Project Management Reflection Paper

Unlike many traditional Embry-Riddle-Aeronautical University (ERAU) students, I began my college career having a vast amount of work experience. Many traditional students begin their college careers at the age of eighteen or nineteen, but I began college at the age of thirty four. The reason this is relevant is because when I started this class I had many preconceived notions about project management and project managers. After completing the class, I have dispelled many of these preconceived notions.

Some aspects of project management I thought would be more complex than they actually were. An example of this was simply the definition of project management. One of the first discussion board posts asked us what we thought the definition

However, I have to reflect back to when I worked construction. I used to work for a grading company from 2000-2002, and the crew I was on was fast and efficient. Because of the efficiency of the crew, we were always shifting between job sites, especially when a project started to get behind on deliverables. Since the grade of the land is vital to building, if we got behind, the entire project would get behind. After this class, I now understand what the superintendent and owners were thinking. I’m almost certain that they had the slack, early start, late start, early finish, and late finish worked out. The penalties for our company, who was likely part of the critical path of the project, were probably severe since they couldn’t even begin to pour concrete until we were finished with our deliverables. Once a crew started to get close to the late finish, the owner likely called us to go in and finish the job quickly to get the project back on track. Of course this was frustrating for us since we might be in one city one day, and then in another city the next day, but because of this class, I now understand why it was a necessity. Since we never finished late, I can now see why they offered me more money when I gave them my two weeks-notice. I’m confident that any project manager would

We then set priorities since some deliverables required information from previous deliverables. My assignment at this point was to construct a responsibility matrix. The way I approached this was to look at the task list that we would be using to complete the kitchen remodel, and I broke it down into categories. I used the planning stages, as well as the financial side of it, and then finally all of the different trade deliverables like electrical, plumbing, and painting (Gray, & Larson, 2014). Since Clayton was the homeowner in the scenario, the finance and planning was largely his responsibility being that it was going to be his money and his kitchen. Most of the trade activities were going to be accomplished by a contractor, so I listed the contractor as responsible while having a representative from the group as support to act as a liaison to the contractor. Having different members of the group dealing with separate contractors would alleviate confusion and avoided one member from having to deal with too many contractors. After we finished the deliverables required for the mid-term, we began work on finishing the rest of the project. For the second half of the project, my responsibilities were making the resource constrained schedule and the closeout checklist. I used the same task list that assisted me in making the