Visiting Disney World with a Project Manager: Part 2

My family and I have recently returned from our first trip to Disney World and I wanted to share our fun and some Best Practice for planning a trip to Disney World. This is the second of three entries which will provide a hopefully fun overview of our trip and how I applied simple Project Management techniques to ensure a successful vacation.

Initiation – Define overall parameters (Define what, when and how!)
This is the phase where you nail down the logistics of your stay and book your reservations.

Over the past ten years Deborah Snyder, a fellow ‘Paranoid Professional’, and I have taught Risk Management for the Upstate New York Chapter of the Project Management Institute (PMI). PMI considers a risk to be any event that can result in either a negative (risk) or position (opportunity) consequence. Many times students struggle with the concept of a positive risk and it is not always easy to cite examples of these opportunities. During this project I came across a great opportunity!

Before booking your reservations I advise that you visit various sites related to Disney World and sign up for mailing lists. As a result of being on a Disney mailing list I was alerted to Disney’s limited time offer for a 40% discount on room rates. Since the project budget had already been allocated, instead of saving the extra money we decided to upgrade our accommodations. Instead of staying all 4 nights at the All Star Movie value resorts we switched to 2 nights at the All Star Movie value resort and 2 nights at the Deluxe Animal Kingdom Lodge. Since these are both Disney resorts, the good people at Disney are more than happy to move your bags between resorts, they will pick them up from one room and deliver then directly to your new room. This was a great example of a project opportunity which increased the Quality of our vacation without adding any additional costs!

During Initiation, you will also book your travel plans, as we did for our airline tickets when they became available around 6 months prior to our trip.

Finally, you need to book any Disney World extras in advance. Reservations for the character dining experiences open in advance 6 months to the day. Tip – book them six months to the day in advance. We planned to dine at Cinderella’s Royal Table on our first night, so five months and 28 days before our arrival I called to make our 3 character dining experience reservations. Oh sorry I was told, Cinderella’s Royal Table was already sold out for the night we wanted! I quickly shuffled our dining plans around with the very patient Disney person and ended up reserving dinner at Cinderella’s Royal Table for our last night, which ended up being a perfect way to spend our last evening at Disney World.

Now that your reservations have been made and your overall project parameters are set you can dig into detailed planning!

Planning – Further define and refine project plans (Get into the activities!)
For the Planning phase of our Disney World vacation I focused on identifying the sights and activities that we wanted to experience on our trip. The last thing you want to do is arrive at Disney World and not know that to do first, or second, or after that. While sequencing and estimating activities is critical on every project, when planning your vacation activities you don’t want to get too detailed. Hey Project Managers, loosen up –you don’t need to plan the vacation hour by hour. Instead we took the approach of listing the activities that were of most interest and wanted to experience.

Again planning well in advance is the key. The Disney site along with various other sites will provide details on all the Disney World attractions and rides. I also purchase the Birnbaum's Walt Disney World 2012 for my daughter. We sent many hours together pouring over this guide to develop a list of attractions we had to see.


You also need to know the schedule for various park activities (parades and fireworks) on the days you will be visiting, along with the opening and closing times for each park. I had all this information captured in a spreadsheet but we also accessed this information using the free version of the Undercover Tourist Disney Application on my wife’s I-Phone.

So we now knew everything we wanted to see along with and the timing of the various attractions in each park. You also want to know what you are doing first so you don’t check into the resort and are then not sure which park bus to get on! So we let our daughter pick the first attraction and she selected the carousel at the Magic Kingdom to ride first. I used this information and the already booked dining reservations to map out a rough plan as to which parks to visit on which days. Great, our plan was done!

But wait! As every Project Manger knows we need to be prepared for changes sometimes before we even get to the Execution Phase. In this case, 2 days before we leave for Disney World my daughter changes her mind and decides she wants to ride Soarin’ first. “No problem, honey” I said as my mind raced. Let’s see Soarin’ is at Epcot not Magic Kingdom and is very popular so you need a Fast Pass if you want to avoid the hour plus wait. A short time later I had re-planned the park visits based on this change. Good, we are ready to execute our project!

Visiting Disney World with a Project Manager: Part 1
Visiting Disney World with a Project Manager: Part 3

Here are a couple great Disney World reference books which I recommend.