Managing Sammaan

As the Central Project Manager for Project Sammaan, my responsibilities include managing workstreams of all the partners and providing strategic liaising with senior bureaucrats in both the BMC and CMC, as well as other government departments in Orissa.

The key objective of my role is to ensure that the project is completed within the planned timelines. I work towards enhancing the communication between various partners and between the project team through weekly calls and facilitating discussions among partners to sort out pending issues. I also manage the field activities of Quicksand, which includes coordination among field partners for site identification, site surveys and approvals.

My typical day starts with reviewing smartsheets, where our central project plan is hosted. I review the tasks which are delayed and escalate the same to the respective partners. I also closely monitor the project plan to identify upcoming critical tasks and plan activities accordingly. After which, I review my emails to respond to various partner requests and work on specific tasks that I am responsible for.

Every week I host a weekly review call with all the partners to track deliverables. I coordinate the call by sending an agenda well in advance and keeping the minutes of the meeting for future records. Every month I coordinate a monthly review meeting with the commissioners of BMC and CMC. I plan the agenda for these meetings based on the project needs and prepare presentation.

There are three things that really excite me about working on Project Sammaan:

• Unique Collaboration – Project Sammaan is a first for kind project where urban local bodies are working closely with design and research experts to build a scalable, replicable model for the rest of the country.

• Diversity of ideas and depth of discussions – Project Sammaan team expertise varies from design teams to communication experts to project management experts to renowned NGOs. Each team brings a diverse perspective and new way of looking at the problem. This is helping to find out new way of solving problems which were not thought earlier.

• Government as a collaborator – Government has been involved from the inception of the project. Senior bureaucrats worked to prepare the MoU of the project and all innovations have been approved by the government. It is exciting to see such an innovation is happening within the existing bureaucratic setup of the urban local bodies.

Also, Project Sammaan is different in terms of the diversity of the partners and the scale of the experiment. We are prototyping at 100+ locations simultaneously, which is quite different from other projects that I worked until now.

Apart from this, Project Sammaan is going to help at least 60,000 people in Bhubaneswar who otherwise don’t have access to a hygienic sanitation facility. The number of beneficiaries is really exciting!