Tasks and Roles Learnt in Project Management

Project Management

Assignment 5

Part One: Reflection

Tiffany Coopeland

Professor:

Course:

Date:

Introduction

Project management encompasses the application of knowledge, skills, techniques and tools to project activities to meet the requirements of a particular project on the course (Lock, 2017). A project is an activity or a planned piece of work that is carried out over a specified period with a well-defined purpose. The course teaches students sound project management practices that include identification and scheduling of project resources, the creation of project flow charts, production of critical paths, planning as well as evaluation reports, team management and staff selection, etc. Companies today engage projects whenever they want to develop a new product, solve a specific problem or even change a process. It's a critical course that engineers and project managers need most and should, therefore, be taken with the seriousness it deserves.

Tasks and roles learnt

A project is the backbone of project management, and a student must conduct few projects entirely to grasp the full knowledge intended to be gained from this course. Any single project will involve several activities in various project phases, each of which encompasses one or more project tasks (Institute, 2017). A project task has a deadline with a start and finish dates and can be made up of various assignments each with a defined start and end date. Completion of all the task assignments renders the whole task complete, whereas completion of all project tasks within an activity makes that project activity complete. For instance, considering the completed D4warehouse move project permits approval was one of the various project activities that included multiple tasks, i.e. approval of electrical permits, plumbing permits as well as building permits.

Every project must complete specific tasks within every phase of the project to be successful. The D4warehouse move project included many tasks that were all completed in their respective project activities in each phase of the project from initialization to closure. Failure to complete a task within the stipulated time impacts the entire delivery period of the project and can make the project manager squeeze some other tasks to reflect this change. For instance, the framing installation task could not be completed within the stipulated time, and hence I as the project manager had to reduce supplies and delivery time to make up for the extended task. Various tasks have been learnt during the life of this project including task breakdown and assignment for the success of the project. The whole project included a bunch of project tasks that were all completed in time. However, resource allocation tasks, e.g. budgeting, scheduling, time allocations etc. had been vital in the entire project.