Japan in the last decade or so, has been named as one of the top tourist destinations. Its hyper efficient structure and infrastructure, culture, way of life, amazing and unbeatable gastronomic offerings, tourist spots and the animes and manga culture which are some of its contribution to pop culture are some of the reasons why Japan has been consistently included in the "places to visit", "bucket list" of many people.
My family and I finally made this dream a reality. We were fortunate to experience Japan and we just recently completed our 3 weeks holidays this summer of 2024.
Are you aware that we started this Japan project as early as August 2023? In this post, I would like to share with you how I applied my professional and strong project management capabilities, modesty aside, in the plan, organization and execution of our Japan 2024 summer holidays.
Project Management Concepts and How they applied to our Japan holidays:
1. Objective/Purpose: Every project has an objective and a purpose. It basically states the rationale why you are doing this project and what are your criteria for success. In our case, as we are not getting any younger (my husband and I are in our mid 50s and late 40s respectively); our objectives include wanting to enjoy Japan while we are still in the peak of our health as Japan will entail a lot of commuting and walking and doing a family trip of at least 15 days, so it must be during a period that my husband and I can go on a longer vacation leave and it must coincide with our son´s summer break.
2. Constraints/Drivers: As a family/team, we made a conscious effort to manage our Japan trip as a project. We started toying with the idea of going to Japan on summer of 2023. Our primary driver was time/schedule as we need to travel as a family and in a reasonable timeframe so we can explore the country. We mutually agreed that the best timeframe is summer although this means that we would need to ensure the scorching summer heat and humidity in Japan. As Japan is an intercontinental trip we thought of the duration; we planned for a 3 week time frame so we can have a good Japanese immersion and tourism exoerience. Summer is the best time as we, as a family, can go on a 3 week holiday (my husband and I can apply for our vacation leaves and my son is on summer break). Along with the time/schedule, it was imperative to manage our budget. Even if the foreign exchange (Euros to JPY) is good, we needed to make sure that our financials are intact and are not compromised.
2. Planning and Prioritization: Japan as a country to visit is huge. And with a limited timeframe, planning and prioritizing the places to visit is a must. Even if you want to visit most of Japan, the limited timeframe makes it really complicated. During our planning stage, we bought a typical Japanese travel guide book to better understand the main tourist attractions and to plot our route. You can´t be going from North to South as logistically, it is complex. It is more sensible to move within the same direction taking advantage of the places that you would like to visit. In the end, as what most 1st timer tourists would do, we spent our 3 week holidays following this route: Tokyo - Kyoto - Osaka - Miyajima - Hiroshima and Tokyo. Prioritization is important to identify your primary considerations and along the way, manage the deviations during the actual trip so you stick to your priorities. Some questions that you may ask yourself include: If I have a limited timeframe in Kyoto, which is more meaningful for me to visit, is it the Fushimi Inari Toori or the Arashiyama Bamboo Forest? Or you can decide to visit both even if it means waking up very early in the morning and commuting.
Another consideration is if you are traveling as a family is to integrate kid friendly activities in your itinerary.
It is important to note that together with the planning and prioritization, the components of financials and logisitics management come along. As you plan and prioritize, you start visualizing and including the logistics such as how to move around/commuting, accommodation, number of days and eventually, the financials/budget. Planning for your route and logistics will help you to manage the necessary advanced bookings. I highly recommend to use a simple excel worksheet or a checklist (whichever works for you better) to document your plan and note the changes in the plan until you have a final version. Planning is a crucial step to see the potential over-all scope and cost of the trip.
3. Critical Path and Milestones setting: In corporate project management, critical path and milestones setting are important because identifying them affirms your key priorities, your "non-negotiables" and at the same time, leads to the completion of your objective. Our critical path includes the on time completion of city trips to ensure that the subsequent trips and accommodation are not impacted. Again, we listed all of these in our shared excel to visualize the completeness of our scope and the proper identification of our milestones.
4. Stakeholders/Roles and Responsibilities: As we are a headstrong, bull headed family of 3 😁, we agreed that we will all play specific roles. These roles are important so we don´t boss each other around 😉, we listen to each other and we take into account each other´s preferences. Having a complete list of stakeholders, roles and responsibilities contributed to the completion of our scope and the management of our critical path. This is the distribution of our roles and responsibilities:
- Dad is the sponsor. He approved our budget (and thank you so much Dad for the generosity) and our approach.
- Mom (I) is the project manager and the "mother packer". I ensured we stick to our gameplan, reminded everyone of our timeline and priorities and I made sure that our logistics and vendors, suppliers are all properly informed and engaged. As a "mother packer", I made certain that the essentials are packed in this summer trip.
- Son is our architect/user. He made sure that his choices and decisions are heard and are properly fulfilled.
- Other stakeholders include vendors/platforms for tickets, tours, trains, transportation and accommodation.
5. Risk Identification, Planning and Mitigation: identifying the risks or the scenarios that could go wrong helped us as a family to control them, assimilate them, conquer our fears and prevent them from becoming full blown problems. This maybe the paranoid in me, but it was useful to identify these risks so we can rule them. Some of the major risks that we identified and mitigation actions:
- Risk of going overbudget/financial expense: Our mitigation action here is to reserve the earliest possible time with the belief that early reservation gives us some discounts and prior to the trip, we recover financially. On the actual trip, we kept a tab of our actual expenses on food and personal items.
- Risk of getting lost in translation; language/communication barrier/moving around: Our mitigation action here is we enrolled in a crash course in Nihonggo to understand and speak basic Japanese phrases and better understand the culture. We also installed translator in our mobile phones and bought local SIMs which came in very, very handy to plot our actual routes.
- Risk of danger presented by natural calamities such as earthquake, tusnamis and typhoons: This is absolutely beyond our control and unpredictable, but keeping it in mind made us alert especially in the last week of our holidays when a major earthquake rocked Kyushu and there was a warning of a megaquake. I think there is no mitigation for this but in the unlikely event that it happens, we prepared an emergency backpack containing extra clothes, shoes, food and medicine that we can easily bring with us should we need to vacate the building.
- Risk related to health: As mentioned, my husband and I are already older and with somewhat health conditions. To mitigate this, we made sure that we made ourselves ready to combat the summer heat by wearing light, airy cotton clothing; we brought sunscreen, thermal water, umbrellas, caps and portable mini fans and lastly, we arranged our international medical health and travel insurance coverage.
As a project and programme management practitioner, I am grateful and take profound pride in my capabilities and in my profession. At any given point in my personal life that I can apply the basics and foundations of servant leadership, project/programme management and agile foundations, I do it! And what a difference it makes!!
Vacation is over and we are back to reality. But the beautiful memories of this recently concluded Japan summer holidays will definitely linger in our lifetime.
Let´s continue to make a difference every day of our lives!!
Snapshot of the shared excel file that we used to document our planning and prioritization:
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