Friday, August 06, 2010

Back to school

Today was the first day of the autumn semester of my MBA programme. On the drive there, it was as if the car knew where to go, in the same way that superdog knows the route of our twice daily walks (sometimes I change it just to confuse her). On Fridays, the lectures are in two shifts: from 8-11am, and from 11:15-14:15. I prefer to have lectures in the first shift, but this semester mine are in the second shift. As today is the first day of term when the lecture kits are distributed, I turned up early so that I would definitely be on time for the lecture. As it happens, there was no queue for the kits so I had at least half an hour to kill after receiving the kit. I spoke a little with the course director, checking my future plans, and he also disclosed my result in the economics exam (a very respectable 71).

This semester I am taking the project management course, which should be very useful in the day job. Whilst in a sense almost all of my work could be considered to be composed of projects, strictly speaking a project has to involve more than one person. In this case, the column which I wrote two months ago describes what is a project by every definition, and is sorely lacking management. I am tempted to take some of the material which was presented today and apply this to the MTD project, showing where it is failing (although I know full well where the problem lies, without knowing anything about project management).

Ironically this evening I was looking for some material about in-basket exams on the internet and found a series of three blogs on the subject, ironically from a blog which is mainly about project management. I intend to visit this site more frequently.

No comments: