EXECUTIVE SUMMARY (ABSTRACT)
The Social Development Commission (SDC) is the principal community organization agency working with Jamaica’s seven hundred and seventy-five (775) communities.
One of the focus areas of the SDC is the Priority Planning & Project Development Programme which is a systematic process used to engage communities in determining and defining immediate, short and long-term priority issues such as community safety and youth inclusion and remedial activities that effect immediate change to an ongoing challenge.
These projects aim to improve community participation in their own development, governance, and economic prosperity through capacity building, networking and building partnerships and direct support. This project looked at the current practices, what guided the current practices, identified any gaps that existed and what recommendations could be made for aligning the gaps to PM standards, where they do not yet exist through the development of a project management methodology suitable for social development projects.
Jamaica has a national development plan to get to first world status by the year 2030. This plan is known as Vision 2030 and includes several development areas. The end goal is to have Jamaica be the place of choice for people to live, do business and raise families.
The individual participation and buy-in of citizens are crucial to this process. The Social Development Commission of Jamaica is one of the chief government agencies used to achieve the goals through the development of community projects.
The organization has an existing framework for project development but none for project management. It was, therefore, important to develop a methodology that could be easily used by the agency and community leaders to increase project success and thereby further the mandate of the organization.
It was important to establish a project methodology for social projects as not a lot of materials exist that speaks to project management in the SDC and social projects in general. Project management is traditionally common to the technology and construction industries and especially in the context of limited resources and time constraints.
The general objective of this Final Graduation Project is to develop a project management methodology framed within the standards of the Project Management Institute to manage the integrated community and local economic development strategy for the Social Development Commission (SDC) of Jamaica.
The specific objectives were: to evaluate the current practices and project management methodologies in use at the SDC, to develop a project management methodology to be utilized in social development projects of the SDC, to create adaptive tools and templates to support the implementation of project management in communities by the SDC and to create a one-day training guide to utilizing the proposed methodology.
The methodology for this research was exploratory and semi-structured interviews were performed after which the data were analyzed to identify the extent of the knowledge of the community development officers about project management. Document analyses were also performed with the existing official documentation of the organization. This informed the development of the components of the methodology inclusive of processes, project documents, and strategies for integration into the existing system of the SDC.
The results of the research were presented using charts, tables that explain the current practices and project management methodologies in use at the SDC, the SDC project management methodology developed, the templates and tools developed and the one-day training guide created.
The results obtained from unstructured interviews and document reviews indicated that the SDC has an existing project management methodology that was not very effective. A SDC Project Management Methodology was developed to address the shortcomings in the methodology of the SDC while accommodating the organizational structure.
To standardize project execution, twelve templates were developed. In order to ensure how the methodology works a comprehensive description was developed detailing the core ideas and how the proposed methodology works. This was followed up by a one-day training guide for the organization.
To the end it was recommended that the training developed be embedded in organizational approach to projects and that there is consistent use of relevant project documents.
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