Communicating effectively

Communication is very important when working on a project. A I have learned in any project in life when the project manager communicates everything goes smoothly. As Portny reminds us, “To successfully launch a project, everyone associated with the project must understand the roles and responsibilities” (Portny & Mantel, 2008). If team members do not understand their role in a project the project, it may fail.That is why it is important to be clear what everyone’s role is.

In this week’s activity I viewed a message in multiple ways. I viewed the message by text, audio, and face-to-face. The reason I did this in more the one way was so that I could analyze and understand the delivery of each message. I read the text, listened to the voicemail over and over again, and tried to pay attention to the speakers tone. My interpretation of the messages changed for each message. I found this interesting because they saying “it’s not what you say, but how you say it” came into play for me.

I felt like this activity was meant to show me how words can have power. It also showed me the many modes of getting messages across and how it can be understood by the other party. 

References:
Portny, S., Mantel, S., & Meredith, J. (2008). Project Management: Planning, Scheduling, and Controlling Projects. Danvers: John Wiley & Sons.

Learning from a Project “ Post-mortem”

    One of the most recent projects that I was involved in had to deal with creating a document that placed students that I taught in classes that I thought they would benefit from for the next school year. As a group member I was in charge of coming up with the best way to do this. I had no idea that there were so many ways to complete this task. I ended up creating an excel spreadsheet, but the process took forever.
    Another team member had to make sure that all teachers put this information into the spreadsheet by the deadline, but that quickly failed. Due to the load of work that teachers have the work was not completed in time. Teachers felt like this was just another thing to do on top of what they were already being asked to do. I believe that if teachers were asked to come to a meeting where all they had to do was put this information in they wouldn't feel like they had to make time for this. This would help the teacher get one more thing completed.
    This project may have helped the scheduling process for students and for administration, but it caused chaos and a decreased moral for the teacher. As a result, many teachers were unable to complete the on time which in return caused the schedules to be a whole week late at the beginning of the new school year.