Final Project

I am very grateful to Manhattan College for including Project Management coursework within the MSOL degree.  I now have much more experience in using Microsoft Project and the concepts behind effective project management.  I hope to have more opportunities to put this critical tool into action at my workplace.  My final project encompassed everything we did during this course and I am happy to publish it here.  I look forward to implementing the project over the next 8 months.

Full Circle

I feel I have come full circle in six short weeks.  Having had some prior coursework in project management helped prepare me for this week's assignments.  I was thrilled to finally put most of my previous and newly learned knowledge in action.

This week I prioritized work to be done for the St. Dismas project and outlined these priorities in the WBC, the Gantt chart and the precedence diagrams I created.  I also outlined a budget for each task and what significant items I would outlined for the senior leadership at St. Dismas to prepare them for the unexpected.  It was nice to go back to Excel basics and plug in formulas for the percentages for the optimistic and pessimistic budget options.

I look forward to finishing my final project and hope I can explain, in detail, every step of the way.  One of the weaknesses is my ability to explain in spoken word and in a presentation exactly what I am trying to say.  I am much better at writing papers and outlining things in print.

Wish me luck.

Diane

Here are the Excel sheets I created:

without formulas:

with formulas:

Precedence Diagrams

I really enjoyed this week's topic of precedence diagramming.  I learned how to do a forward pass and a backward pass to determine the slack/float of a project and how to determine the critical path of a project in an optimistic, most likely, or least likely time frame.  I used Microsoft Project to assist me with the WBS, AON and Gantt charts.  However, I did the precedence diagrams by hand as you can see, below.  I look forward to hearing from the professor to see if I arrived at the critical path and end dates correctly.

Task Name	Duration	Start	Finish	Predecessors
Task 1	2 days	Sun 2/4/18	Mon 2/5/18
Task 2	5 days	Sun 2/4/18	Thu 2/8/18
Task 3	3 days	Fri 2/9/18	Tue 2/13/18	2
Task 4	7 days	Tue 2/6/18	Wed 2/14/18	1
Task 5	11 days	Tue 2/6/18	Tue 2/20/18	1
Task 6	5 days	Thu 2/15/18	Wed 2/21/18	2,4
Task 7	9 days	Wed 2/14/18	Mon 2/26/18	3
Task 8	5 days	Thu 2/22/18	Wed 2/28/18	3,6
Task 9	7 days	Thu 2/15/18	Fri 2/23/18	4
Task 10	3 days	Wed 2/21/18	Fri 2/23/18	5
Task 11	15 days	Tue 2/27/18	Mon 3/19/18	7
Task 12	6 days	Thu 3/1/18	Thu 3/8/18	8
Task 13	7 days	Mon 2/26/18	Tue 3/6/18	9,10
Task 14	12 days	Tue 2/27/18	Wed 3/14/18	7
Task 15	16 days	Fri 3/9/18	Fri 3/30/18	12,13

Budgeting and Scheduling

This week was an incredible week as I learned how to estimate costs by understanding how the accounting department, the comptroller's office and the project manager view and manage the costs of a project.  I also learned how to estimate and schedule a project using the WBS, a precedence list, the critical path method (CPM), and an AON Diagram, which help to determine not only the critical path the project must follow but also those tasks that allow for flexibility (float) without causing delays in the delivery of a project.

Here is an example of a critical path diagram:

An example of an AON Diagram is below:

How My MSOL Degree and the Project Management Course are Helping My Career

Good morning,

About a year ago, I began my journey towards a master's degree in organizational leadership.  When I applied to the program, I knew it was the right degree for me and the coursework I have taken since then has continually solidified my reasons for selecting this degree.

The timing of each course has fit in so nicely with my actual workload and has enhanced my performance at work tenfold.  I am looking forward to completing my degree and spending the extra time on implementing more of the concepts learned form this program into my everyday workday.

Along the way, however, I have used much of what I had learned but at this present time, project management, has been the most timely and most effective tool.  I am in the middle of hiring a senior director of strategic and digital communications while drafting a digital communications plan and I am using everything I am learning in this course to help me not only manage the hiring process but also draft the digital communications plan. Project planning concepts have helped me to focus on exactly what the scope of these projects need to be and the application of the WBS, RACI and mind-mapping techniques have been invaluable.

Diane

Project Management Office, SMART Goals, Project Charter, Product Requirements Document

I learned a great deal this week. Here are some of the key concepts:

• Conflict and Negotiation
• Project Management Office
• Projectized Organization
• Functionally Organized Projects
• Matrixed Organization
• Enterprise Project Management
• Communication Requirements in all Phases of any Projects
• SMART Goals
• Creating Smart Goals through Tree Diagrams
• Project Charter
• Product Requirements
• Product Requirements Document
• Objective 
• Purpose
• Profiles, Goals and Tasks
• Product Principles
• Prototypes and Testing
• Identify and Question Assumptions
• Write it Down
• Prioritize and Rank
• Test Completeness
• Manage the Product

Project Management

Project Management is the one course that I have been looking forward to taking.  I feel as though my career has brought me to this point and I have so many examples of projects I have participated in, led and want to start.  However, what I really want at this point in my career, is to assign individuals to be the project managers on specific projects.

So far, I have worked on a massive college-wide initiative called Molloy 2020: A Vision for the Future that began with a listening tour in Fall of 2014.  The president and I listened to over 500 employees and created 25 task forces to find out how to best move forward with the 25 themes identified by the employees of the College as priorities for the College going forward.

This process opened up new relationships as well as trust among employees.  It also began our strategic planning process for our 2020 Strategic Plan.  Five years later, we are still working on priorities that were suggested by our employees.  However, what we need now is better planning and processes to bring things to implementation.

I am looking forward to taking this course so I can chart the path for how we will move forward with some of these key priorities for the College.

Here, take a look:  Molloy 2020