To Weed Or Not To Weed

A post-project review is an important step when closing out a project, providing insight on causes of poor performance and unmet expectations as well as identifying effective methods and practices. While individual reflection is valuable, Russell (2000) writes, “Knowledge management occurs when project teams reflect on their project experiences together, transform that knowledge as their experiences are vocalized and exchanged, and create new knowledge through action plans for the future” (p. 92). 

I will conduct and provide an accounting for a post-project review of my home gardening efforts from this summer. This project is worthy of review because of several variables introduced this year and the fact that I was not particularly satisfied with the outcomes. The following background information will provide a point of reference. I am an avid gardener and maintain a vegetable garden, strawberry and raspberry patch, and several flower gardens. I considered not planting this year or limiting my efforts due to a heavy workload on the job and with my graduate studies. However, I ended up planting my full repertoire and added a new wildflower garden I had been planning for a while. This year, several unique influencing factors contributed to my decisions, successes, and unexpected failures with my gardening project. Some of these influences include my son’s high school graduation prompting my wife to insist upon the flower gardens, a severe drought in southwest Michigan, and the disabling of my sprinkler system due to road construction. 

My post-project review has revealed several factors contributing to both successes and failures. The first factor was the classic scope creep that Portny et al (2008) describes as present in all projects. The flower gardens for the graduation party were an essential as was maintaining the strawberries and raspberries.  However, allowing my wife and daughter to convince me to plant tomatoes, cucumbers, and zucchini in what was supposed to be a vacant vegetable garden this year along with my own ill-advised additions of vegetables and a new flower garden was a grave mistake that contributed to multiple failures. One positive experience was the decision to use wood chips for weed control, which was tremendously successful and will prove useful in future years. 

The combination of a drought, disabled sprinkler system, and an overextended project scope contributed to significant damage of my strawberries and raspberries. In an effort to maintain watering of the yard, flowers, and vegetable garden, I completely neglected the strawberries and raspberries, which suffered stress due to water depravation and overgrown with weeds. Eventually I became demoralized and gave up maintaining the entire project.  Portny et al (2008) warns that team members will become disillusioned with a project if they do not believe it will be successful. 

I have taken away several important lessons from this year’s gardening project. When expanding the scope of a project ensure you have sufficient resources to complete the additional work. When my wife and daughter suggested including some vegetables, I should have negotiated their assistance with the additional workload. Further, water is a critical resource to gardening and contingency planning to ensure sufficient resources are available is prudent. Identifying and deploying efficiency improvements will help control resource usage; in my case, the wood chips reduced my weeding workload. Finally, if a project gets out of control, it may cause long-term and possibly irreversible damage.


References

Portny, S. E., Mantel, S. J., Meredith, J. R., Shafer, S. M., Sutton, M. M., & Kramer, B. E. (2008). Project management: Planning, scheduling, and controlling projects. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Russell, L. (2000). Project management for trainers. Alexandria, VA: ASTD Press.