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What I have learnt from being part of the website project team

by Aidan

I have enjoyed being part of this project as Hylands is a great club that has been an influential part of my life. It feels rewarding supporting the club in any endeavour that it approaches to improve itself, to providing grassroots sport to the community; in this case an improved website.

I first became involved in the project when I was invited to be part of the project team along with other young people such as coaches and tennis leaders. The communication ongoing with monthly project tasks: 6 in total.

There were deadlines which help me with my organisation and timekeeping skills and ability to work under pressure by ensuring I prioritised the tasks to complete them on time. The second skill I developed as part of this project, was my research and critical analysis. I researched other tennis clubs websites and learnt how they display their information so could feedback this back to our club to make the information on our website as impactful as possible. The third skill I developed was my critical thinking. This skill was developed as we had to try and make sure it was impactful whilst making sense to all stakeholders.

In terms of improvements, after Covid-19 there could have had some virtual meetings such as on Zoom to discuss ideas with the full project team and this would enable us to build confidence in our opinions to help progression to make the best outcome for the new, refurbished website.

Each task brief included learning material to improve our knowledge in taking part in a project. The first learning material explained what was a project. The second set of learning materials covered the seven principles, themes, and processes of project management. The third learning material covered stakeholder mapping. Stakeholder mapping involved understanding such as what a stakeholder is and how to manage and communicate with stakeholders effectively. In the fourth briefing I learnt what a project board does, the roles within the project board and what the terms of reference are. In the fifth briefing, I learned what the project team does.

Overall, my reflection of being involved in this project is a positive one. I would have preferred some of my opinions to be considered more but this is a skill that the project manager improves upon by drawing upon everyone opinions and going with the majority approach for the best outcome. The other positive of being involved in this project is the learning material supplied to me helped me understand what managing a project is like.

In terms of the future of my potential involvement with Hylands after this project, as well as contributing to the News section from time to time, I hope to coach groups on a Saturday, do some private coaching on a Saturday or Sunday, help coach on Holiday camps and umpire matches in JW Tour once it is safe for it to resume. Sadly, I may be restricted to the amount of coaching I can do on weekday evenings due to my increased workload in being a Full-time student at The University of East London starting this September.