October 10, 2017
BY: EMILY WELSH
Happy Belated Thanksgiving everyone!
 |
| This class fell on Thanksgiving Monday! Source. |
Week 5's class fell on Thanksgiving Monday and thus we didn't have an in-person class. Instead, we perused the week's materials on our own time.
Class Learning
This week's material covered the responsibilities and characteristics of the project manager, how to create the project team, support them through the project life cycle, a nine step problem solving strategy, conflict resolutions strategies, and finally considerations for the types of meetings, procedures, documents and communication methods your team will use during the project.
It is crucially important to plan out the methods for completing your project early on and communicate them to your team in a kick-off meeting to ensure everyone can proceed in the same fashion and understand what is required of them.
 |
| Plan out how you will complete the project, (What kind of meetings will you use? How will the team communicate? What are your procedures?) and review this plan with your team! Source. |
Although much of the material presented was straight-forward and doesn't merit deeper discussion here, I found the topic of delegation to be quite interesting. I hadn't realized that there are different degrees of delegation that likely depend on how willing you are (either consciously or unconsciously) as a project manager to give control of a task to your team member. The highest degree asks the member to investigate the problem, take action and decide if they want to inform you of the action. The lowest degree asks the member to investigate and report on the problem, and you, as the project manager, decide what action is taken and who completes it. The barriers to delegation were listed as thinking you can do the task better, lacking confidence in your team, being afraid of losing control, fearing criticism, and lacking self-confidence. A good project manager would be able to keep these barriers in check to make a sound decision on how much to delegate to the team, as delegation is key to ensure you use the time available and the skills of your team in the most efficient manner.
I also found the review of meeting protocol to be quite helpful. Before the meeting you should take time to review the purpose of the meeting and whether it is necessary, define and invite the participants, hand-out an agenda (or perhaps a less formal description of the meeting), and prepare any required materials. At the meeting, review the purpose of the meeting with the participants. I think this is a key step because if members understand why the meeting is valuable and what is supposed to be achieved, you will be able to keep their attention and interest better and limit discussion to what is absolutely necessary.
Reading Insight:
The reading I would like to highlight here are two chapters from Macdonald's book, Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum. Pages 91 - 156 discuss the planning and development of a permanent gallery in the late 1980s for The Science Museum. The theme of this gallery would revolve around food. The chapters provide an excellent case study of a large scale project and the iterations it moved through including issues during the development phase in which the team faced issues which border on scope creep. Alternatively you could more aptly describe the issue as 'initially biting off more than one can chew.' As they researched the content, built the narrative and selected objects, the team found they had more content that they could feasibly display. When presenting the content to the Director, the Director also questioned their narrative and what the messages were. With the amount of content he was confused as to what the exhibition was trying to say to the visitors. When altering and trimming their content, the team had to think about what really mattered to their message; a concept that clearly illustrates the term interpretive plan we use today. Knowing your goals for the exhibit and having a solid curatorial thesis or big idea can help filter what really matters to the project. However, the team ultimately had to alter their big idea.
Most interestingly the author is a researcher who did not play a large part in the project itself. She examines the project and describes it's progress, issues, ideas, team dynamics and museum relationships from a viewpoint more distant from than if it had been written by one of the curators or the project manager, who may be more subjective and emotionally charged. The author refers to her work as ethnography and in this fashion the readers get a better view of both sides of the dilemmas and situations found in the story and gain better insights for their own projects.
Happy Planning!
Resources
Macdonald, S. (2002). Behind the scenes at the Science Museum. Oxford; London: Berg.
No comments:
Post a Comment