Organization

As a leader, your big portion of your responsibilities, would be to plan for certain activities related to your position. Therefore it is very important to know what are the best practices available, which will enable efficiency and success.

Believe it or not, the most important criteria which determines whether your activity is a success, would be the objective of the activity. Many a times, student leaders dive in too quickly into planning without first being clear on the objective of the activity.

The BAR-DAR-PAR system is one system which you can adopt for the planning of activities. There are many other systems available. If you find one that suits your leadership better, go ahead and stick to it!

BEFORE ACTION REVIEW

• Clarifying of activity objectives with your tutors

• Setting a working timeline, with dates in which activities should be completed.

• Breaking down the activity into smaller parts.

• Assigning of parts to different area ICs

• Seeking out seniors who have conducted this activity before to learn from their experience to increase the success of your activity.

DURING ACTION REVIEW

• Taking of meeting minutes at each meeting and sending it to all parties once the meeting is over.

• Each area ICs to update the whole team on their progress or to seek help in solving problems which they might face.

• Constant communication with tutors on whether the plan is headed in the right direction.

• Adjustment to working timeline if needed.

• The overall leader (captain/president) should make an effort to ensure that area ICs stick to the timeline.

• Area ICs should flag out if the working timeline is not feasible when it is being set.

Meeting minutes are useful during the planning process as it serves as a reference to the attendees on what decisions have been made and the direction to proceed for area ICs.

Learn how to write meeting minutes from the video below.

Download a simple meeting minutes template here.

POST ACTION REVIEW

• Feedback on how the activity was executed.

• Did the activity meet the original objectives.

• Areas for improvement.

• Sharing of good practices by area ICs (community sharing and learning).

• Intra-community affirmation of area ICs who did a good job.

• Feedback from tutors.

The end of every activity serves as an excellent platform to learn from erroRs, affirm members who have done a good job as well as to encourage members who may not have done what they had planned to. If the objectives were not met, distill what were steps that distracted everyone, so that the same error will not be repeated.