Title: Final Exam
Course: KVCC BUS208 > Section: Assessments

Question 1

In the first chapter, there was a discussion as to why project management was important and this set the stage for the remainder of the course. In the first exam, you answered some questions on what you thought a project manager was and what they did. Now that we have gone through this semester, I want you to go back and review many of these questions based on the additional knowledge you have obtained. Answer the following questions:

a.      What is a project manager and what do they do? Your definition should demonstrate a complete understanding of all of the topics that we have discussed in class.

b.      What do you believe are the five most important skills for a project manager to have? Why? Defend your answers with evidence and research.

c.      Do you think we need project managers/do they provide a valuable purpose? Why/Why not? Defend you answer.

d.      If you owned your own business and conducted projects within it, how would you incorporate project managers?

i.     Would you hire in house managers or would you contract them out?

ii.     What organizational style (I.E. Functional, Dedicated Project teams, and Matrix) would you select to support the project managers? Why?

iii.     Do you think that the freedom you provide Project Managers has an impact on their job performance? Why/Why Not?

1.      If you answered yes then what steps, would you take to ensure they have the power that is necessary to get their job down?

2.      If you answered no, then do you need to reevaluate the necessity of project managers? If they have no power and are still responsible for the completion of a project, is that a reasonable expectation?  Why/Why not?

iv.     Look above at your definition of a project manager and what they do, use this to answer the following questions:

1.      How would you support these pieces of what a project manager does within your organization? If you are saying that this is what a project manager needs to do how can you, ensure you are providing and supporting their needs?

2.      You listed the top skills that you believed every project manager should have, how can you support these within your business? Things to think about:

a.      How will you evaluate these skills during the hiring process?

b.      What methods will you take to further your project manager employees in their training and skills?

c.      Would you encourage the Project manager to teach these skills or try to assist in their development in your other employees?

e.      Now I want you to think on this from the perspective of you being a project manager. Answer the following questions:

i.     What organization style would you desire to be hired into? Why? Provide support for your answer.

ii.     How much freedom would you want within an organization, Why? It is likely that we all want more power and control however justify your answer based on your needs of managing projects.

iii.     If you are a project manager, in an organization and you are asked to manage a project but are given very little power to do so how would you handle this? Remember in some cases the pressure of the projects success or failure is on you often times in situations when you have little control over getting things done. How do you reconcile and combat this? Provide support and evidence for your answer.

iv.     What characteristics would you look for in an organization to see if you would be a good fit as a project manager there? Explain your answer.

v.     Again, you developed a list of necessary skills, reflect on these when it comes to you as an individual.

1.      Do you possess these skills currently?

a.      If yes explain your comfort and skill level

b.      If no how are you going to obtain them

c.      if mixed then answer based on both

2.      How will you practice and sharpen these skills in the future? As per this, I would like you to search some training that is applicable and summarize the item and why you think it would be beneficial and directed towards your goals of skill development.

3.      What methods could you use to teach or engender these in others?

f.       Finally, I want you to reflect on the various components of project management and the skills and items we have discussed in class. In the first part of this question, you were asked to write a complete definition of a project manager and what they do. I want you to think on these skills and performance pieces and what you have hopefully learned in class this semester. Answer these questions:

i.     Would you consider a career in project management? Why/Why not?

ii.     Even if you do not want to go into project management how could you apply these skills and knowledge areas to your life? Give examples.

iii.     Where do you go from here? Do you plan to advance your training or getting some certifications? Is there any area of project management you would like explored further such as in a professional development course at the college?

Question 2

One of the chapters we spent the most amount of time on was that of chapter 2 and the topic of aligning your projects to your organizational strategy. As I stated I think this is one of the most important areas you can consider and one of the biggest that we are lacking in the modern business world. To achieve this, we have to first of all determine what our organizational strategy is and then align all subsequent projects with it. Answer the following questions on this topic:

a.      We have already had questions on defining organizational strategy and all of the definitions that exist within that concept. I want you to now start to apply this further and connect it to an actually business, more specifically one that you will be managing.

i.     What process would you use to define your organizational strategy:

1.      What steps would you take to develop the business’s mission?

2.      Who would you involve, Why?

3.      What person or group will be the ultimate decider on the strategy?

4.      Once the strategy is decided upon how will you collect and distribute it to your employees?

ii.     Once you have this strategy in place how will you train your staff on its contents and the direction the business is heading?

1.      Is this training important, why/why not?

iii.     You have the strategy and your staff have been trained the next step is to build a formal structure for revision:

1.    How often will you revise your mission, Explain?

2.      What will be the process to revise?

3.      Who will be involved?

a.      Who can submit ideas

b.      How will these submissions occur?

4.      Who will be the ultimate decider of the revisions?

iv.     How will you model this strategy to your employees?

v.     What methods would you implement to ensure your organization is focused on this strategy and moving in the intended direction, Explain.

vi.     Will you disclose your mission statement or strategy to the public, why/why not?

1.      Do you think customers or the public would be interested in this information?

a.      If you were a customer would reading these statements by an organization sway your opinion on them?

b.      If a strategy aligned with your views would that matter, why/why not?

c.      If it did not align with your personal views would you choose to not do business with them? Why/why not?

vii.     How valuable do you believe this organizational strategy to be?

1.      Can an organization be successful without this planning? Explain

2.      If this was your business would you actually do this process you developed above, why/why not?

b.      Once you have the mission calculated then you have to determine methods to align your project to it:

i.     What steps would you take to evaluate any projects in your organization against that of its dominant strategy?

ii.     Who would you want to perform this evaluation?

iii.     Who is the decider on the fit of the project to the mission of the business?

iv.     What would you have for cutoffs, another way to put this is what percentage of alignment would be necessary to be selected?

v.     What methods would you introduce to make this selection fair and balanced?

vi.     If you reject an idea how would you explain this to the group or individual that submitted it?

vii.     If a project came along and it seemed to be guaranteed money but did not align with the strategy what would you do? Explain in detail your though process.

viii.     How would you factor risk into this assessment of the projects and their alignment?

Question 3

We have discussed project management and how it relates to a business and the alignment of projects with the organization strategy. The next consideration we have to put into this is the examination of the structure and culture of the organization which will have a large amount of impact on how a project will fit within an organization. Every business is different because they have different people and we need to understand this because not all approaches will work everywhere. Answer the following questions on this topic:

a.      The first part deals with the structure of organization in relation to projects

1.      In a previous exam you defined each of the styles of structure that of functional, project teams, and matrix based. You also were asked to describe which you would implement. Now that you have been exposed to more information when it comes to the field of project management I want you to reevaluate and answer these questions: (In the question 1 you decided on what structure you would choose so base these answers on that)

2.      How important do you think the business structure matters when it comes to the success of a project, explain?

3.      No matter which you select how would you support projects within your organization?

4.      If your organization that was structured in a different manner than you would like how would you effect change:

a.      How would you persuade the organization?

b.      What steps would you take to start the change?

c.      How would you involve the workers within an organization?

d.      How would you determine when the transition is complete?

e.      Who would be the evaluator of this completeness

j.           The next consideration that has to be done deals with that of the culture that exists within the business:

1.      What impact do you think the culture has on the running of a business?

2.      How does this effect projects? Provide an example to explain your point.

3.      What process would you use to determine the culture of an organization, explain in detail?

4.      When you have determined the culture how can you use this information to benefit project development and lessen the affects you listed above?

a.      If you had a culture in an organization that did not support the projects that were being developed within what would you do to change the culture? Can this even be done? Explain.

b.      If you had a person or group of people that were impacting the culture in a negative fashion what would you do? Why?

c.      When you are hiring people to work in your business how would you evaluate that they fit within your culture?

i.     What if they were very skilled but you did not think they would be a good fit?

ii.     What if they were lacking in skills but would fit in nicely?

iii.     Ultimately how much of this fit would be a consideration in hiring?

5.      The idea of culture and selecting people that fit within it opens up some interesting considerations. Answer the following questions:

a.      By hiring and wishing people to fit within our established culture are we encouraging conformity? Is this a good or bad thing?

b.      Does a strong culture force everyone to think within the confines of the same box?

c.      How do we encourage people to question and analyze things and look beyond their experience and past to benefit the organization?

d.      Should we hire people that will shake things up and have fresh and differing views from the rest of the staff? Why/why not?

e.      Should this culture adapt to changes in society and the market or should it remain insulated from the outside world?

6.      Overall what is your opinion on corporate culture? Summarize your stance and thoughts here.

Question 4

Once we have an understanding of projects, our corporate strategy and the alignment of said projects, and how our culture and structure impact them we can then get down to the detail of planning and executing these projects. Answer the following questions:

a.      One of the most important responsibilities of a project manager is assisting with the defining of the scope of the project and then ensuring that it remains the focus throughout. The follow questions are on the scope:

1.      What process would you use to develop a project scope?

2.      Who will be involved in the development?

3.      How important is the scope?

4.      How will you keep the project focused on the scope and not allow it to creep?

5.      What technique will you use to manage the scope in the event that items have to be removed or amended?

6.      Who will be involved in this decision?

b.   Ultimately we are attempting to deliver the needs of the customer, so how will you ensure that they are kept in the loop and a part of all decision making procedures in the future.

c.   The next part of the project process is to begin the estimating of the time and costs, the following questions are on this:

1.      We discussed two approaches that of top down and bottom up how would you include this within your organization? Would you learn more towards one or would you include both methods?

2.      Explain how you would gather and define the time and costs associated with your project as well as describing who will be involved? Go into detail on your process.

d.   Once you have your basic estimates you are going to start fleshing things out but developing a network plan.

e.   What steps would you take to complete a network plan?

f.    How would you use a network plan within your organization?

g.   How can we use slack within our projects, why is it useful?

h. The next step in the project development process is examining risk that will be inherit as part of the project:

1.      How will you identify risk within your projects and organization?

2.      Once you identify these risks how will you address them?

i.  Resource management is necessary to consider as part of project development and is one of the areas that have a huge impact on the results and time involved:

1.      How will you manage and allocate resources within your organization?

j.  As established a project manager often has to juggle time, budget, and resources. Due to this many times we have to shorten the project for a variety of purposes:

1.      How would you determine the need to shorten a project?

2.      What approaches would you take to crash projects if you were managing them as a business owner?

3.      Which approaches would you never consider as options, why?

4.      What is the relationship between direct and indirect costs when it comes to crashing a project activity?

5.      Who should be making the decisions when it comes to shortening a project?

6.      How would you ensure that the customer is involved in this process?

k. The above is a quick rundown on structuring and building out a project. What is your overall opinion on this process and how will it impact how you work on projects in the future?

Attached Files: | - KVCC BUS208_ProjectMgmt_Final Exam.pdf