Project planning workshop 2, Objective tree

We have had some workshops about our project. We had Veera Pensala again to help us with this workshop. This time we focused on the project objectives and we utilised also the problem tree workshop.

Here is our infrastructure objective tree. In this infrastructure objective tree we tried to formulate our problems to objectives by changing them positive. And we concentrated only on infrastructure as an example for us to help us to understand how to use this tool. Actually we don’t know yet in what we want to concentrate on particularly, we’ll find that out during the field trip.

The overall objective is something we won’t be able to reach in this project but this project will be one step towards it. There has to be other projects to help to reach that one. The project purpose is a sort of a goal for this project. And results are what we need to achieve to reach the project purpose.

The next picture is more about our whole project, not just a part of it.

The top green post-it is now the overall objective which we wont reach with only this one project. The second green post-it is our project purpose and the red ones are the results that needs to be done to reach the purpose.

Gathering information

Lately we have been gathering information on Dar Es Salaam. We found some books from the Helsinki City Library, but were faced with the problem that much of the material was already decades old, making it outdated for us, since we would need up-to-date data of the city. However, we did come with some books that will probably prove to be very useful for our research, for example the book “From Public Pipes to Private Hands: Water Access and Distribution in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania” (2006) by Marianne Kjellén.

We also discussed about starting to follow some local online newspapers, as our mentor Taru suggested. That would help us to get to know what are the current hot topics in Tanzania. You can find a list of at least some Tanzanian online newspapers here.

It seems that a lot of the news concerning Dar Es Salaam are about traffic or road accidents. The unsafety and inefficiency of public transportation are big problems, that we also wrote about in our background study paper. A new Bus Rapid Transportation system is in the process. A recent news article about it can be found here.

Project planning workshop 1, problem tree

In the course lectures we had Veera Pensala from Kehitysyhteistyötoimisto ZULU helping us with our projects. She introduced us to a tool called problem tree which helps to find the problems we want to solve during the project, impacts that those problems have and where one needs to concentrate to get results. Next the problem tree can be formulated as objectives and further to strategy analysis.

The first tasks was to write down all kind of problems we can think there is in Dar es Salaam’s city. Then we tried to group those things in to rational groups to understand what things are linked to gether. It seemed like everything were linked to gether and it was quite hard to make conclusions of what things caused which problem and is a problem a consequence of some other problem.. The first picture tries to present our conclusions of the problems we found out. The social side is quite complex and that’s why not grouped so well.

Then we tried to formulate the problem tree as you can see in the second picture. It came up really simplified because there are so many issues going on in such a big city. But more details are in the first picture.

It felt hard trying to find the paths of a problem. But I believe this helped us to understand the complexity of the issues. Later when we have more knowledge of all these issues we can more easily try to find solutions and things to concentrate.

Getting started

To get started we met with our group the first week at one of our group member’s collective work studio in Kamppi. We brainstormed and started to gather information for our first assignment, the Background study paper on the city of Dar Es Salaam from a city planning point of view. The final paper can be downloaded from the “results” section.

The following week we met again with our group and another time also with our group mentor, architect Taru Niskanen. The meeting was really helpful in clearing out what was the main task of our group, and what things should we concentrate on. Now we will continue with doing further research on the city of Dar Es Salaam.

Check also the “References” section for additional reading and information!