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I started the second (Project Planning & Scheduling) of five required courses for the Bellevue Washington project management certification courses. As is my habit, I like to document my experience, impressions and key concepts learned via a blog posting.
This class started off with 16 students and I picked a nice front row seat. Amazingly enough, I ended up with fellow students from my Introduction To Project Management class on each side of me. More than that actually, both were members of my case study team on the famous picnic planning project from the depths of hell. Like the other Bellevue classes, we received a primary handout of all the printed slides to be show in the class sessions. This makes my little blog debriefing sessions much easier and I like to add notes as I can at the key moments in the class.
I had to groan inwardly because we are going to do another in class exercise session and I dread these. I rarely get much out of them and it seems to be a “blind leading the blind” exercise in futility. This class has an interesting twist, most of the work is done outside of class. Our team case study is actually homework and is done via email communicating with each other. Kind of makes a more social aspect to homework that is different ... to say the least!In this class, we are going to cover three of the nine primary knowledge areas as defined by the PMBOK. These three are scope, time and cost management. One thing I liked about our instructor quite early in the class is her sharing personal experiences about some of the discussed topics. I do want to try and do a better job at capturing this real world project management input. I seem to have forgotten many of these little gems just a few days after the class meeting.
The instructor also relies on the slide material quite heavily and I like this just fine. My last Work Breakdown Structure instructor did not and this may be due in part that the slides for that class were not that great. This slide presentation did have some cute animation and this did seem to distract our instructor. The animations themselves were NOT over the top but seemed to surprise her when they kicked in. I think if an instructor is prepared for the animations, they may be able to tweak their presentation to take full advantage of them as a learning resource retention aid. We covered phase management quite a bit and I found this quite illuminating. Many of the tools, techniques and actions that are true for the project are true for a project phase. The difference is that it is just specific for that phase. Another particularly interesting topic we explored, I had heard about in some project management podcasts I’ve been listening to but this clarified the topic for me.
At one point in the class, the instructor and a student were tossing around the term SME like machine gun fire in an action movie. I wasn’t the only one bewildered and thankfully someone interrupted with ... “what is SME?” and it turns out to be Subject Matter Expert. That was a bit of a buzz kill because I was hoping for something a bit more sensational.
We also covered the differences between functional organization, weak matrix organization and strong matrix organization. I cannot remember a time when I was part of a strong matrix project management organization but the idea of does seem quite appealing.
At this point, the instructor continued to mention that she was woefully behind in the slides. In hindsight, she probably spent too much time covering things we had already covered in our “Intro” class. So this turned out to be a real bummer because we rushed through some content I’d like to have seen explored. Three of the twenty or so slides we didn’t cover in detail were questions about the content. Our instructor simply said to review these at home and that was quite disappointing. Unfortunately, trying to find any material to review for these questions is challenging. Looking on the interwebs, you never really know if the content is on the mark. One of the questions we were going to review was “What are some examples of STEP factors?” but we never discussed what a STEP factor was. It is also missing from any of our required textbooks! The main thing I found was STEP - Social, Technological, Economic and Political Assessment but those links are not particularly project management focused.
Overall, I gave the class a solid B. Instructor seems to be extremely knowledgeable and passionate about her craft. The slides seem to be very good but which we could have given the last couple dozen the attention they deserve. I guess I will be able to review these again when I prepare for the CAPM or the PMP. Really not looking forward to the class work at home exercise but perhaps I’ll be pleasantly surprised. I’ll keep my fingers crossed!
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