Reflective Essay ; Caneta Inc

Understanding Project Management

In my experience as an IT Professional I always tried to stick to the belief that, expertise, application of good techniques, use of the right tools plus the knowledge gained over the years from other similar experiences could help solving similar problems in different time and environment.

It was also my belief that in projects where the team which was put together is made of experts in their fields, the role of the project manager would make no such difference in the achievement of the goals; and now i realize that I could not be more wrong.

In all projects in which I have taken part in the last 5 years in the company I work for there has always been something that went wrong. Sometimes it was over budget, sometimes problems were related to the timing, and in some cases the product that was delivered has not achieved the expectations of the customers. But no matter what, things don’t change and projects keep being managed accordingly. The processes and their workflow are there, well defined and in accordance to the company’s governance policy, processed by the enterprise project management tool that every project manager have to comply with it. The tool generate alerts so that the project managers can take actions. Instead, what they do is to simply reschedule activities without hesitation, without planning, without considering the budget. The main concern is to take their projects out from the red light.

The thing that has always intrigued me from the beginning was the fact that I had never noticed any sense of discomfort among the team members of these projects, in front of such "failures".

One of the main reasons for this indifference, in my opinion, is due to the fact that it is a pub...

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...Chart, Cost Breakdown Analysis, Quality Management Plan, Change Management Process, Risk Matrix other than the Project Plan.

Despite the fact that we did not have enough time to spend as a group on analysing every single document that was produced by the other members I decided to produce some of the documents on my own for educational purposes. The one on which I have had more difficulty making was the Logic Network Diagram.

Most of the time creating a schedule gantt chart can be tricky for me and identifying the critical tasks very difficult. With the logic network diagram I learned that I can define a logical path for the tasks which will then lead me to having a clear vision on how the events should be executed and will provide me with visibility on the right sequence of activities and support the creation of the schedule gantt chart, that will become easier.