Projects on a Personal Perspective

Projects are interesting, involving and knowledge/experience packed especially if one is in the right field. Vaidyanathan (2012, p.2) describes project management as the act of collaborating with people using other required resources such that a project is planned, organized, and controlled effectively to accomplish its goals and objectives. A project according to the description given there above, is only considered successful if successfully complete. Personally, I like working on projects that have the capacity to last for decades. I like it when am involved in something that might be useful to my grandchildren. In my organization, projects are a means of ensuring that the company remains as a going concern. Projects is what makes the company sustainable both in the short run and in the long run. I see people take delight in projects that have an impact to the public. To ensure that these people are properly motivated as a project manager, it would be a priority area to have the people interact with the beneficiaries of the project to ensure that they feel what they are doing is of importance to other people.

Reference

Vaidyanathan, G. (08/2012). Project Management, 1st Edition. [devry]. Retrieved from https://devry.vitalsource.com/#/books/9781269551083/

Post 2

Differentiating Project and Non-Project Work

Project and non-project work are two different things that every business or organization need to understand as clearly spelt out by Kerzner and Kerzner (2017). Project work evolves around a specific project that is listed as a priority area in the organization. Departments and human resource are organized and structured around each particular project. For instance, a project manager in such kind of a setting is responsible for organizing work flow and personnel to get the project work done. Teams in the project work are organized in a way that enables interaction to maintain focus to the main goal (Vaidyanathan, 2012). On the other hand, non-project work entails any other work that is not tied around a particular project. Each department is responsible for a given function, for instance, a firm might have departments such as human resource, accounting, and marketing among others.

References

Kerzner, H., & Kerzner, H. R. (2017). Project management: a systems approach to planning, scheduling, and controlling. John Wiley & Sons.

Vaidyanathan, G. (08/2012). Project Management, 1st Edition. [devry]. Retrieved from https://devry.vitalsource.com/#/books/9781269551083/

Post 3

New Product Development Project

In the current era of technological advancement, a project can range from the development of a mobile app to building a mile-tall building or a few tens of thousands of tones aircraft supercarrier. This effectively means that a project can be complex to super complex. In all projects that involve the development of a new product, some steps are quite uniform. First, according to Barczak and Kahn (2012) is the conceptualization stage which aims at detailing what needs to be the output. After knowing what the end product should look like, the process enters into the design stage followed by the development stage. In the development stage, real work that molds the raw materials using labor and knowledge is initiated and sustained in accordance to the design. If the product being developed is a commercial product, the last step becomes marketing. To prolong the life cycle of a product, maintenance and improvement need to be carried out. As detailed by Petala et al. (2010), sustainability in new product development should always be in the minds of new product developers and as such, all organizational issues that are required need to be ironed out lest they become barriers.

References

Barczak, G., & Kahn, K. B. (2012). Identifying new product development best practice. Business horizons, 55(3), 293-305.

Petala, E., Wever, R., Dutilh, C., & Brezet, H. (2010). The role of new product development briefs in implementing sustainability: A case study. Journal of Engineering and Technology Management, 27(3-4), 172-182.