Thursday, March 31, 2011

Estimating Costs and Allocating Resources: Budgets and Resource Allocation

What do you find the most challenging about estimating activity durations and resource costs?

Creating a comprehensive schedule is one of the more difficult activities that project managers face. Schedule creation is often considered more art than science, and results often support this. What is often more frustrating is that team members often find themselves on one team with a project manager that creates and manages schedules a particular way and on another team with a project manager with a different approach (Holohan, 2010).


Links -
1. http://www.super-business.net/Project-Management/Activity-Duration-Estimating.html -

2. http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/project-help/estimate-activity-duration-HA001139963.aspx -


Reference

Holohan, R. (2010).6 Steps to Successful Schedules. Retrieved March 31, 2011 from http://www.projectsmart.co.uk/6-steps-to-successful-schedules.html




All about Dynamic Views for Readers

All about Dynamic Views for Readers

Friday, March 18, 2011

Communicating Effectively

  • How did your interpretation of the message change from one modality to the next?
  • What factors influenced how you perceived the message?
  • Which form of communication best conveyed the true meaning and intent of the message?
  • What are the implications of what you learned from this exercise for communicating effectively with members of a project team?

Communication can occur by various means, each with varying degrees of richness (Daft & Lengel, 1984). At present, there are four basic communication modes utilized in the workplace: face-to-face meetings, audio or telephone exchanges, video-mediated conferences, and computer-mediated text transfers. Using media richness theory, McGrath and Hollingshead (1993) developed a grid of task and media fit to explain the moderating effect of task type on media richness and performance. Briefly, their model suggests that there is an optimal fit for the information richness required of a task and the media chosen to mediate that task. For example, text based computer messaging is a "good fit" for generating ideas, but not for negotiating conflicts; likewise, video systems offer the optimal level of richness for judgment tasks but are insufficient for negotiating tasks and too rich for generating ideas.

After reading the email, listening to the voice message and face-to-face interaction; although, each message had the same meaning, the delivery of the message will determine how the message is received, and there were no factors that affected my decision or reaction to the message.

I would rate face-to-face communication as more of a preferred choice of communication and not necessarily the better choice. Again, all three forms of communication have the same message but the delivery and interpretation may be different.

After reading and experiencing the communicative correspondences, my perception in regards to how messages are delivered, I don’t think that there is a better way, but depending on the circumstances of the situation, one of these forms of communication can be a by-product of the sender, but the interpretation is left up to the receiver.

Sunday, March 6, 2011

The "Instructional Designer" role... EDUC-6145-1 Project Management in Education and Training

With consideration of the project management process and the tasks associated with the instructional design process: according to Dr. Harold Stolovitch, one critical difference between the instructional designer and the instructional design project manager is that, as an instructional designer you have to have good analytic skills and you have to be able to analyze the context, analyze your learners, analyze the tasks that need to be done, you got to be able to design and develop excellent instruction, verify that learning occurs, then the evaluation portion.

As a project manager all of those skills come into play as well but in a very different way, because the main thing here is managing resources, managing people, managing money and managing time and being an excellent communicator, verifying understanding so that everyone are singing on the same key. Those are the key differences, you focused allot on an orchestral leader role rather than an individual musician role (Project Management and Instructional Design).

In contrast, the comparison of the phases in project management and instructional design activities yields many similarities and a few differences: the comparison of project management and instructional design phases indicates the both adopt a systematic approach. Both engage in careful planning and focus on consistency as a means to deliver quality. Both try to establish problem-solving procedures to guide decision makings. Both decisions are made on the basis of a systematic and analytic framework. Arguably, instructional design must be expanded to include the value of project management as a tool (Lin, 2006).

In regards to, who should define the priorities of the project: both the people who requested the project and the project team, through the process of negotiation and discussion, should agree to all terms in the SOW before actual project work is started (Portny, Mantel, Meredith, Shafer, Sutton, & Kramer (2008).

The key priorities will have to be in place before the initial project begins, of course there must be room for uncertainty, regardless of the scope and or goal of the project. My role as an instructional designer influences my thinking and priorities, at the beginning of an ID project by ensuring that the project falls within the timeline of completion and identifying the specific goals while addressing problems of the project during its design and development. I believe that my role falls under the functional employee or project team members’ category, because I would be the person responsible for successfully performing individual project activities (Portny, Mantel, Meredith, Shafer, Sutton, & Kramer (2008).


References
Lin, H. (2006). Instructional project management: An emerging professional practice for design and training programs. Workforce Education Forum, 33(2). Reprinted by permission of the author.

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.

“Project Management and Instructional Design”
In this program, Dr. Harold Stolovitch discusses what project management is, why instructional designers must learn it, the difference between the roles, and how project managers can effectively manage their workload.