A Standup Comedy Presentations on Project Management
Summary report: Drafted by Anagha Dhara, Refined by Dhananjay Gokhale.

10 Teams, 150 audience, 15 Volunteers, 2 judges, with the thought to depict project management via Circus – something as unique as DG - Dhananjay Gokhale.

This fun event was on 13^th Nov 2016, Jyotsna Bhole Auditorium

8:45 am: All the buzz with Volunteers getting ready for the Project Circus event. The Volunteer Dress theme was Green. It was fun to watch all of them in green. DG and Narendra checking the stage & cameras, Nivedita busy getting the Entry gate ready, Geeta in her quiet demeanor, organizing the minute details.

9:35 am: The Event is inaugurated by Mandar Gore & Pooja Nayak. It was a great beginning to this event. Mandar sang a song which was very apt in the context of Project Circus. It was written by Mr. Sanjay Dole.

The plot:The act revolved around cricket and how the co-ordination between the PM (Batsman) and the HR (stakeholder) is shown using Cricket.

The impression:The act starts with the basics of Project Management, the contracts, contingency, liabilities, & the need of a Sponsor. Introduction of team work was done stating that a project, like in cricket, has to be run by a team, not as Jhansi ki Rani. A typical communication gap was shown when the HR did not inform the PM that the meeting is cancelled while the PM keeps prepping for the same. Project analysis becomes HR responsibility and Project completion and customer satisfaction being the PM work. Mirror crashes in the breakdown, hearing which, the HR runs away and the PM is left alone to clean the mess with the limited resources he has. The Struggle of a PM, for doing it all himself, information gathering, working against odds was depicted well in the act.

Skit 2: PM giree- chu fa Pro – AllScripts India Pvt. Ltd..

The plot: A classic representation of incorrect requirements gathering – landing the project in a fix.

The Impression: The play starts with the Director being very happy on project completing on time and taking all the credit. He even agrees to approve all the reimbursement bills without seeing them. The act then goes into a flashback with a background music “Golmaal hai bhai sab golmaal hai” to 3 months before.

The Performers: Abhijit Bendigiri , Prasad Chothwe, Pradnya Chavan [In photo – left to right]

The plot: The play revolves around the project of Akbar and Birbal trying to cross the road in today’s modern & traffic filled Pune roads.

The impression: A play starts with Birbal convincing Akbar to cross the traffic filled road. Akbar’s inhibition of taking on a new requirement in a new way, Birbals’s analytical skills, gathering requirements to cross the road, overcoming impediments of fast moving vehicles, convincing skills to get Akbar to cross the road, shows various practicalities happening during a project execution. Showing the importance of doing baby projects, celebrating milestones by crossing half way the road and bringing the confidence back to complete the whole project was shown well with witty humor. The importance of keeping your stakeholders informed, achieving milestones and celebrating them was shown to give a positive twist.

The Performers: Kiran Vaidya, Mukund Wangikar [In photo – left to right]

Skit 4: The Scope & the Creeps! By Bhushan Kelkar

The plot: A group of boys planning for a Goa Trip. The challenge is the planning and keeping the scope.

The Impression: A group of 6 with different but unique skill set come together for a Goa Trip. The planning is to have a prototype done by having two of them travel ahead and make the arrangements. How incomplete planning, scope creep can happen and cause delayed timelines without control was shown with breaks for market visit, unplanned dinner halts. Change in requirements by taking a different route and encountering new roadblocks was shown derailing the project prototype. A good depiction of how the project can derail due to incomplete planning, scope creep, risks turning into issues, incorrect decisions was shown providing lessons learnt for the future projects.

The plot: How an unsuspecting client gets fooled by tall promises made by the salesman and pays heavy price for nothing.

The impression: The play starts with how a Salesman tries to gets time and attention from the Husband (Client) and then works to gather requirements from the couple, who give vague and abstract requirements. The fun puns with the new requirements coming with increased maintenance costs and the never ending change in requirements showed the typical project scenario. The Salesman provides the perfect solution to this – the PM Handbook. The client gets interested and the finally buys the book thinking it’s the Bible for all the solutions for his problems. The play concludes with the client opening the book and finding it empty. The moral being – there is no easy bookish solution for anything. It needs to be carefully planned and results evaluated at interim milestones.

The Performers: Amit Beknalkar, Priyanka Relekar, Aniket Bhange [In photo – left to right]

The plot: How requirements can be misinterpreted and cause a completely different outcome – that also in an advertisement!

The impression: The play gives good references to how a project is mapped to a train journey – with Start and end points being the stations, the coal being the resources and the journey as the timeline.
Given it is an urgent ad, the project managers get going to develop it without reconfirming the requirement or providing interim updates to the Client. The ad is developed for an (tel) oil brand whereas the requirement was for Sunder Telang kesurdi . The client is furious getting to know the blunder and swears never to give the ad requirement to them anymore! Importance of requirements approval,sign offs and interim updates to the client is shown as a vital lesson.

The Performers: Ganesh Akkar, Sheetal Korhale, Vinit Deshpande, [In photo – left to right]

The plot: How critical tasks show their importance and how people want to be a part of this important community is shown by 2 tasks.

The impression: The play revolves around tasks who think they are critical and form the impression with the PM that things cannot progress without them. New task wants to be a part of sucha critical ‘bhai’ community and comes to learn the tricks of the trade. The basic tricks of showing  resource  crunch, critical path, ghost dependencies, need to check the dates is shown quite well – normal things which happen in a project and cause to derail.

The Performers: Nikhil Deo, Harshal Pawale, [In photo – left to right]

Skit 8: Phir Mohhabatein

The plot: An IT adaptation of the movie “ Mohhabatein “ as “ Phir Mohhabatein”

The Impression: Big B in the role of a PM with SRK and Aishwarya as developers and how they handle the issues , changes. The contract conditions and the inability of the PM to remove the Developer due to the contract is shown quite well. Big B shows his PM giri by telling that he is the master to change any schedules , can terminate resources when he wants but the strong hold of SRK and Aishwarya topples Big B ambitions. The typical notion that the PM always did good for the team resource, gave good work and the reality of the PM being labelled as a ‘stubborn’ PM came out. PM becomes – Phir Mohhabatein”. – a comic version of the movie- well played.

The Performers: Vikash Chandra , Sujata Darekar, Chetan Bhalerao, [In photo – left to right]

The plot: Keeping the Sarpanch happy by keeping his wife happy.

The impression: Every year, the Sarpanch’s (Sarpach – chief of the village) wife is taken on a 5 day trip to the village for haldi kukum and the challenges are faced everytime, making the wife unhappy everytime. This time, the PA decides to do it differently. The objective of the project from getting the Sarpanch’s wife to the haldi kumkum project changes to making her happy by taking her to a farm and having her to rest.  The complete change in Scope to satisfy the client – results in the stakeholder being happy! Similarly, this continues to show requirement gaps, when both village representatives showcase their villages to bag the project for Sandal making factory and realize much later that it is for candle making! Incorrect requirements leads to incorrect expectations! Presented well. Managing stakeholders is the foundation for success. Well presented!

The Performers: Sameer Bhate , Gajanan Jawalekar, Aniruddha Kulkarni [In photo – left to right]

Skit 10: Yeda Reda

The plot: Hanuman, Brahma, Ram in a project of unclear requirements and unending scope creeps , leading to client dissatisfaction through “Yeda Reda”

The Impression: The play depicts how even Gods get unreasonable and ever changing wish requests from their devotees. They have to watch for the action of scope creep. The tender comes out interprets it as, “Reda – an animal” is requested. Additional inputs from come in and then demands for it to give milk, to be able to sit on him, driverless. Listening to these unreasonable demand client is finally called and the requirement becomes clear – a milk dispensing machine! A typical case of client needs being different from what is made, causing changes and rework, stress to the team who works on it and realize the efforts are all gone waste.

The Performers: Swapnil Pasalkar, Suyog Vanshiv, Prashant Gahalod [In photo – left to right]

The Impression: DG as a seasoned PM Mentor and Geeta as a beggar representing PM - at their best. Tremendous sarcasm on the current situation in the corporates. The paradoxes like – “One needs to know the color combination rather the reality”; -- “It is more of a para-lingual tone variation, story-telling, rather the factual presentations”, -- “The report must look good” – such a similar paradoxes are presented extremely effectively. The person who knows these tricks is made the Chief of PMO.