From Experience to Structure | Project Management Process

Creative ideas become stronger when experience, structure, and execution work together.

Project and Team Management was a class that did not make me feel as if I were starting from scratch. Instead, it gave more structure to the experience I already had from the Army, car sales and finance, live sports production, school projects, and building Breaking Ball Media. I have been in situations where teamwork, deadlines, pressure, communication, and accountability mattered. What this class helped me do was take those real-world instincts and organize them into a clearer project management process.

The biggest takeaway for me was PLOM: planning, leading, organizing, and monitoring. Those four words gave a simple structure to something I have done in different ways for years. In the Army, planning and leading were part of the job. In sales and finance, organizing information and monitoring performance mattered every day. In live sports production, everything depends on preparation, communication, timing, and the ability to adjust quickly when something changes. This course helped me see how those skills transfer directly into the entertainment business and media production.

My class project, the Breaking Ball Pilot, made the course feel practical. The goal was not to create an entire business plan, launch a full-fledged media company, or develop every future idea for Breaking Ball Media. The project had to remain focused on a single completed sports-entertainment pilot episode. That was a valuable lesson because creative ideas can grow fast. It is easy to keep adding more segments, more graphics, more future plans, and more “what if” ideas. The project management life cycle helped me keep the pilot moving through definition, planning, development, review, delivery, and debrief without letting the scope get out of control.

The Work Breakdown Structure was one of the most useful parts of the class because it broke the project down into concrete steps. Instead of saying, “make a pilot,” the WBS made me think through tasks, dates, milestones, resources, and dependencies. That matters in the industry I want to work in because entertainment projects can sound exciting at the idea stage, but they only become real when the work is broken into pieces that people can actually complete.

Risk management also stood out to me because it forced me to think ahead rather than wait for problems to arise. For the Breaking Ball Pilot, remote coordination between Washington and Ohio is a real constraint. Audio quality, video quality, file organization, scheduling, school, work, and life responsibilities can all affect the final product. Creating a risk plan made me think about warning signs, prevention, backup plans, and worst-case responses. That is something I can use beyond this class because any future media project will have risks that need to be managed before they damage the final result.

The team performance and quality management sections also helped connect the people side of project management with the final deliverable. A strong project is not only about tasks and timelines. It also depends on how people communicate, how roles are assigned, how conflict is handled, and how quality is measured. The DiSC, MBTI, conflict resolution, TPIP, and quality management work reminded me that a team can have talented people and still struggle if expectations are unclear or if communication breaks down. At the same time, a smaller team can produce strong work if the people understand the goal, know their roles, and have a shared standard for quality.

What I appreciated most about this class is that it gave me tools I can keep using. The Breaking Ball Pilot is one class project, but the process applies to much more than that. I can use the same structure for future BBM video content, live sports projects, entertainment collaborations, creative campaigns, or other business ideas under Frasier Peaks. Moving forward, I do not want to be only someone with ideas. I want to be someone who can take an idea, build the plan, manage the people, protect the scope, control the risks, measure the quality, and finish the project.

This class added a stronger project management layer to the foundation I am already building. It gave me a better way to connect leadership experience, creative thinking, and business execution. For my career in sports, entertainment, and media, that structure matters because the goal is not just to create something once. The goal is to build a repeatable process that can grow into something professional, useful, and sustainable.