Project Management Resources

When creating a project's schedule, it is very important to consult resources if you are unsure of what to schedule and when. Therefore, I have listed two resources that should help with project management scheduling.

http://www.techrepublic.com/article/estimate-project-costs-after-you-have-estimated-effort-and-duration/6080089

This appears to be a blog post with a lot of pertinent information. This blog suggests that you evaluate effort first. once you have evaluated effort, you can then evaluate the other areas of scheduling. Other suggestions include the need to evaluate both internal and external labor costs as well as the non-labor costs such as travel expenses, materials, and training.

I will use this source to help me with budget and schedule because it provide areas that need to be scheduled and budgeted that I had never thought of before.

http://www.hyperthot.com/pm_cost.htm

This is a great resource because it provides suggestions to the project manager on how to to estimate costs. This can be very challenging even to the the experienced manager. This resource suggests that the manager implement project cost goals. However, most of the time the cost goals are strictly tied to the budget.

This resource also suggests that the manager should look at the history of the cost data and use that data to come up with the estimates. This resource also identifies things that may have been left out once the const estimation is complete. Those things are parts of scope, technical difficulty and changes.

I will use this resource to assist me with estimating costs for my project as well as evaluating how well my estimations will fair to comparable past projects.

The Errors in Communication

In my opinion the best type of communication occurs when you are face to face with someone. of course that type of communication is not always feasible. However, one must realize that if there is any other type of communication that occurs besides face to face communication that it can end up in several misinterpreations.

Also in communication I have had a lot of issues with miscommunication while texting. Many of those times it resulted in everything being negative. Therefore, if you insist on communicating through print, it is imperative that you have several people read it so that they may catch anything that you may have missed. Having people review it can also aid in ambiguous language.

Communicating through a video message can also be effective because the viewers can see the informer and hear them and there may also be text on he video to help to enhance what is being said.

However, in the case of project management, I think that all of the communication channels should be insisted upon. This way, everyone involved in the project can have access to the message that is attempting to be conveyed. Also to avoid conflicts, all messages through all communication channels should be reviewed by several people before they go live.

The Limited Experiment

Actually no project that I have worked on the past has resulted in desired outcomes because most of the programs that I have had have always come across unforeseen circumstances. One instance of a project that did not get the desired outcomes was when I was a biology major. I conducted a lot of experiments but the one that stayed with me the most happened when I grew many different soybean plants in the greenhouse.

There are many factors that need to be taken into account when you grow plants in the greenhouse of which you are not in charge. If you are not in charge, then you have to conduct your experiments based on other people's time. Most of the time, the greenhouse is not open on the weekend and they are not open during lunch hours and if anyone calls in sick then there creates another problem.

In this experiment, I grew plants of three different soybean plants that are indigenous from three different areas of the world. Unfortunately, for this experiment to be successful, the plants need daily around the clock care. However, daily around the clock care could not be attained for the many reasons aforementioned. However, I am not saying that the project was a complete failure because the plants grew unusually. Thus, this unusual growth that was due to atypical growing conditions resulted in unforeseen outcomes.

From what I have learned all of my life, many breakthroughs in science and other disciplines have come about by accident. Therefore, as mentioned earlier, the experiment produced unexpected outcomes because I was using someone else's facility. When you use someone else's facility, you have to abide by their rules and operating times. This can make it almost impossible to conduct a variety of experiments-- especially those that require daily and around the clock care.

In order to make the project/experiment more successful, I could have chosen to study different types of soybeans that did not require so much attention, or chosen to study a different plant altogether. If I would have taken into account these instances then the limitations of the experimental environment would not have been such a factor.