Grand Chess Tour Competition

28 students from the Diploma in Business Studies and Diploma in Computer System Technologies were involved in this project. The subject is taught by Ms. Gan Kia Hui. We had take around 2 months with conducted around 8 meetings to make sure everything is up to date so that we would not face any sudden matter during the event. Throughout the planning, we decided to approach with Penang Chess Association(PCA) to seek advice about the chess competition as all of us are not experienced chess player and the association also provided chess equipment rental service as well. We also decided to get sponsors from outside to raise our fund to make sure our event have enough money to cover the expenses such as lunch, medals and etc. We decided to collect each participants RM18 with lunch provided. The target number participant we aim for is 64 participants and at the end we received 66 entries who signed up for the competition.

We actually planned to start our competition at 9am but during that day we encountered a bad weather and not many participants show up yet. Our project manager, Ooi Tin Phang decided to delay the time until 9:30am to wait for those participants to arrive due to the bad weather. Unfortunately at the end we had only 43 participants showed up only, but we still going on the competition because half number of participants had shown up. After the briefing of rules of chess and a group photo session, the competitions started at 9:45am.

Although we had delayed the starting time, but we still manage to catch up the schedule we had planned and everything goes smoothly as well. The lunch was provided to every participants and committees during 12pm, which is mean that our schedule is still on time based on the schedule we planned. After that, we resumed our competition at 1pm and we were still able to finish all rounds of competition at 4pm. After tabulating the marks of the participants, we had given medals to those participants who get into top 8 at the overall competition. The whole event adjourned at 5pm and everything goes smoothly as well.

A post mortem session was carried out during the next day. Overall the committees are giving good feedback to the competitions. Just only that we did not set a restriction line to quarantine the waiting area and competition area and this cause lots of participant who finish their competition goes into the competition area to look at those participants who still going on the competition. Overall is a good feedback from every committee.

What is the best achievement of the event?

The best achievement is we are able to have an opportunity to plan and execute our project smoothly that day. We also have an opportunity to practice our leadership throughout the whole project planning and executing. As we had divided into a few departments to work with each other and we learn on how to manage our teammates properly. Lastly, we also have a chance to interact with other association outside from SENTRAL College which is the Penang Chess Association to collaborate and make the event goes smoothly.

Are there any challenges or setbacks? How did you overcome them?

The only challenge we face is we are quite difficult to communicate with each other. As all of us not really know each other yet. We overcome it through bonding at several meetings and slowly get to know each other well.

What are the key takeaways of the event? What did you learn? How can it relate to the programme you are enrolled in?

Throughout the event, we discover new things from the head of Penang Chess Association, Mr. Tan Eng Seong. He shared to us that although chess is a traditional game, but we should organise in the modern way to catch up with the steps in nowadays generations. As he brought in the participant matching system to us and showed us how it works to calculate marks and matching participants.

He also shared to us that using the traditional ways to get participants such as direct phone call is no longer effective in nowadays. As he shared to us that using this method is slightly effective in 20 years ago. He also encouraged us to search for effective ways to get our target segment by ourselves, because different people have their own ways to get participants effectively. And he said that once we started to organise this chess competition continuously in several year, we will be starting to have our fix participants already.

As what we learn from him is that planning a project is not only depends on our planning skills. It also requires marketing skills as well because a project without participants is a failure and it will be a waste the efforts to the committee as well. We are very grateful to have this outsider with us to share some precious experience to us.