Journal Problem: Project Management
• Consider a personal project that you have worked on in the past. What steps did you take to begin the project? How did the initiation phase help to provide more information for the planning phase? Based on your project outcome, would you, in hindsight, do anything differently in the initiation phase?
• What are some of the tools, (i.e., work breakdown structure, project scheduling, Gantt charts, and critical path), that you have previously used in a project? Which tool did you find to be most beneficial? Were there tools that you found to be cumbersome? Identify one tool that was not used that could have benefitted the project team. Explain the rationale for your answers.
• Project managers often determine the project's progress based on the elements of the project balanced scorecard (BSC), which includes the internal project, the customer, financing, and growth/innovation. For each of these areas of the project BSC, explain how the project manager would use each area to determine the progress made in the project during the execution phase. Discuss what might factor into how a project manager might prioritize or weigh these elements as they guide the team to project completion and success.
• In this unit, we focus on the controlling phase of the project. A part of the controlling phase is to provide performance updates to the project's stakeholders. Reflect on the information that you would want to know as a project stakeholder. Do you think most stakeholders want to know more information or less information than the project manager may want to share? Explain your rationale.
• In this unit, the focus is on the closing process group. You have learned that maintaining the lessons learned registry and then creating a lessons learned register is vital to future projects and project managers. As a project manager, what type of lessons learned information do feel is most vital to future projects? In what other ways can you help the next project manager or the organization with future projects during the closing phase of your project?
• How will the concepts and learning activities presented in this course benefit you in your future professional or academic pursuits? Share one specific aspect of this course that resonated with you the most, and explain why.
The response should include a reference list. Using double-space, Times New Roman 12 pnt font, one-inch margins, and APA style of writing and citations.