As I was conducting a post-mortem our Thanksgiving dinner experience, I realized a dash of project management goes a long way for a successful holiday dinner.
- Plan, re-plan and be flexible: Plans change with new information. The key is to stay flexible and re-plan as needed. In my case, realizing nothing really fits into my small oven after the turkey goes in required complete re-planning of the cooking schedule;
- Establish your baseline: You can plan as much as you want, but if you don’t have a baseline to build your assumptions, such as the duration required for cooking, your dishes will come out at odd times, and may not even make to your dinner table;
- Know your key metrics: Cooking the turkey to an internal temperature of 180o F ensures quality and healthy dinner for everyone;
- Test and retest: Just because the temperature reads 180o F for the turkey doesn’t mean it is done. It took us three tries to ensure the thermometer was positioned correctly.
- Tools and components: The right tools and good ingredients certainly make the experience of cooking more enjoyable, and not to mention make the results tastier.
- Resources: The right level of resources with right expertise contributes to the full cooking and dining experience. Remember the adage of “too many cooks”. With thanks to everyone who contributed and helped, our dinner dishes and all the pots/pans were completely cleaned up with plenty of time before desert. I toast to that!
Finally, success for this project is measured with the number of happy smiles and overly satisfied tummies. Happy holidays everyone!
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Keeping with the core competency of the company I work for, we outsourced our Thanksgiving production to a resturant in Sun Valley. I trust that the staff kept a few of your recommendations in mind as they produced and delivered a quality product that resulted in happy smiles and overly satisfied tummies.
Great post. Sounds like a great success.