Reflection on Project Management Course

 What do I like best about the course?

§       The thing that I like best about the course is that this course teaches me how to be a good project manager. The whole course teach us step by step from the very beginning of initiating process to the close up process of doing a project.  In this case we manage to get the experience to be in the real project management team and do all the procedures by ourselves. This is a valuable experience for me.

 What do I dislike most about the course?

§        The thing that I dislike about this course is that this course has so many facts to be understood and memorize. Moreover, the course becomes dull when it is done at the wrong time which is from 5.30pm to 7pm.Psychologically this time is the time for our brain to relax and do some recreation. Instead we have to go class and pay attention to the lecture given by our respective lecturer. So it is very hard for me to pay attention. Furthermore the lecturing method is not interesting and is not a two way communication. The syllabuses to be covered also are a lot  which makes the course not fun to learn. Besides the student are not serious and the presentation made during class time is not formal and do not represent themselves as the real project manager.

  What are my proposed suggestions to improve the course delivery and content. If I had more time, what do I wish I had done differently for the course?

§         My proposed suggestion to improve the course delivery and content are by having a role play of some situation about the project management, giving the student some complex situation about project management to be solved and also having a two way communication of teaching in class. Which means the lecturer can ask students’ opinion about certain issues or the problems in project management. In this case I guess perhaps the class would be more interesting and the delivery would be more effective. Last but not the least is about the timing of the class as I mention above. If I had more time, I wish that It will be better if the class timing can be changed to a more suitable time for the students.

IT Project Management Tips

There is lots of IT Project Management tips I have learnt in class. From what I have learnt, I like to share with you all some of the tips. It is about tips to have better communication with Project Stakeholder Management. For your information, Project managers spend 80% to 90% of their time communicating. So we need to actively manage communication with the various project stakeholders.

There are four different strategies for the different groups of stakeholders. We need to know what is it and what it does. Below is some information about it:

• Key Players - Manage them closely and keep them fully engaged
• Important Stakeholders - Keep them satisfied. Don’t burden them with too much detail
• Affected Stakeholders - Keep them informed. Communicate regularly to check that no major issues are appearing
• Other Stakeholders - Monitor them. Communicate, but do not bother them with too much information

Further than this, we need to spend time and effort to improve our own communication skills in these important areas:

• Written and oral (involving verbal and non-verbal communications skills)

Venues for communication:

• Internal- with the project team and organisation
• External- with the customer, the media, the public

Types of communication:

• Formal - Reports, meetings
• Informal - emails, conversations
• Vertical - within the organisation and functional group (for example engineering, sales, finance)
• Horizontal - with peers and other groups within the organisation

Hopefully these tips will help you in communicate with Project Stakeholders Management.

The Benefits of Learning IT Project Management

• We can understand the growing need for better project management, especially for information technology projects.
• We can know the role of the project manager by describing what project managers do, what skills they need, and what the career field is like for IT projects managers.
• We can know what are the IT project software tools and describe how software can assist in creating an IT project.

Chapter 12 - Project Procurement Management

This chapter is about Project Procurement Management.Procurement refers to get some goods and service from outside also same mean with outsource. There are some advantages and disadvantages of doing procurement some of the advantages are provide flexibility, increase accountability and so on, the disadvantages are it’s too depend on particular suppliers and not protect the information. The processes that involve in procurement are planning purchases, planning contracting, requesting seller responses, selecting sellers, administering the contract and closing the contract. All the processes involve are about to get the goods or services from outside of our organization. What is the most important when we want to involve on procurement our organization need to evaluate the best seller based on their request for proposal (RFP) or request for quotes (RFQ) and decide which company that have potential to become the services or goods vendor. As conclusion there are some advantages and disadvantages of procurement and it’s depend on the organization itself to involve in procurements or not. If they involve procurement they need to make sure the vendor that they request for goods and services provides the good service not only cheaper price but the most important is the high quality for anything that the organization request.

Chapter 11- Project Risk Management

It is important to an organization to identify and analyze the risks of the projects in order to increase the performance of the project from time to time. When we are heard the word risks we are only imagine about negative risk (problem) but actually there is also positive risk (good things). There are six processes in risk management which are Risk management planning, risk identification, Qualitative risk analysis, Quantitative risk analysis, Risk response planning and Risk monitoring and control. We need to define any risks that will occur later in our projects that we want to develop with using some techniques such as brainstorming, The Delphi Technique, interviewing and SWOT analysis. By construct risk register we can define risk, what are the causes of the risks happen, the probability and impact of the risk low, medium or high and what is our plan to overcome the risks. There are four response strategies for negative risk which are Risk avoidance, Risk acceptance, Risk transference and Risk mitigation and also four responses strategies for positive risks which are Risk exploitation, Risk sharing, Risk enhancement and Risk acceptance. As conclusion it is very important for us to define the risks especially negative risks and provide some suggestions to overcome the problems so that if one day the risk really happen so we already have the backup to handle it, if not we will have problem in the future such as the project will be delay or the cost of the project will be increase because of our weak plan. Risk management is important to minimizing the negative risks and maximizing the positive risks.