A Brief Overview of Project Management

June 24, 2022

During the summer break, I chose to venture into Project Management which is not my forte, where I successfully completed the design phase for an AI based personalised mentor with a group of friends. I wish to share my thoughts and my experience in this blog post.

Why Project Management?

Before the introduction of project management, I was quite puzzled and oblivious of the role of a project manager. The 9 management phases and the 5 PM processes are very applicable to any domain areas.

It is very informative how a project is initiated, planned, executed, controlled, and concluded. I was mostly fascinated by how a change request made in a certain department could affect the overall project management plan similar to a domino effect. Thus, it is the responsibility of a project manager to manage change requests and recommend preventive measures.

The search for and formulation of a product/service was an exciting and engaging part of the brainstorming process. The struggle with ideation is only a part of the process of developing a good service or product. We initially came up with an idea of an AI tutor system after several hours of team research. We each came up with a solution and then combined our efforts to fine-tune our concepts utilizing the project concept refinement tool. As some of us had a strong background in Artificial Intelligence, we were confident that our proposal will be good and acceptable. However, after our first group presentation, our professor enquired about the outcome of the project and how to achieve the outcome of our product.

We got more clarity on whether this initiative is realistic and if the project is feasibly possible or not. The tutorial session was a good example of monitoring and control, our project’s outcome is not something that can be measured and compare with a numerical score. There were similar projects such as JulianTM (Butschi, 2021) which were successfully implemented to suit the demands and busy lives of adult learners, delivering individualized teaching at scale. We took upon similar concepts and also planned to dicsuss with a adult learning professional to assist in the needs of learners regarding the emotional and social aspect of learning.

Additionally, I contacted the Ministry of Education (MOE) to discuss the integration of an AI system and provided a brief outline of our adult learning solution. Their IT staff responded, stating that while they were extremely happy with our suggestion, more information needed to be given and reviewed. The viability of our idea has been deemed favorable by their project team.

Moreover, I appreciated the importance of managing stakeholders as they promote synergy and resolve stakeholder issues. It is important to maintain a good communication with stakeholders to facilitate the project and progressively elaborate on our project’s scope and problem description, as well as the structure of how it will be carried out. It improved the quality of our project information and gave us a better knowledge of how to carry it out. As a result, we devised a communications plan to determine the information to be gathered, organized and accessed by all project team members.

Furthermore, I understand the importance of documenting every aspect of the project. The project plan serves as key materials for project team, stakeholders to review how the project will be managed and controlled. When I was working on my group project, there were many conflicts over the project objectives and deliverables. I took on the onus to resolve heated debates and had to combine 2 project ideas to initiate the project. As a consequence, we were unable to progress further and experienced a delay.

It is critical to ensure that everyone in the team is on track and understands the project statement’s deliverables. We were still unsure how other key aspects of the project, such as the cost and quality control system, would be accomplished, so we utilised progressive elaboration to fine-tune the project as it progressed. I was able to learn the importance of successful communication and articulating ideas effectively. Our team set some ground rules such as collecting ideas and storing it into our project management integration system (PMIS) such as GitHub and set the objectives of the team’s meeting before the start of the meeting.

Prior to the implementation of a formal system as explained earlier, it was difficult to keep track of ideas, feedback from fellow team members and complete the necessary deliverables. There was a lack of focus among the team members. We were easily distracted with a plethora of ideas and information, incapable of confirming our project’s scope and deliverables. Thus, I learnt to set proper objectives of the meeting, meeting’s deliverables and communication protocols such that every team member’s idea is known, and proper discussion can take place. We were able to carry out a successful discussion at the last meeting for our group report using the formal system as mentioned. I would ensure to adopt similar successful practices in future projects to achieve a fruitful outcome in every team’s meeting.

The project time management plan constitutes another significant portion of the project. I understood the activity dependencies, critical path method and fast-tracking components. Before the design of time management plan, I was not sure which activities to fast track and so I tried to predict the duration for each activity. During this phase, I identified the critical paths, so as to make sure the activities on the critical path were not to be delayed. Consequently, I started from the critical path and progressively assigned the duration for each activity. In addition, I used fast tracking to execute numerous tasks concurrently in order to finish earlier while accounting for any reserve time.

Project Management is a vast subject, and I am glad to experience the work of a project manager in a short amount of time. I was thrilled to see the positive results when I employed project management skills in my undergraduate studies. For example, before the start of each module, I created a compilation of module objectives, deliverables, and initial assumptions of the module. This initiation phase helped me to identify the big picture of a module’s syllabus, the module’s purpose, and milestone schedules.

Risk management is the one of the most important aspects of decision-making in any situation. Understanding qualitative and quantitative risk analysis will enable us to minimize and resolve any adversities while analyzing and regulating present performance.

I strongly believe that to succeed in today’s global commercial environment, students require more than simply reading, writing, arithmetic and computing skills. Students of today must develop abilities that go beyond basic academic knowledge to provide them an edge in the commercial sector (Byrne, 2010). Project management has formed an essential component of my life. If given another opportunity, I would have employed project management tools such as Git and Notion to track the project’s status and create an integration change control plan. Learning is an incremental process that requires combining project management knowledge with practical experience. My future aspirations as a project manager are to create successful teams who can collaborate easily and achieve goals in the shortest amount of time possible.

I wish to end off with a quote from Benjamin Franklin, “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail”. This is very evident in my group project and in our lives too.

References

1. Butschi, S. (2021, November 3). New google cloud student success services help educators scale individualized learning google cloud blog. Google. Retrieved April 18, 2022, from https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/public-sector/new-google-cloud-student-success-services-help-educators-scale-individualized-learning

2. Byrne, J. J. (2010, October 12). Learning library - pmi.org. Project management as a twenty-first century life skill. Retrieved April 16, 2022, from https://www.pmi.org/learning/library?q=career&Industries=Nonprofit+Organizations