Reflection and Future plan

List three practice/concept you have learned in this class that you plan to use immediately in your work. Described the concepts and your plan. The concepts can be rather brief but the plan should have concrete actions and schedule.

This class provides much valuable knowledge that will be helpful at my workplace. DLI demands new projects everyday to enhance student’s better performance, but some projects are very successful, but some are a really waste of time and money. So, we need a good project management skill. Thanks to this class I have learned the good overview on the project management and the MS Project software skill. The fast Forward MBA in Project Management introduced the concepts on Project management very clear and easy. Among those new concepts this book addresses I would like to mention a few things that I think the most valuable for my work.

I am going to participate in Immersion curriculum development project starting from next week. It will have a project manager and 7 project team members. The sponsor is the school dean and the functional manager is the chairperson of Immersion department.
For this project I am going to apply the knowledge I have gained in this class.

The first thing I have learned in this class is the Work breakdown structure (WBS). Building a WBS helps to provide a detailed illustration of project scope, monitor progress, create accurate cost and schedule estimates, and build project teams.So, my plan is, first, to list the major products. Second, name all the tasks required to produce the products. Third, put work packages under different summary task headings for better visibility.

The second thing I think it is crucial in project management is to build a high-performance project team. A high-performance team has three components, which are positive team environment, collaborative problem solving, and leadership. In order to create positive environment we need explicitly stated ground rules, team members’ commitment, the ability to listen to solve problems, and the ability to effectively manage meetings. In order to build collaborative capability we need 1)problem-solving skills tied to an accepted problem-solving process, 2)understanding and applying multiple decision modes, 3)conflict-resolution skills, and 4)continuous learning. As far as the leadership is concerned, I think the most important factor in a high-performance team is leadership. When the team members do not trust the team leader, it is hard to create the other two components in high-performance team. This book addresses various things to create high-performance project team and what caught my eyes is active listening tips because the team meeting goes wrong when the team members want to express their own ideas without listening to others.

The last thing I have learned in this class is MS Project 2003. Using this software you can create a task list, set up resources, assign resources, view to work with project plan details in different ways, use reports to print project plan details, create a project plan and enter a project start date, and set the working and nonworking time for a project. Using this software I am going to create WBS and set up detailed resources to minimize risks and to balance the schedule, the costs, and the quality of the end product. This software will increase the chance to the success of this new project.

Chapter 10 Leadership styles and capabilities

After you have carefully reviewed Ch 10, write an evaluation of yourself as a leader against the many capabilities and functions of a project manager. For example: on page 241, during stages of team development, the leader of the team needs to have different styles and capabilities. Which one are you most capable of? Which one are you least comfortable with? Be frank and reflect upon real situations you have faced in the past.

I am not a team leader, so what I am going to reflect here is my experience as a team member. The most I am capable of is attending to the team members. My supervisor evaluated me that I am a very good team player and flexible. I respect individual teaching perspectives and support them. For example, our current team had a team building workshop three months ago and one of the assignments was to write about the person next to us. My partner, who was my team leader in my previous team, wrote that I was very dependable person. Some teachers tend to blame other teachers who have different point of view from themselves and hate each other. But I believe that people have different beliefs, career goals, and nonwork interests. I should not blame them because they have different goals or point of views from me. What I do to be a good team player is to find good things in the person and try to do what others believe to see if it is better than what I believe. When it is turned out to be better, I take practice them so that I can develop my professionalism.
The least I am comfortable with is maintaining the strategic vision. I think the strategic vision comes from many years of experiences. Good project leaders are also subject matter experts. As a team member it is hard to see the big picture and the path toward the goal because I do not have any experience as a team leader. My assignments are different from the team leaders. What I do is to work with the things assigned to me by the team leader. If I have to lead a team, I need to have an ability to see what is ahead of me and make the clear path to the goal with the strategic vision.

Chapter 13 Enterprise Project Management

What is Enterprise project management (EPM)? It consists of four components which are processes, technology, organization structure, and people, and EPM is the integration of those components for the execution of projects. The three tiers of management in the EPM model are project management, program and multiproject management, and project portfolio management.
The roles of the project management are to define, plan, and control a single project. The roles of the program management are to remove deploying limited resources such as personnel among many projects, to track relationships among projects, and to manage projects or tasks that add value across projects. And the role of portfolio management is strategic planning and budgeting, so it involves authority, budgeting guidelines, strategic and operational goals, discipline, accurate project information, and phase gates.
The three tiers of EPM can operate only when the four components are in place-processes, people, technology, and organization. How to put them in place? For the processes, establish consistent EPM processes. For example, create standard deliverables and approvals for each project phase, define practices requires assigning responsibility and authority, separate project management practices from development practices, and use different management standards for different projects. For the technology, apply all of the lessons from the same project success factors. For example, build the EPM team to include key skills and knowledge areas 1) high user involvement in system design, 2) a strong sponsor, 3) business analysis skill, 4) project management expertise, 5) tools or technology expertise, and 6) IT expertise. For the people, project office has a large range of responsibilities.
The roles are
Maintaining project management standards,
Maintaining project history
Organizing training
Mentoring and consulting support
Schedule analysis and budge analysis
Enterprise project management technology
Multiproject coordination
Project oversight
Making project management decisions
Supervising project managers in their project responsibilities
Meeting quality, cost, and schedule objectives
Career growth for project managers
Supply project managers to the organization
Participate in project portfolio management

For organization, there are the three organizational models-function-driven, matrix, and project-oriented. You need to consider following six factors to decide the best fit for a given company.

Organizations that spend a majority of their budgets on projects are better served by a more project-oriented structure.
In a function-driven environment a project-oriented style will increase efficiency.
A firm with a majority of its revenue coming from a few large projects should be more project-oriented than a firm with a firm with many small projects.
A firm with a great deal of similarity among the projects will be function-driven.
Companies relying on their experience to build up a knowledge base will be function-driven.
A firm with an inability to predict the volume of project work will become more project-oriented.

Chapter 12 Measuring Progress

All projects should keep balance on cost, schedule, and quality. How can we measure all those progress as project managers?

You might try to use simple graphs for the projects that contain many similar tasks. These graphs are extremely helpful to measure schedule performance.

Also, measuring costs accurately is critical because it equals to productivity. True cost performance can be measured with a technique called earned value reporting. “Earned value reporting uses cost data to give more accurate cost and schedule reports. It does this by combining cost and schedule status to provide a complete picture of the project.” So, you should track both cost and schedule at the same time. In addition, if you have a detailed the Work Breakdown Structure, the earned value calculations become easy. For example, 1) the WBS has defined start and finish dates, 2) the task has a tangible outcome, and 3) costs are assigned to the task.

Another way to measure progress is to have cost and schedule baselines. It presents the original project plan as approved by the stakeholders. Keeping the baseline cost and schedule goals visible is one way of holding the focus on the original goals.

Measuring progress using those tools mentioned above will help to spot the problems early and solve them.

Chapter 14 Solving Common Project Problems

When people work for neither you nor your sponsor, it is hard to have them responsible for what they are doing for the project. For example, when I had to conduct usability testing for my final project, the people who participated in the testing had no responsibility on my project. It was beyond my authority.
How can I enlist them in my project team to have responsibility?

Ask your sponsor to publish a charter for all the stakeholders. Make sure that it strongly designates your authority on this project.
Explain the reason behind the project, and give them the background necessary to understand its importance to the organization.
Involve them in setting up your primary means of communication. Make sure that this is a two-way medium so you’ll know that they are up-to-date and involved.
Make assignments easy to understand and track and involve them in estimating the cost and duration of tasks and in defining completion criteria.
Show them how they fit into the project; emphasize the importance of their input and the probable impact on the project.
Invite them to status meetings when their tasks are near enough to appear on the open task report.
Develop a strong relationship with your sponsor by keeping him or her informed of your plans and your progress.

When you tell the managers that the project is not realistic but they tell you make it possible, how will you handle this situation?

Be extremely clear about the project’s purpose, scope, and deliverables.
Putting on your best can-do attitudes, develop at least three options for what can be done.
Because this project will have risks that affect both cost and/or schedule, you will need to perform risk assessments at both the high level and the detail level to find your danger points.
If you are attempting to meet a schedule that you believe is impossible, don’t give up on changing your stakeholders’ expectations.

At my workplace, DLI, raised the graduation test goal and all teachers disagreed on the new project because it was impossible to achieve, but our opinion was not accepted. So, team leaders had to get to work to make the project successful. I think following the principles mentioned above will help the decision makers understand the difficulty of the project.

Chapter 11 Communications

At my work when the team failed to achieve the team goal, everyone points out the lack of communication. When the team leader does not share the information with other team members or students, things do not go as it planned. So, it is very critical that the right people have the right information to make the necessary decisions.
Project team members have four major communication needs.

Each team member needs to know exactly what part of the project he or she is responsible for.
Coordination information enables them to work together efficiently.
The members must be kept up to speed on the status of the project.
Team members need to know all the decisions made by customers, sponsors, and management to keep all projects decisions synchronized.

Since good communication needs some skills that we need to practice.
Verzuh mentioned some good tips for better communication.

Put time for every team member on your weekly calendar so that meetings can be available to everyone.
The best way to communicate difficulties to customers and managers is simply to present them with facts. When projects are late or over budge, the sooner the problem is acknowledged the easier it will be to solve.
While you are carrying out all these change management guidelines, don’t forget that the ultimate goal of change management is to maintain realistic expectations.

Chapter 10 High-Performance Project Team

What is a high-performance team? There are three components in high-performance team framework-positive team environment, collaborative problem solving, and leadership.
In order to create positive environment we need explicitly stated ground rules, team members’ commitment, the ability to listen to solve problems, and the ability to effectively manage meetings.
In order to build collaborative capability we need 1)problem-solving skills tied to an accepted problem-solving process, 2)understanding and applying multiple decision modes, 3)conflict-resolution skills, and 4)continuous learning.
As far as the leadership is concerned, I think the most important factor in a high-performance team is leadership. When the team members do not trust the team leader, it is hard to create the other two components in high-performance team.
This book addresses various things to create high-performance project team and what caught my eyes is active listening tips because the team meeting goes wrong when the team members want to express their own ideas without listening to others.

As you listen to others

Eliminate environment distractions.
Use nonverbal cues to show you are involved in what the speaker is saying.
Provide feedback, paraphrasing or summarizing the speaker’s statements to ensure that you understand them as the speaker intended.
Ask relevant follow-up or clarifying questions.
Listen for the idea behind the facts and data.
Suspend judgment on the speakers’ statements. Understand his or her point first.

During active listening,

Don’t try to solve the problem or give advice until it is asked for.
Don’t judge what you are hearing, either positive or negative.
Don’t shift the attention to yourself.
Be aware of resistance and defensiveness by the speaker.

Chapter 7 Realistic Scheduling Ideas

You can be ambitious about your project but your project should be realistic to be successful.
According to Verzuh, a realistic schedule:
-Includes a detailed knowledge of the work to be done
-Has task sequences in the correct order
-Accounts for external constraints beyond the control of the team
-Can be accomplished on time, given the availability of skilled people and enough equipment

There are steps to follow to create realistic project plan.
Step one: Create a work breakdown structure
Step two: Identify task relationships (Network Diagrams/PERT Charts)
Step three: Estimate work packages
Step four: Calculate an initial schedule
Calculating the schedule is a three-step process; forward pass, backward pass, and calculate float. Forward pass helps you determine the early start (ES) and early finish (EF) for each task. Backward pass determines the late start and late finish dates. Calculate float means flexibility in the schedule and calculated buy subtracting early start from late start. Critical path has no float, so it should begin and finish on time.
Step five: Assign and level resources
Resources mean the people, equipment, and the materials. And the leveling follows a four-step process:
1. Forecast the resource requirements throughout the project for the initial schedule.
2. Identify the resource peaks.
3. At each peak, delay noncritical tasks within their float.
4. To eliminate the remaining peaks, reevaluate the work package estimates.
This detail and realistic schedule may not solve all the problems but wil provide a tool set for solving many of them.

Chapter 6 Work Breakdown Structure Ideas

When the project is big, we need to break it into pieces to balance cost-schedule-quality equally. “The work breakdown structure (WBS) is the tool for breaking down a project into its component parts.” (Verzuh, p. 101)
Building a WBS helps to provide a detailed illustration of project scope, monitor progress, create accurate cost and schedule estimates, and build project teams.
WBS has two tasks; summary tasks and work packages. Summary tasks are a summarization of the subordinate work packages, so it is not actually executed. The work packages are the ones that are actually executed.
What are the steps to provide a guideline to developing a useful WBS?
Step one: Begin at the top.
You list the major deliverables or products.
Step two: Name all the tasks required to produce deliverables
When it is hard to list all the detailed tasks, it is time to invite more team members, with diverse skills, into the planning process.
Step tree: How to organize the WBS
Different ways of organizing work package may emphasize different aspects of a project. And when organize the WBS, every summary task should be meaningful to some stakeholder because the purpose of summary tasks on the WBS is for communication, or visibility.

Chapter 5 Risk Management Ideas

All projects are new because it has never been built before. So, it is very risky business. How can the project manager handle the risk? The project manager should follow three main steps.
First, systematically find the sources of risk in the project.
Second, develop strategies for reducing risk in each case, for example, changes in assignment of responsibility, lines of communication, the scope of the project, etc.
Third, monitor the effects of the strategies the project manager developed on the project.
Then, how to identify the risks? There are two ways to involve the team. One is brainstorming sessions and the other is interviewing. Another way to identify the risks without involving the team is to use a risk profile that
-The profiles are industry-specific.
-They are organization-specific.
-They address both product and management risks.
-They predict the magnitude of each risk.
How to reduce risk?
First, accept the risk which means you understand the risk, its consequences, and probability, and you choose to do nothing about it. A common strategy is that if the risk occurs, the project team will react. As long as the consequences are cheaper than the cure, this strategy makes sense.
Second, avoid the risk by choosing not to do part of the project. But avoiding risks on projects can have low return.
Third, monitor the risk and prepare contingency plans.
Fourth, transfer the risk by purchasing insurance or an expert to do the work or to use a contract for service.
Fifth, mitigate the risk which means “work hard at reducing the risk.” Mitigation covers nearly all the actions the project team can take to overcome risks from the project environment.
How to control the risk?
You need to monitor risks and choose measurements that will indicate the risk’s severity and probability. Keep a record, or log. When update a log you should make sure there is someone responsible for every risk, rank risks by severity and probability, routinely update the status of the risk.

Chapter 4 Making the rules ideas

In order to make a successful project there should be rules to solve problems such as disagreement or changes. There are three crucial factors in writing of the project rules. First, get agreement on project rules. Second, keep the scope of a project clearly defined. Third, have management support.
Writing project rules include statement of project charter, the statement project, the statement of work, the responsibility matrix, and the communication plan.
Project charter states the purpose of the project and demonstrates management support for the project and the project manager. The intent is to give notice of the new project and new project manager. It is sent to everyone who may be associated with the project.
Project charter describes three techniques that document the project rules: the statement of work, the responsibility matrix, and the communication plan. So, project charter should come first to get the agreement written and if a change occurs a new charter should be issued.
Statement of work includes purpose statement, scope statement, deliverables, cost and schedule estimates, objectives, stakeholders, and chain of command.
The statement of work is a tool for managing expectations and dealing with change. When there is disagreement it can be solved by reviewing SOW or change the SOW when it needs to be changed.
Responsibility matrix is ideal for showing cross-organizational interaction. And when there is a change responsibility matrix answer to the question of who is responsible for the decisions.
A communication plan is the written strategy for getting the right information to the right people at the right time. And when make the status report, keep it simple so that project leaders can spend time to solve problems. It is best to have regularly scheduled progress meetings written into the communication plan.

Chapter 3 Proejct Stakeholders

Anyone who participates in the project is a stakeholder. It would be customers, decision makers, vendors, and employees. There are different roles among stakeholders.
For example, project managers define, plan, control, and lead the project. Function management contributes company policy and resources. Project team contributes skills and effort to perform tasks. Sponsor contributes authority, guidance, and maintains project priority. Customers contribute product requirements and funding.

Tips for project manager

-Project manager should ask questions like: What is my authority? Who do I report to? Does this mean I’ll be relieved of other responsibilities? What are my expectations?

-Project manager should keep team members with minor roles informed.

-Ask the right questions about managers like: Which managers will make decisions? Who has veto power? Who is indirectly affected by these decisions?

-In order to determine who fills the role of customer a manager must be guided by two basic questions: Who is authorized to make decisions about the project? And Who will pay for this project?

The project manager of my capstone project is I. So, I define, plan, control, and lead this project. As for project team, there will be no other project team members. So, I will contribute skills and effort to perform tasks. Sponsor would be school advisor because he will guide and maintain project priority. Customer will be Korean school at DLI. Function management will be the department chair Korean school at DLI.

Chapter 2 The project Environment

All projects have a beginning and an end, and produce a unique tangible or intangible product. But ongoing operations have the opposite characteristics of projects. Because of different characteristics from ongoing operations there are some challenges the project managers face.
First, every project has different personnel needs because of the temporary nature of projects.
Second, it is hard to make accurate budget because projects have never been built before.
Third, projects might have to shut down when the budget is underfunded during one budge year.
Fourth, it is not clear who has authority for many decisions when projects cross organizational boundaries.
Fifth, by the time quarterly accounting reports show a project over budget, it may be out of control as to be beyond recovery.
Sixth, communication breakdowns occur because communication channels tend to follow a firm’s operational structure.
One of the most important things as project manager is to balance variables to create the optimal cost-schedule-quality equilibrium.
How to do that? Set realistic expectations about the cost-schedule-quality equilibrium and if the equilibrium changes, make sure everybody knows and accepts the new equilibrium, and deliver the promised product, on time, within budget.
There are different types of companies that favor ongoing operations on the one end and projects on the other, for example, Function-driven firms, Matrix organizations, and Project-oriented organization/Program. In function-driven firms, project managers have no functional authority and must work through the functional managers to assign, monitor, and coordinate work. In Matrix organizations, this structure gives authority to both project managers and functional managers. In project-oriented organization, functional departments exist within the project. Program is another style of project-oriented organization. I think knowing the types of companies is important to project managers.

My capstone project does not need to recruit people and to worry about budget because the scale is small. However, I did have some problem in the beginning of my capstone project because DLI is the function-driven organization, all authority lies on school dean and project managers has almost no authority. For example, I had a problem with my laptop computer and asked if school can support a new computer for my capstone project. But, unfortunately, I got a refusal message from the school dean saying that it is a voluntary work, so they cannot support. Certainly, I did not have any authority on getting a budget for my project.

Chapter 1 Project Management in a Changing World

World is changing fast with the birth of new technology everyday. To live on the fast changing world we need new projects that can work with the newly created situation. The question here is that how can we make the projects successful? Verzuh mentioned that there are five essential factors to the success of a project.

-Agreement among the project team, customer, and management on the goals of the project.

-A plan that shows an overall path and clear responsibilities and will be used to measure progress during the project.

-Constant, effective communication among everyone involved in the project.

-A controlled scope.

-Management support

I think having all the five essential factors will definitely lead to the success of a project. At Defense Language Institute the work is performed as a team. The school provides clear goal and each team leader plans the action. However, many team leaders have communication problem and it caused disagreement between team members and fail to success the goal. So, I think having all the five essential factors are the key to success.
How does it apply to my project? My capstone project will be developed by myself alone but I have an advisor, so still I will need an effective communication skill for the success of a project. The basic thing is to have a clear goal and plan to get approval from my advisor and then communicate with him to make successful project. Also, management support is important in case I need more time to work overtime.

Introduction to myself

This is my 5th blog. Most of the blogs that I have created were for Korean langague students at DLI.

This blog is for MIST 595 & 696 class at CSUMB.

The reason for attending MIST is to make good educational software because, personally, I think computers are helpful for self-studying rather then classroom teaching situation. Also, I want to help people who want to learn languages but cannot afford to go to langauge school.

The reason for taking MIST 595 & 696 is to learn how to manage projects. Working at DLI I find many ways to work more efficient but don't know how to develop my ideas. I expect to learn how to manage projects sucessfully so that I can contribute to my school.