MANAGING BUSINESS IT PROJECTS: PERSONAL REFLECTION

Managing Business IT Projects: Personal Reflection

Managing Business IT Projects: Personal Reflection

Introduction

Being a student can be very stressful for many different reasons. One of the pressures is the many deadlines and assessments, particularly if it is difficult to study. To me, I face many difficulties with how I cope with assignments and pressures of time, I do not know where to begin and how to improve my study and communication skills. In this report I will focus on myself and recognise how my learning can be made more effective and furthermore I will attempt to improve my self-awareness and how I will achieve my high targets. In addition, I will indicate my strengths and weaknesses and also plan to improve my weaker skills.

As I enrolled for this course, I remember considering the fact that even though the course topic would not be my favorite, I could still learn valuable skills in organizing myself and others to complete simple and complex tasks. I hoped that this course would be the scheme I needed to finally improve my organizational skills. I had examined project management software previously, and could not believe the amount of information required for just one step of a project. I assumed that this course was going to give me a simpler model that would, in fact, obviate the seemingly overwhelming amount of work that the software suggested was necessary. In general the course succeeded, but mostly with reflection on the activities that took place over the semester, rather than during the actual practice with the 5-Phase PM scheme.

This paper will discuss some personal reflection on the usefulness and adaptability of the 5-Phase PM tools in completion of a grant writing project, then will analyze PM as the management and coordination of a series of complex situations. To facilitate this approach, I will critique some of the 5-Phase PM tools using the analysis and recommendations of Winter and Szczepanek (2009) in the book Images of Project. The structure of the five phases - Define, Plan, Organize, Control and Close - provides an understandable structure to the project. The first phase, Define, unfortunately was not as helpful as intended at the time because of some confusion about the appropriate “level” of the project definition. However, when it became clear that this l evel of deliverable concerned the “project of writing a grant,” the definition stuck with the group for the remainder of the project. This definition enabled us to determine the appropriate level of analysis for the deliverables and, in conversations, allowed the team to keep the levels straight. Lack of that particular clarifying activity with its product of a clear goal of success for the project would have caused confusion and frustration because of a lack of knowable progress toward that goal. Planning was certainly the most difficult aspect of PM. This step requires not only a firm understanding of the tools and their usefulness, but the careful application of these tools ...