Category: LRNT 525

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.

Continue reading “Leading Projects”

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).

Continue reading “Leadership Reflections”