For the first session, we had Mr. Meas Chandy as our mentor for this course. He started the class by talking about the introduction of project management. I remember what he said like he raised up the real example to let us gain idea and consider about our plan as we need to do better and faster for our fruitful achievement in this competitive and challenging society. Come back to our topic, if everyone sees the word ‘to do better and faster’ it is the key word that we should deliver in practicing and in setting plan of our project.  According to what mentor mentioned, there are five basic steps of project management:

1. Define the project and scope goal: What is the problem? And why we raise it up as the concern? And how the project can deal with it? It is about studying the root of problem, and what should be the most effective solution? It requires discussion, researching, and planning before we can design a project. After we got all the information of problem, we have to start with project planning and point out our objectives. Next, scope our project target. We have to know the profile of our stakeholder.
2. Outline: In this step the researcher has to figure out the project purpose and make it small and specific. Moreover, we can expect to success in running project as we have no too big or complicated target to deal with and to give enough time and more effort on each objective.
3. Schedule resources: It is important to make sure that you have enough resource either in budget or human resource to support the conduct of project management. Project management team can seek for fund and support by sending the proposal to NGOs, Government, or private sector three months before running the project is a must.
4. Structure or Projector: who will involve with us in running the project? Can this project be done by our institution alone or requires any corporation from others in which can be NGOs, or Government? In projector, it is necessary to know about our member, partnership, leader and so on.
5. Monitor and Evaluation: the last step for us in planning before going to take action. Since the monitor runs as the main role in analyzing the topic, checking, correcting, and feedback on project planning.

 

In the term of what we have seen above, so why we need project management? To answer this question, Mr. Phan Socheat who is our second mentor of today class stated that we can set our expectations on what we are going to deliver, it helps us to define what activities our team will perform to reach the goal, it will help us to effectively generate our plan, to manage the cost, and respond to what should be done and what should have changed for more impact. This is a new knowledge and difficult course which I have never learned before, yet I try to catch up and understand. The most interesting point of the topic was LFA Matrix which is the concern case during conducting the project. Actually, we can say that we might know the definition of project management which is the application of knowledge, skill, tool, and methodology. But it’s much more than that in reality, rather than just a word “to manage the project”, it is how we can run and manage it successfully. And of course I learned the answer to this question which are LogFrame, Monitor and Evaluation, and Budget. I would like to state more details about LogFrame which includes five elements: Goal, Objective, Output, Outcome, and Input. Opp, I almost forgot one thing, does anyone know the meaning of Logical Framework Analysis? Let me explain: it is the key management tool in each phase of the project cycle used for systematic planning, implementing, monitoring, and evaluating projects.

Well, It’s all for today, I would like to respect my genius to the advisor board of CaMSafe, the coordinators, and mentors who had spent their valuable time with us since the first week we met. I am really satisfied to be here and hopefully in catching up all the prioritized things we did, we shared together. To conclude, I would like to suggest to the organizers, please kindly set some strict policy for us on how we work on group assignment. Since now we have three groups of doing research and we almost finalized the last draft. I hope everyone has commitment in doing, open mind to accept others ideas, and has more communication with each other. It would be great if we work together as a team with very strong team spirit. I really hope to have a friendly environment when we work together in the following projects. Last but not least, I want to say that I have learnt a lot of new things both in hard and soft skill every single week from the classes of CaMSafe Youth Capacity Building Training 2017 that I had attended. Proudly to say that I promise to use all of my knowledge, likewise to bring all of my abilities to engage myself in running project and to share this fruitful outcome to the next generation within the society. As a Cambodian youth, I always wish to see my country to be full of human resource and we all are willing to involve in developing our society. There are more things that we can do to develop our country, I will start with learning and then sharing, or more than that I will involve in project which can help to deal with social issues. So how about you?