The Hub’s new Project Management Tool was unveiled at the June 24th webinar. We promised to follow that brief tour of the Tool with this blog and an online forum for projects to share experiences, questions, and ideas for improving and using the Tool. The forum is live and that’s where you’ll find the Tool. The longer term home for the Project Management Tool will be the Resources section of the Hub website, where it will be available in both English and French. Before we have it settle in there, the Hub would like your input to improve the content of the Tool and any guidance on its use.
A few brief reminders about why this Project Management Tool was developed, and how it may be relevant to you:
- The Project Management Tool is one of the Hub’s responses to the findings from our needs assessment with Mental Health Promotion Innovation Fund (MHP-IF) projects. Broadly, all projects are addressing determinants of mental health for children and youth, and the specifics of each project span diverse populations, settings, approaches, and stages of project development. Something was needed to meet any project where they are, at any moment in time.
- The MHP-IF community (projects, KDE Hub, funder) is trying to advance child and youth mental health promotion in Canada that is evidence-informed, sensitive to diverse contexts and cultures, equitable and sustainable (you may recognize this as the Hub’s vision). The Project Management Tool emphasizes these features.
- Context is always changing, even without a pandemic. Under shifting conditions, nimble and adaptive ways of working are needed to maintain a good fit between innovations and their environments. The sudden and extreme changes as a result of the pandemic make the need for adaptations and the need to go back and forth between different stages of project development (design, implementation, evaluation, scaling up) even more important. We would go as far to say the pandemic is an opportune moment to take stock, adapt and hone aspects of projects that may not get the attention they would under ‘normal’ conditions. The Project Management Tool can help with this taking stock and choosing any new or refined directions.
This is sounding like a bit of sales pitch; it’s truly not meant to be. Only an invitation to consider how the Hub’s Project Management Tool might be a useful reference for your projects. You’ve heard enough from the Hub on this. The best orientation to the Tool is to open it, scroll through the topics to find one that fits where you’re at in your project, and take a look at the considerations. Our hunch is you may find a few questions in there that offer a useful nudge, a moment of ‘yeah, that’s a good point, and could add value to our project’.
The Tool sure does reinforce how many topics and issues there are to consider; no one can be expected to keep all of those things top-of-mind. Over time, we all identify our ‘go-to’ tools and sources. The Hub’s Project Management Tool is not meant to replace other excellent resources you may use. Maybe it will be a useful supplement; a tool that provides the big picture of project management, and tailors considerations to the focus of the MHP-IF.
Ready to try out the Tool?
- Go to the Project Management Tool online forum and open the Tool. Take a look at the top of page 2 – Suggestions for using the Project Management Tool.
- Consider those suggestions and choose your first ‘adventure’ within the Tool; what section and topic fits with where your project is at?
- In the online forum, jot down a few lines about what parts of the Tool you chose to look at, questions that come up, experiences in using the Tool. Your input, no matter how modest, will be a valuable contribution to learning within the MHP-IF, and to improving the Tool for your own and others’ use.
- Overall, keep your efforts bite-sized and focused on what you’re dealing with today. Tomorrow’s issues will come and will create a new moment for action and learning from it.