already explicitly specify the assumption that the "project manager" only need to manage this kind of project ONCE. So, repetitively trial and error to experience the profitability of such project is not an option. Sorry, bro :p.
Even so, if you really going ahead down the route of doing it multiple times, you can't be sure that your wedding dinner(s) is profitable because without a rigorous and scientific methodology to measure, monitor, control and evaluate the numbers, you might be misleaded to a wrong conclusion. Don't you think so?
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