I see that I haven't written anything about my current course for the MBA degree, project management, apart from noting the fact that I have started the course. This is partially because we started in August then had a three/four week break in September because of religious and personal holidays, and partially because I was not getting a 'handle' on the subject.
If I remember correctly (and this is a good test to see how much I need to revise), the first lecture was an overview, the second was about groups/teams/personnel management (most if not all of this material was covered in the 'organisational behaviour' course, so I didn't listen too closely), organisational breakdown structures, and risks (including contracts). Most of this was fairly dull and seemingly unconnected with the subject at hand, although the lecturer assures me that the course is holistic and that it will all come together at the end. It's clear to me at the moment that I will have to devote plenty of time to learning modules 3 (risk) and 4 (obs), especially as the exam will require one to write an essay on these subjects.
But now we're in the middle of a three week span of lectures on a subject which seems very straight-forward to me - time management, specifically what is the critical path, calculating the critical path (CPM and PERT) and calculating the time/cost trade off (assuming that quality is maintained), aka 'crashing'. This is fairly simple mathematics/statistics and this serves as a subject which separates the men from the boys. Those who have problems with figures have probably had it easy until now - and now they're struggling - whereas I've been struggling until now.
I found a file on our course site which gives questions and answers about CPM, PERT and EVA (we haven't touched that yet). I did two questions (CPM and PERT) and found them very easy. So I'm going to devote my studying time (ie reading the course book in the evenings) to going over modules 2-4 again. This will be the most efficient use of my time.
1 comment:
Great post! By the time we were taking Project Management course, we were learning but we never understood it's importance.
Now, that we are doing it, we've learned that everything goes together, as one. Thanks a lot for this post!
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