{"id":383,"date":"2022-03-06T16:49:03","date_gmt":"2022-03-07T00:49:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0226\/?p=383"},"modified":"2022-03-06T16:49:03","modified_gmt":"2022-03-07T00:49:03","slug":"lrnt-525-%e2%94%82-activity-2-leading-projects","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0226\/lrnt-525-%e2%94%82-activity-2-leading-projects\/","title":{"rendered":"LRNT 525 \u2502 Activity 2 Leading Projects"},"content":{"rendered":"

Change is difficult and projects are no exception. Some of the stats shared in by Knolscape (2013) were quite surprising, only around 25% percent of new product projects actually make it to market or 31% of IT projects are canceled before being completed. My team recently participated in large project transitioning to a new web conferencing tool and I’m happy to share it has been mostly successful. The stakeholders for this project were potentially all faculty, staff and students tied to our institution. The tone of our project was well captured by Conway et. al. (2017),\u00a0 a project, innovation or change won’t necessarily create a huge impact on it’s stakeholders. That is to say, in this project’s context, we already had the technologies and processes that fit our requirements and it’s replacement would fall roughly into the same range of capabilities. In hindsight of\u00a0 our project’s completion, there was still great benefits to the users and administrative processes with this project, but these were highly dependent on the service we chose and weren’t necessarily the primary focus.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

If compared to the PMBOK 10 knowledge areas shared by Watt (2014), the initiating concern of our web conferencing project was managing cost.\u00a0 During COVID19, the use and demand of web conferencing definitely increased and with our web conferencing contract ending it was important to review other options. Our current service provider drastically increased prices to continue our contract which made continued use of the service unlikely. Switching services required a lot of time commitment beyond the technical implementation of the new web conferencing tool. A couple items my team was responsible for were creating new support materials\/workshops and developing an account creation process. We were able to collect relevant information from the vendors, other institutions already using the web conferencing tool and utilizing internal expertise. A benefit of this web conferencing project occurring during COVID19, almost all stakeholders had recently used a similar service and were familiar with core functionality. One strategy we implemented early in the project was to include a vast range of stakeholders to test the new web conferencing tool immediately after we selected one. This provided great guidance in our tasks and capturing potential issues that may not have been obvious when first approaching the project.<\/span><\/p>\n

With potential issues in mind, our web conferencing project definitely had barriers. Specifically in the aspects of integrating into existing systems and accounts posed a challenge that is continually being worked on beyond the project. As Conway et. al. (2017) described, supporting changes in complex environments requires flexibility as a seemingly static project are almost always dynamic. What was initially evaluated as a simple step in implementation, ballooned into one of the larger issues that needed to be addressed. Luckily to combat these type of hiccups, there was a long enough grace period where both services were available simultaneously which really alleviated time pressure and minimized stakeholder impact. In any future system transitions I would try to maintain this strategy to ease users into the change and provide a backup if things go wrong early in the project.<\/span><\/p>\n

I would consider our project a success and any barriers highlighted items beyond the scope of this project we may be able to work on soon. An additional project is already planned and will be commencing soon to address some better integration solutions. Ideally this could have been done all together, but the reality of budgets, employee time and other obligations created the need for separated projects. As long as we strive for continual learning and improvement, I’m confident we will continue to deliver great results with projects.<\/span><\/p>\n

References<\/span><\/p>\n

Conway, R., Masters, J., & Thorold, J., (2017). From design thinking to systems change: How to invest in innovation for social impact. Royal Society of Arts, Action and Research Centre.<\/span><\/p>\n

Knolscape. (2013). Introduction to Project Management. Youtube. https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=BOU1YP5NZVA<\/span><\/p>\n

Watt, A. (2014). Project Management. Victoria, BC: BCcampus. https:\/\/opentextbc.ca\/projectmanagement\/<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Change is difficult and projects are no exception. Some of the stats shared in by Knolscape (2013) were quite surprising, only around 25% percent of new product projects actually make it to market or 31% of IT projects are canceled before being completed. My team recently participated in large project transitioning to a new web […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":220,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-383","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lrnt525"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0226\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0226\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0226\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0226\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/220"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0226\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=383"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0226\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":387,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0226\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383\/revisions\/387"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0226\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=383"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0226\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=383"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0226\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=383"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}