Running Head: Module 7 Final Paper 1

Module 7 Final Paper

Leon Patzwald

Arizona State University

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“How Good Are Your Project Management Skills?”

Since taking the “How Good Are Your Project Management Skills?” quiz, I can

absolutely identify some areas of growth. These areas include; building a team, monitoring risks,

delivering the project on time and on budget being the most important things. When I initially

took the quiz, I stated that I preferred technical skills over personality, and I think that this was a

mistake. Knowing how personalities will affect your group’s morale and productivity is an

important knowledge area. A person can have all the technical skills imaginable, but if they have

a poor work ethic and a selfish personality, they will harm your project more than help it. In the

beginning of this course, I didn’t think much of the importance of monitoring risks on a regular

basis, but I have since learned that this is a vital part of the project management process. Our

project management scenarios were proof of this in an educational way. If you weren’t prepared

for such mid-project issues such as moving deadlines, losing team members, supplier issues, etc.

then your project is going to face some serious difficulties during its development while you

scramble to fix problems as they arise. As we progressed in this course, I learned the value and

necessity of having a project being delivered both on time and on schedule. In fact, this tended to

be the most important thing that I focused on in each of the scenarios that we participated in.

Especially as we started getting into the swing of things and the final scores began to really

matter. This initial quiz was a great way to see our initial positions and now that we are finishing

the course, it was an interesting experience to take it again and see how things have changed.

My Personal Approach to Project Management

After completing all the scenarios, I found that I tend to prioritize results over other

things such as the budget or team morale. When I say results, I mean completing the project at or

above expectations and doing so by meeting the target deadline. This doesn’t mean that I don’t
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think that meeting the target budget or my team’s morale is important, I just found that in these

scenarios, meeting project expectations and the target deadline were the most important aspects

to succeed in to obtain a high score. In real world scenarios, I believe I am more likely to place a

higher importance upon maintaining my team’s morale because they are real people that I can

see and speak with rather than the nameless and faceless team members within our scenarios. But

at the same time, I am a project manager, so it is my job to ensure that the project is delivered

both on time and meets expectations. Coincidentally, the biggest challenge in these scenarios for

me was staying in line with the target budget. It was quite difficult to do so, especially when

events occur such as a deadline being moved up, losing team members, or other similar events.

This difficulty in staying near the target budget is likely the reason that it was the first thing to be

sacrificed for the good of the project’s development. I was much more adept at staying on course

with the target deadline and the scope of the project, so I chose to concentrate on those aspects

more and therefore was more efficient at making them work.

Connecting Skills to My Professional Environment

After I graduate in Spring 2020, I plan on joining the Army and I certainly believe that

this is an industry that would allow me to use the skills I’ve learned in this class. I would argue

that the areas of managing resources, outcomes, and solving mid-project problems to be the most

important and applicable areas of project management. To start, resources in the army can be

limited, especially if a project is not seen is critical, so it is important for a leader to be able to

make do with less resources than what would be ideal. We certainly had a lot of experience with

this in the Harvard Business Simulations. Specifically dealing with budget shortages and staffing

shortages. These put a major strain on both me and my team and forced us to innovate to

complete the project in a timely manner. There wasn’t a lot of innovation available to us in the
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simulation, but real life experiences in this area would allow us to be more proactive in our

search for alternative solutions. In module seven’s scenario, we dealt with some of our team

members being involved in an accident, so we had to bring in new people and bring them up to

speed on the project. While it is an unfortunate part of life, people do lose their lives or are

injured in war zones so it may be inevitable that at some point you will have to bring in new

people in order to continue working on the project. It is likely that they won’t know the specifics

of your project so additional training will have to be done. Like in another scenario, we dealt

with the competition poaching our staff and not being able to hire anyone new for a few weeks.

If the higher ups identify a project that is more critical than the one you and your team are

currently working on, they may move some of your members away from your group leaving you

in a difficult position.

In the Army, projects can be life and death situations, so a successful outcome is of the

utmost priority. Therefore, the pressure can be intense to ensure that you lead your project to

success by minimizing risks and maintaining the scope of your project. When doing so, you

reduce the need for a white knight to come in and rescue the project. More specifically, leaders

sometimes have “... tiger teams, and ‘staff champions’ in reserve to handle problem projects”

(Williams, 2015) which is essentially a person(s) that comes in during emergencies to save a

project. However, when project managers put their projects in a place to succeed from the very

beginning, these white knights aren’t necessary. In fact, white knights are detrimental to the

development of a project and the leader because they know they can be bailed out so they may

begin to disregard the need for due diligence regarding the risks of the project. As the project

manager, it is your responsibility to ensure that you are fully invested in your project and team

success by finding what resources should be obtained to ensure a project’s success, ensure that
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your team has access to your guidance if required, and setting targets that can realistically be

reached by your team (Majeed, 2018).

Building off the two previous paragraphs, managing a project that experiences a mid-

project crisis is an unfortunately possible scenario considering casualties are sustained in war

zones and unexpected events can happen at any moment. We had to solve mid-project problems

quite frequently in our scenarios such as a deadline being moved up by five weeks, losing staff

unexpectedly due to poaching or injuries, and supplier issues. The best practices for dealing with

mid-project uncertainty I found during this class was in module four within the reading titled

“Managing Project Uncertainty” by David Cleden, specifically chapter three. When starting any

project, an approach that makes sure to balance the various possibilities of problems arising is

called adapt and consists of attempting to “... contain uncertainty to acceptable levels, deal with

unexpected outcomes as they arise, and remain focused on the objective” (Cleden, 2017, pg. 38).

This way, when you take preemptive measures, your project can recover when it faces any mid

project problems. Another way of taking preemptive action in the beginning of a project is called

Suppress which consists of taking “... preemptive steps to reduce the overall levels of uncertainty

before problems occur” (Cleden, 2017, pg. 38). Once a problem occurs, it is too late to take

preemptive measures and you are forced to deal with these issues on the fly which can be

dangerous to the development of the project. This is why it's important to have plans in place

such as knowing of other people that can replace members of you team if anything should occur,

having a backup of all of your team’s work in case there are any data losses, or simply making

sure that everyone on your team is on the same page in terms of the project’s goals and

responsibilities.
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Advice for the Harvard Project Management Simulation

● Managing the schedule of your project

○ In these simulations, management gives you their target date for the completion of

the project.

○ Because you lose points every week that you don’t meet this target, it is important

to design your approach to meet this target.

○ Each printer level has a set number of tasks that need to be completed for it to be

fully designed and considered a success.

○ The number of tasks completed in every week has multiple factors influencing

this. For example, the amount of people on your team, their skill level, the amount

of outsourcing, and the number of mistakes being made.

○ The factor that has the largest impact on the number of tasks being completed on

a weekly basis is the amount of people on your team. However, it is important to

quantity with quality in terms of your team members.

○ Teams made up of highly skilled members will make less mistakes and therefore

keep your project’s development on track.

○ At times, it is necessary to sacrifice your target budget in order to hire more team

members to either stay on track or catch up to the target completion date.

○ When my project was behind schedule, my go to approach was to either up the

skill level of my team or increase the number of members I had on my team.

● Managing your team’s morale and stress levels

○ Managing your team’s stress and morale is important to both your final score and

the number of mistakes that your team makes.

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○ Some actions you can take to increase morale and reduce the stress of your team

is by having realistic deadlines, a large enough team to be able to manage the task

workload, and using prototypes to counteract extensive outsourcing, and meetings

to keep everyone involved and on the same page.

○ When using extensive outsourcing to keep most of your project’s development

down, this takes important and “interesting” tasks away from your team so using

prototypes can give them something to work on while reducing the number of

mistakes potentially being made.

○ When your team has lower skill levels, they can quickly feel overwhelmed by the

tasks they have to complete. Utilizing one-on-one coaching is a great way to help

them solve these problems and prevent them from feeling overwhelmed.

○ Daily standup meetings and status reviews are another key to keeping morale high

and stress low because they help to ensure that your team members are all on the

same page in regard to the project and know how much and what kind of progress

is being made.

● Managing the budget of your project

○ Even though the target budget is often disregarded when attempting to meet the

project’s deadline, there are still steps you can take to reduce your overall

expenses and attempt to stay somewhat close to the target budget.

○ The first, and easiest, step you can take is to activate the use of extensive

outsourcing and the effects are immediate.

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○ Next, pay attention to the target budget put forth by management and create an

initial team that’s cost is close to this target. You can adjust it as needed as the

project progresses.

○ Making sure to not go past management’s deadline target is also a vital aspect to

controlling the budget because every week that you go over, they don’t have an

allocated budget for that week, and this blows your budget quickly past their

target.

○ Finally, making sure that your team is skilled enough to complete tasks in a

timely manner to ensure that the project moves along smoothly and will be

finished in time to meet the target deadline.

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References

Cleden, D. (2017). Managing Project Uncertainty. Routledge.

Majeed, M. (2018, October 16). Duties and Responsibilities of a Senior Project Manager.

Retrieved April 7, 2019, from https://project-management.com/duties-and-responsibilities-of-a-

senior-project-manager/

Williams, T. C. (2015, December 27). Kill The White Knight. Retrieved March 31, 2019,

from https://ecaminc.com/index.php/blog/item/457-kill-the-white-knight