Welcome to my blog for EIDT 6510-2 Online Strategies. 

I look forward to communicating with everyone over the next 8 weeks.  As always I appreciate your comments and feedback, as we journey together in our quest to expand our knowledge of Instructional Design and Technology.

Analyzing Scope Creep:

In the advent of the close to the busy, chaotic, holiday season, I will use this as an example of how scope creep can ruin things; how can project management can help deal with the holiday season better. 

 

I tend to start my holiday season in July since I have 27 neices and nephews. I usually start with a list of church socials, school plays, and other family calendar events. In my family my 3^rd sister is the event planner. After this I develop an more detailed plan of events that tends to work well with  the numerous brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, cousins, nephews,…etc.  After determining the schedule and activities I then tackle communication. I email, postal write, text, and use smoke signals to inform all family members of the schedule and planned activities. As always the best laid plans will always be derailed by one or two family members who have the greatest number of children and cannot adhere to the schedule.

Usually by Christmas day I am tired, irritable, and could care less about Santa or his reindeer. So what are the risk factors that arise during the holiday season? 

Time: In delivering cookies to my neighbors and business associates I found that I lacked the time for conversation in a lengthy manner. I should have had someone deliver the gifts to protect my scheduled time.

 

Aunt Ruth needed me to stop by for a short period of time (as she stated) to help with the potato salad. When I arrived she wanted me to boil, peel, and dice the potatoes. A project manager must stay on top of a plan so that they know the time and resources of all of the team members. This will also help if the plan needs to be changed from time to time.

Project monitoring is the collection, recording, and reporting of project information that is important to the project manager and other relevant stakeholders. Project controlling uses the monitored data and information to bring actual performance into agreement with the project plan (Porny, Mantel, Meredith, Shafer, & Sutton, 2008). 

I feel that with more project monitoring and project controlling the holiday season will not be the chaotic, stressful mess that it usually turns out to be each year.

Portny, S., Mantel, S., Meredith, J., Shafer, S., & Sutton, M. (2008). Project management: Planning, scheduling, and controlling projects. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc

 

 

The project manager’s job is challenging. He or she must coordinate technically specialized professionals who often have limited experience working together- to help them achieve a common goal (Portny, Mantel, Meredith, Shafer, & Sutton, 2008).The key to successful project management is effective communication.

 Communicating Effectively

We were given three examples of communication and asked to interpret each one, address factors that influenced how we perceived the message and which one we thought best conveyed the true intent of the message.  Each message had the same basic meaning.  Mark has a report that Jane needs and she is trying to get in contact with him. If Jane does not receive the report in a certain time frame she may miss her deadline.  In the meantime, Mark is busy with meetings and his own reports.

The three examples of communication included:

• Email: is different from hard-copy memos and letters in many ways. The primary difference is that people read online text differently than they read hard-copy text (Gerson & Gerson, 2008)
• Phone:  a clear voice and correct tone of voice is essential for effective phone communication.
• Face to Face: In-person and scheduled meetings are always the best for any discussion requiring true dialogue and consensus (Martin, 2007).

When Jane delivered the message via email the content was clear and concise and her tone was polite. I interpreted the email was that Jane needed help. 

Jane’s delivery of the message by phone seemed more anxious. I interpreted her voice to Mark as he needed to get it together and do his job. 

Jane’s face to face message was polite and friendly.  My interpretation of the message was that she was stating help me so I can help you. 

The ability to communicate well in writing, orally, and face to face is a critical skill for project managers. Of the three forms of communication, I believe the face to face message conveyed appropriate intent of effective communication. Dr. Stolovitch stated the following key points, be diplomatic, communication in not just words, avoid ambiguity, be precise and to the point making sure that everyone understands what is meant.  In my opinion if you want to connect with someone in the most effective way, you should meet face to face.  No other form of communication really takes the place of face to face interaction; it involves a three of our five senses, sight, hearing, and touch.  Body language and facial expression play a huge part in communication and can be a big plus when trying to get your point across.

 

 Email and phone communication are best way to share material and document informal meetings. It is difficult to solve glitches in projects through asynchronous forms of communication, such as email and voice-mail. Face-to-Face meetings tend to be a more effective form of communication when there are project issues or team member conflicts. Formal and informal discussions with one or two other people about project issues are particularly useful for interactively exploring and clarifying special issues of interest to a small number of people ( Portny, et al., 2008).

It is important to understand how people perceive the message that you are trying to portray.  Regular face to face meetings can be valuable, if planned and managed effectively. Face to face meetings can help project manages learn about other team members backgrounds, experience, and styles; stimulate brainstorming, problem analysis, and decision making; and provide a forum for people to explore the reasons for and interpretations of a message (Portny, et al., 2008).

 

Gerson, S., & Gerson, S. (2008). Technical communication. (6th ed.). Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall.

Martin, C. (2007). The importance of face-to-face communication at work. Retrieved from http://www.cio.com/article/29898/The_Importance_of_Face_to_Face_Communication_at_Work?page=2&taxonomyId=3154

Portny, S. E., Mantel, S. J., Meredith, J. R., Shafer, S. M., Sutton, M. M., & Kramer, B. E. (2008). Project management: Planning, scheduling, and controlling projects. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Learning from a project "Post-mortem"

At a prior place of employment I was involved in a team that was task with creating a clinical instructors handbook for new and returning hospital clinical instructors. The handbook would include the RAD course grading system, uniform specifications, attendance policies, Hippa violations, clinical documentation, examination policies and clinical objectives.

Immediately, the project started falling apart because the assigned project manager demonstrated a lack of participation and put the entire project into jeopardy of being shelved. To my horror, I was selected as the new project manager. My first contribution to the project was to reassign the roles of the team members to the following groups: grading and clinical documents, examination policies and clinical objectives, uniform specifications, attendance, and Hippa violations, and finally presentation. 

Time was a key factor and major problem since we only had three weeks in order to complete the entire project, we had already lost two weeks of valuable time with the original project manager lack of involvement. Project managers sometimes have to work on two (or more) phases at the same time in order to meet established deadlines (Portny, Mantel, Meredith, Shafer, & Sutton, 2008). As the new project manager I found myself working on the define phase and the start phase simultaneously. We had to be careful doing two phases at the same time since, working on the next phase before completing an earlier one increases the risk that the task might have to be redone. Unfortunately, with the time constraints that we were experiencing we had little choice but to combine as many task as possible. 

Overall, even with me as the project leader the project ended up as a success, not as successful as we wanted but none the less a success. I believe that the project’s success was attributed to the redesign of the team member’s roles, one on one meetings and regular group meetings which kept us all on the same track and in constant communication with one another. 

I also made it a habit to stay on top of all purchases and any outside research. During the entire project I made sure that no team member felt that their contributions were insignificant and I thanked everyone at every meeting for their hard work and dedication because of the extra work involved due to the time constraints. By keeping the lines of communication open on all levels I believe that even though I was recognized as a new project manager I gained a degree of trust from the team members. 

We did a good job at achieving our main objectives but if I could return to the project again with more time, I would seek individual feedback from the hospital clinical instructors on the effectiveness of the final project. The three questions that should form the skeleton of any project post-mortem are:

• What went right?

• What went wrong?
• What should we do differently next time? (Buehring, 2012)

Armed with this feedback I would share it with all the team members and stakeholders involved with the project so everyone would understand the exact outcome of the project. In conclusion, I believe that instating a longer close phase and a project post-mortem is essential to defining what you have (and have not) achieved, to developing project management best practices and to enabling a sense of closure.

Buehring, S. (2012, May 09). How to do a Post-Project Review. Retrieved from http://mushcado.wordpress.com/2012/05/09/how-to-do-a-post-project-review/

Portny, S. E., Mantel, S. J., Meredith, J. R., Shafer, S. M., Sutton, M. M., & Kramer, B.E. (2008). Project management: Planning, scheduling, and controlling projects. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.