Day of Service projects for graduate project management certificate

From left to right: Lauren Howard, project sponsor; project management certificate student Wan-Yu Lee; Dr. April Reed; and project management student Christopher Cates. 

College of Business project management certificate (graduate online) students making up six teams provided approximately 150 hours in the spring ’21 term to help the ECU Purple Pantry plan three separate projects. The Purple Pantry is a food pantry on the ECU campus whose purpose is reducing food insecurity to ECU students. The pantry opened in spring 2018 and continues to grow.

The project management students used skills learned in the courses to help the sponsor, Lauren Howard, with three projects she wanted to execute this year. Howard is the assistant director of Leadership and Service Learning in the center for leadership and civic engagement and oversees the Purple Pantry. Additionally, the ECU Project Management Office provided three of their project managers to serve as mentors to the six COB teams for these projects.

The projects involved moving the pantry location, expansion of the pantry and a marketing plan for the pantry. As the sponsor, Howard provided documentation and met with the students for requirements gathering and project updates.

“The goal of the Day of Service Project assignment was to give the students real-life experience using their skills to plan a project,” said Dr. April Reed, associate professor, management information systems, College of Business.

Working in teams after meeting with the sponsor, they initially provided her with a project overview document, i.e., the Project charter. Additional meetings allowed the students to create a requirements document that identified all of the key items, restrictions and goals for each project. The requirements document served as a guide to meeting success criteria for each project.  Since all projects run into roadblocks, each team provided a document identifying potential risks and solutions. Finally, near the end of the project, the student teams provided a detailed schedule for completing each project using Microsoft Project. Teams met to identify lessons learned and then made presentations to the sponsor to finish off the projects.

Jeff Buck works on Purple Pantry project management certificate project

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