The hardest assignments for me in this course (672) have unexpectedly turned out to be the blog posts. Perhaps it's my checkered history with blogging (see 'blog fail', again), but it was hard for me to see from the beginning why these posts were important (it might have helped if I'd actually looked at their weight in the grading).
Now, with the end of the course looming and the final project done, I see the point. There's something about documenting a process that changes its place in your consciousness, and opens the door to useful retrospection. As I struggle tonight to turn all of my haphazard draft posts of the last two months into something I can publish without shame, I hope I find time to benefit, at least a little, in the intended way.
8.11.2010
When is "management" not a bad word?
Project management is a very interesting concept to me, because I operate professionally in world of projects that should be managed, and that technically have leaders, plans and desired outcomes; yet, somehow, there's never really any sense of project management happening. Management of individual employees, resources or processes, perhaps, but not an overall eye on plan and execution.
Perhaps it's a sign of career maturity that the steps and systems of project management as laid out in PMBOK are both comprehensible and appealing to me. I also appreciated the fact that the treatise began with a clear definition of what a project is - that a 'project' has certain characteristics (short duration, unique factors, a development arc, a specifically assembled team) that distinguish it from every other dang thing you do in the work day.
Unfortunately, I haven't left myself enough time in the semester to do the readings justice. I think it would behoove me to spend some time with the PMBOK (which I picture as a sort of gazelle every time I think the acronym). I did find a lot to think about in the article I reviewed for the assignment, which was a case study of projects and management in action.
This and the technology planning units presented me with some challenges, since I've always worked in environments where planning gets shortchanged, and leadership is present, but boundaries of responsibility are often fuzzy. In a sense, these subjects are much harder for me than configuring a server and constructing a database.
Perhaps it's a sign of career maturity that the steps and systems of project management as laid out in PMBOK are both comprehensible and appealing to me. I also appreciated the fact that the treatise began with a clear definition of what a project is - that a 'project' has certain characteristics (short duration, unique factors, a development arc, a specifically assembled team) that distinguish it from every other dang thing you do in the work day.
Unfortunately, I haven't left myself enough time in the semester to do the readings justice. I think it would behoove me to spend some time with the PMBOK (which I picture as a sort of gazelle every time I think the acronym). I did find a lot to think about in the article I reviewed for the assignment, which was a case study of projects and management in action.
This and the technology planning units presented me with some challenges, since I've always worked in environments where planning gets shortchanged, and leadership is present, but boundaries of responsibility are often fuzzy. In a sense, these subjects are much harder for me than configuring a server and constructing a database.
8.05.2010
Wrappings
There's a lot to think about in this course, and in a way I don't think it can end at midnight on the 11th for me. When I registered for Applied Technology I expected a lot of hands-on work, and I got it, and very useful it's been too. I've passed that terribly important point where the threads of the tasks we've performed have become interwoven, and I'm beginning to see the shapes of interconnected systems in the weave.
Passing that milestone makes it possible for actions taken, like commands given at the command line, to have all the necessary associations with the bigger picture that really make reason and memory work effectively. There's been even more to this class, however.
That same sense of an overall fabric of technology has also pulled the threads of planning and project management into its weave. These are subjects to which I'd have been indifferent earlier, and which I now see in context. That may be the most valuable thing I'm carrying away, and that realization has come quite late - late enough that I may have to continue studying for this class long after the deadline has passed.
This late post has been back-dated to keep everything in order.
Passing that milestone makes it possible for actions taken, like commands given at the command line, to have all the necessary associations with the bigger picture that really make reason and memory work effectively. There's been even more to this class, however.
That same sense of an overall fabric of technology has also pulled the threads of planning and project management into its weave. These are subjects to which I'd have been indifferent earlier, and which I now see in context. That may be the most valuable thing I'm carrying away, and that realization has come quite late - late enough that I may have to continue studying for this class long after the deadline has passed.
This late post has been back-dated to keep everything in order.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
