PMI defines a project as “a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service, or result.” Projects drive change, move the enterprise from one state to another, create value. While professional project managers focus on business, commercial, or government enterprises, projects are also undertaken outside of work. Home renovations, Thanksgiving dinners, New Year's Eve and birthday parties, weddings, and other celebrations are projects with sponsors, stakeholders, risks, budgets, lessons learned, and firm end dates.

Birthday Parties and Weddings

Simple birthday parties for children may have a budget of around $50 and feature pizza, soda, and cake for a dozen children. Planning for the birthday party may be as simple as a few conversations about date, time, location, activities, menu, and decorations. The menu may be pizza, cake, water, milk, soda, and coffee for adults. Wedding celebrations are carefully planned events for 100 to 500 or more guests and budgets of $50,000, $500,000, or more.

These events are part of people's personal lives, not their work lives. While planned in detail, weddings tend not to be structured like projects. There is no WBS, there are no formal risk management plans, stakeholder engagement plans, or communications plans. Planning for weddings begins with date, time, and venue. There are other details: music, the photographer, flowers, the rings, the vows, and of course, the guests of honor, the dresses, tuxedos. The “Project” completes on the wedding day. Estimated costs are detailed in Table 1.

Table 1, estimated costs for wedding with 125 guests

Of course, the gowns and tuxedos may be more expensive, or less, and the number of guests may be higher or lower. And this estimate includes costs for rings, which can easily rise to $5,000 or $25,000, depending on whether the rings are gold or platinum, color, size, and clarity of the stone and wealth of the couple.

Table 2 lists core elements of the dependency chart for a wedding.

‍

Table 2 - Dependency Chart

To convert the dependency chart to a Gantt chart, the planner needs to add in information regarding item durations. It could take 3 months to shop for a dress and another 3 months for the dress to arrive. Venues may be booked 18 months to 2 years in advance. Most of the items are dependent on the decision of the couple to get married. However, some things are dependent on the venue, and the guests' responses to the invitations. And the venue is, at least in part dependent on the date.

Obviously, nothing should be left to the last minute, but some items, such as planning the menu, take much less time than others, such as shopping for a wedding dress. Other items, such as recommending a hotel for out-of-town guests, are not critical, but are a nice gesture.

Given the importance of questions concerning date, venue, and expense, it is logical to hire a project manager, albeit one who calls himself or herself a wedding planner.

Interview Questions for the Wedding Planner (Project Manager)

Describe your experience in planning weddings.

How much time should we allocate to things like shopping for and buying the wedding dress, the bride's and groom's mom's dresses, bridesmaids' dresses, etc.?

How closely do you work with the venue to make sure things go smoothly? And have you worked with this particular venue recently?

What about flowers? Who orders them? When?

What about the menu? How is the menu planned?

What do you do if the Best Man misplaces the rings? And how do you make sure he doesn't?

How do we handle DJ's, Bar Tenders, Wait Staff, or guests who may act in very inappropriate manner?

There will be a lot of phone calls, text messages, and emails. Most communications, except those regarding financial considerations, are likely to be informal. The planners and the bride, groom, and other sponsors are likely to be in close communications with each other and other stakeholders. And as the wedding day draws near, there are likely to be daily scrums, particularly between the bride, groom, and planner.

While project management will help weddings go smoothly, one or two issue, while potentially expensive, will not stop the event. The wedding will take place with or without all of the desired flowers, with a substitute DJ, without a key member of the band, even without a Best Man, Maid of Honor, Flower Girl, or Ring Bearer. The bride’s father may escort her down the aisle, but if he can't then someone else, generally a father figure, will. No one will notice if the venue can't get wild Chinook, Coho, or Sockeye salmon from the Pacific and is forced to use farm raised Atlantic salmon, Arctic Char, or another entree. And if the bride or groom stumbles while reciting her or his vows; that's because they are nervous, or excited, and human. Even if one or both of the rings are forgotten or lost, others can be substituted at the last minute.

But a key principle of Project Management is that we need to tell the sponsors and stakeholders what they need to know, not what they want to hear. The sponsors need to know what the wedding is likely to cost so they can budget for it.

The planners need to communicate and the sponsors need to understand dependencies and critical path. For example, they need to determine the guest list and probable guest count before they sign a contract for a venue. They and the venue need to understand that some people will not make it. Obviously, the couple need to decide on and buy rings in advance. The sponsors also need a realistic understanding of likely costs, time frames, and risk.

The obvious risks today, in early 2022, are associated with COVID-19. Some weddings originally scheduled for 2020 and 2021 have been postponed. Those that have taken place have had fewer guests. One trend has been for large parties to be replaced with intimate family events of bride, groom, parents, siblings, and an officiant, with a larger celebration to follow in 2022 or 2023.  A subsequent trend may be an increase in “destination weddings,” where the couple, immediate family, and close friends go to a beautiful exotic destination.

Weddings, like home renovations and other events in our personal lives, are time bound, have a budget, sponsors, stakeholders, and, most importantly, are temporary endeavors undertaken to create a unique product, service, or result. They meet PMI's definition of projects. Given the financial considerations and their importance in our lives, it makes sense to use the tools, techniques, and disciplines of modern project management, and leverage the expertise of professional project managers, i.e., wedding planners, to ensure that they run smoothly.

-

Chapter member Larry Furman, MBA, PMP, continues his exploration of Project Management. With this article he looks closely at how the use of insights and discipline of project management can help plan weddings and other events in our personal lives. While he was the major sponsor, he was only tangentially involved in the planning of his daughter's recent wedding; that was left in the capable hands of the couple and their wedding planner. He can be reached at “Larry@FurmanGroup.net”.

‍