A project's life time

Description of the tool

This is an interactive, whole group, exercise taking place in the plenary. The only thing on the wall – which has to be clearly visible to the participants – is a long rope of 5 – 6 meters.
One trainer is making guiding questions and the other “fills” the empty parts of the wall (above and below the rope).
Questions are related to project management. The trainer can start like this: “imagine you want to develop a project…when is the application deadline? When do you start to create partnerships? When is the project taking place?”… Of course, participants must have somehow got this information before! At this point they only bring the "pieces of the puzzle" together and they have it visualized (for enhanced memorizing).
Needless to say, that the project should refer to a specific action and not a project in general (in this case, we used Action 1.3 "Youth Democracy Projects").
By the end, the rope will have been enriched by coloured paper (elements) and string (timing). It can stay there till the end of the course, nicely decorating the plenary, among other benefits!

TIPS. Make sure there is a discussion taking place after each question and not having an “one man show” by the “smarties”; prepare for a lot of negotiations and, depending on the expertise level of the group, maybe not everyone will agree with the final result!