Author: Megan

My MALAT journey has been an exceptional learning opportunity. As I approach the final phase, my objective of enhancing my career with a research-based master’s degree and integrating innovative learning methods into my company’s training environment remains unchanged. Utilizing the insights and hands-on experience I’ve acquired during this program; my aim is to obtain a managerial role responsible for guiding training initiatives and cultivating technologically enhanced learning environments. It will be my honour to extend my research, discoveries, and outcomes with my colleagues, superiors, and leadership within my organization.

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The purpose of this infographic was to illustrate how a COI framework can be utilized to enhance EVO within the workplace. As a team leader, one of my responsibilities involves facilitating the onboarding process. Onboarding remote employees has proven to be a challenging aspect of this role.

Statement of Problem

Employees are dissatisfied with onboarding due to information overload and monotonous training, resulting in reduced engagement and delayed job application. The absence of a structured onboarding system impedes information access and time management. Employees also seek interactive content and feedback opportunities to share onboarding experiences and suggest improvements.

Reflection consists of reflective thinking, reflective learning, and reflective practice (OpenLearn, n.d.). These skills entail showcasing self-direction, self-reflection on learning progress, and the pursuit of knowledge and skill development to an advanced level. I must acknowledge that I do not dedicate enough time to reflection and occasionally overlook its value in my learning and development. Similar to my work context, people are typically enthusiastic about starting new projects and invest a lot of time in their initiation, but often overlook the project closure phase, neglecting the opportunity to learn lessons and improve for future projects.

In unit 2 activity 1, we were tasked to write a critical academic reflection blog update regarding the issues that have been investigated in the learning events and delivery of technology. In my team’s learning event, I have learned that assumptions made about the learning (e.g., a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC)) might not always be applicable. The experience was unsatisfactory and different from what was perceived.

Image: OER by @visualthinkery, licensed CC-BY-SA remix by catherinecronin
https://open.teachingandlearning.ie/license-your-oer/

The Learning and Development team in my organization assembled virtual learning resources to provide continuous learning opportunities for supporting employees’ personal and career development journey. The organization has an extensive list of online courses to help employees work on a range of competencies such as conflict resolution, strategic thinking, leadership, collaboration, and more. Employees can also obtain development opportunities at their own pace via a self-served eLearning program called Bookboon. This platform includes more than 2000 short or bite-sized eBooks and audio titles under 13 different categories such as digitalization and IT, communication and presentation, and Microsoft office programs. Although the organization offers a wide array of learning options, many employees are not aware of their existence. Pontefract (2018) argued even if the employees come across a learning option, they are too busy to consume the learning and then apply it to their role. He also claimed that only about a third of the organization is engaged and willing to excel in their role. As a leader who provides training in my department, I am interested in exploring the irony of colleagues who complained about the lack of learning opportunities but also refrained from using the available learning resources because of a variety of reasons ranging from time constraint or other unspecified factors.   

Being immersed in the project management world for more than a decade, these past nine weeks have revived my knowledge of leadership, project management, data analytics, and change management. Yes, you need them all in leading change in digital learning organizations today.

My perspective of leadership in an organization that provides strategic direction, guidance, support development, and empowerment for operational and people success (Li, 2023) has not changed at the end of this course. While my top three leadership attribute choices were inspiring, honest, and forward looking, I have included broad-minded and cooperative as rank 4 and 5, respectively. In my context, many project managers only focus on the technical side of change such as developing and delivering the solution that solves a problem. I believe leaders would lead successful projects and change when they are also open-minded, receptive, collaborative, and responsive (Kouzes & Posner, 2011) to the people side of change.

According to Prosci’s Unified Value Proposition model, project management and change management have complementary disciplines that aim to meet project objectives and realize organizational benefits (Prosci, n.d.). The integration approach enables project managers and change leaders to work towards a shared definition of success, improves alignment of technical and people activities, and enhances information exchange such as the reasons of change and feedback on adoption and usage of the technical solution (Prosci, n.d.).    

I am excited to integrate project management and change management in my current work environment, and the potential to access and employ the arsenal of toolkits created by my cohort in real work scenarios. It has been a great pleasure learning with everyone in this space. My next goal is to invest in my analytics capability as project management and change management are becoming increasingly data-driven in my organization.  

References:

Kouzes, J. M., & Posner, B. Z. (2011). Credibility: How leaders gain and lose it, why people demand It. San Francisco, Calif.: Jossey-Bass. Retrieved from Books 24×7 e-book database. https://royalroads.skillport.com/skillportfe/assetSummaryPage.action?assetid=RW$564:_ss_book:43184#summary/BOOKS/RW$564:_ss_book:43184

Li, M. (2023). Leadership reflections. Megan’s blog: A MALAT student blog. https://malat-webspace.royalroads.ca/rru0269/leadership-reflections/#more-437

Prosci. (n.d.). Integrating change management and project management. Prosci: People, Change, Results. Retrieved March 26, 2023, from https://www.prosci.com/resources/articles/integrating-change-management-and-project-management

I work in a project-oriented organization which complies with the Project Management Institute’s (PMI) project management standard and practice. Depending on the type, size, duration, resources and other factors of the project, some of them would pursue the full project life cycle which consists of four phases: Initiation, Planning, Implementation, and Closing (Watt et al., 2014), and some of them would be deferred or terminated after the initiation phase.

I was involved in a recent project that was successfully executed and put in service at the end of 2021. The overall goal of the project was to deliver a replacement for the existing time entry solution which did not provide either the ideal business process or technical solution. The existing solution required a high degree of manual intervention that caused invalid data, strenuous corrective actions, and payroll inefficiency. Before the start of the project, a project charter (i.e., statement of work) was issued by the project initiator and the project sponsor to authorize both the project and the project manager (Brown, 2005). It highlighted the requirements, business needs, assumptions and constraints, and summary schedule. After the authorization of the project, a comprehensive and detailed project plan that led to the success of this project was put in place by the project manager. The project plan started with a scope statement, then followed by key deliverables, key milestones, schedule, cost estimates, quality management, project organization, and risk register. Additional project documents included the communication plan, change management plan, and training plan. The overall goals were clearly communicated to the project steering committee, project team, and all the stakeholders by the change management team. The entire stakeholder group consisted of 2,100 employees from 10 different key business units in the organization.

Leadership is known as one of the top organizational values throughout my career experience in the corporate realm. During my first job in Japan, the leadership I experienced was traditional where a top-down style of leadership was preferred in a highly centralized and hierarchical context (Yokota, 2019). To fit in their transactional leadership culture, I recognized leaders as bosses who I had to respect and obey their instructions at the workplace because they possessed the authority to lead and instruct directions to their employees (Workman & Cleveland-Innes, 2012). Overtime, my perspective of leadership has changed through work and life experiences, and people who have influenced me as leaders such as managers, coaches, colleagues, and family members. I learned that leaders can be in different kinds of roles and managers are “paid to be accountable for results produced by others” as defined by Peter Senge (Sarder, 2015, 1:03). Considering this, my perspective of leadership in an organization today plays a critical role in providing strategic direction, guidance, support development, and empowerment for organizational success in both operations and people (BC Hydro, personal communication, February 3, 2023). This also affected my individual ranking of leadership attributes in activity two where “inspiring” came first then followed by “honest” and “forward-looking”. The ranking of these three leadership attributes was aligned with the research informed ones (Kouzes & Posner, 2011).