Visiting Disney World with a Project Manager: Part 3

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 third 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.

Execution – Manage the plan (Enjoy the trip, but keep refining the plan!)
After 11 months of planning the big day was finally upon us. We woke at 3:45 am to make our 6:30 am flight and arrived in Orlando on schedule. Since we had used the on-line service to pre-check in to the resort and indicated our planned arrival time, our room was ready and shortly our bags were brought directly to our rooms. Disney has customer service down to a science!

After a quick lunch it was time to hit Epcot and Soarin’. But my daughter had been hesitant all day and finally decided that we should visit the Honey I Shrunk the Kids attraction first. “No problem, honey” I said as my mind raced again! Let’s see... Honey I Shrunk the Kids is at Hollywood Studios not Epcot. Okay another change but again we adjusted accordingly.

As we entered Hollywood Studios we came across another opportunity. A family was leaving the park for the day and offered us their Fast Pass tickets to Toy Story Mania – which happened to be on our list of attractions to visit! If you are in the situation of leaving a park before you can use your Fast Pass please consider passing them along to someone else, it really adds to their day!

So we finish visiting Honey I Shrunk the Kids just in time for the afternoon parade and we start exploring the park. We quickly found Handy Manny and Jake signing autographs and taking pictures. One problem, we had not yet purchased autograph books. My wife saved the day by quickly finding a nearby store and purchasing two autograph books. Lesson learned – make sure to have your autograph books as soon as you enter your first park.

During the Planning Phase Michelle, my wife, cautioned me that we were picking out more attractions they we would likely be able to visit. Wow, was she right! Although I did consider ride wait times, knew we wanted to stop and see characters at greeting spots, and attend parades and fireworks, I did not account for all these tasks in my schedule planning. For example I did not plan on the 90-minute wait time to meet Rapunzel, which we could not leave without doing.

One basic lesson that I have learned and preach in Project Management is that it is not the tasks that you estimate inaccurately that haunt you; it is the tasks that you don’t identify and estimate that will haunt you. For example if you planned a series of tasks for say 55 hours and they each take 60 hours it will not impact the project as much as the few dozen 10 hour tasks that you never identified and estimated.

The impact of our vacation was that we did not get to visit all of our must see activities. In the end of course this was not a problem since we put these missed items on our list for our next trip to Disney!

As this impact was evolving and since I wake up at 5:00 am everyday even on vacation I would take that time to re-plan the day’s parks and activities. In the PM world this is where you manage the triple project constraints – scope, schedule and budget.

In the middle of this project I determined that the effort to complete our scope was greater than planned. Since we could obviously not increase the schedule because the reservations were set and we could not extend our stay, we had to adjust scope. The solution was to further refine the list of must see attractions and focus on these. So each morning I would review options for parks and activities, including the pros and cons of each with the family (project team) so we could jointly determine our path for the day. For example on the last day we could do Soarin’ at Epcot but the extended ride wait time and travel time between parks would mean we would lose the chance for several rides at the Magic Kingdom. In the end we opted to spend the last day at the Magic Kingdom and never did make it to Soarin’, which is the first thing we will do on the next visit!

Important Best Practice – Review potential changes with the team and decide collectively. Project Managers should always look to consult and secure buy-in from all stakeholder groups before making changes to the project – simple change request processing. Aren’t project management techniques so useful in everyday life?

If you plan to visit Disney World during the holiday season you must see the Osborne Family Lights at Hollywood Studio – simply breath taking!

In short the trip went very well and everyone agreed it was our best vacation to date. All it took was a lot of planning and maintaining flexibility during project execution. This is a simple concept that can be applied to any project!

Closeout – Assess project performance (Document your trip!)
Home again! After an uneventful fight we arrive home in chilly Albany with memories to last a lifetime. But wait, the project (vacation) is not done yet! You need to first document your trip by making sure to download and capture all of your pictures. If you chose to purchase any Disney Photo Pass pictures you only have a limited amount of time.

I downloaded all the pictures from our cameras and immediately made back-up copies. This is a lesson learned from the horrific flooding that was experienced locally from Hurricane Irene. During the flooding we lost our computer but fortunately we were able to have all of the pictures recovered. Of course this was a very minor inconvenience compared to the devastation that impacted and continues to impact many local residences.

You also want to capture any lessons learned and best practices for your next trip, several of which I have shared here. For example we decided that next time we would stay at a deluxe resort for the entire trip – the fridge and DVD player are great benefits, along with the character visits to the hotel along and many other extras! I highly recommend the Animal Kingdom Lodge, especially if there are animal lovers in your family.

Finally, please consider writing and posting trip report to share your experiences and help others, such as on Mouse Planet.

I hope this have given you some insights on just a few of the ways we can apply simple PM technical to everyday activities such as vacation planning. Please feel free to share any comments.

Visiting Disney World with a Project Manager: Part 1
Visiting Disney World with a Project Manager: Part 2

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