Program and Portfolio Management Information Systems
1. Consolidated Portfolio
Task Description Assignment Overview
In this unit you are required to complete a weekly portfolio. A portfolio provides evidence of previous and current experience and presents a dynamic record of your growth and professional learning over the duration of this unit. Your portfolio will provide an account of your learning based on your practice and your critical reflection.
Task
Your task is to write a weekly portfolio reflecting upon your learnings from the prior week. In your portfolio you will identify: the learning outcomes and module/topic of the unit, a description of your experience, including reading samples or records, your learning from your experiences, and any supporting documentation of prior or current learning.
Purpose
The primary purpose of this assessment item is to help you to develop skills for undertaking research and translating, via your technical and creative skills, underpinning concepts about project and portfolio management information systems. The secondary purpose of this assignment is to give you the opportunity to enhance your analysis, critical thinking and written communication skills. Developing a portfolio, as a result, makes your learning more explicit as you translate your workplace and personal experiences into documented evidence. You can then learn to critically examine the nature of your learning on this unit in relation to specific experiences in your project management practice and demonstrate that you have learned from those experiences and how you have achieved or maintained your professional competence as a result.
The assignment will also give you the opportunity to enhance your analysis and written communication skills; particularly in the areas of rigorous structured assignment writing.
Structure
You will be provided on the Moodle web site with a portfolio template. You should use this template and upload a weekly portfolio to the Moodle web site. At the end of this unit you will consolidate your portfolio into a single document and upload an overall consolidated portfolio submission. Your portfolio should contain a coherent, but necessarily restricted review of the academic literature related to the project management topics for each week. You should also include a weekly reference list formatted in the prescribed style. You are also encouraged to include a bibliography. This assessment item involves researching the topics to enhance your understanding of each concept through an utilisation of academic literature and secondary sources. Whilst you must use the recommended textbooks and web links, you should also refer to other sources on the Moodle web site and additional relevant peer reviewed academic journal articles of your choosing.
Weekly Portfolio
Your weekly portfolio can be as long or as short as you want it to be. It is your portfolio and shows your development of understanding during the unit. Naturally, this will make the portfolio different for everyone. Each student's background, education, current and past work experiences is what makes it different.
Each student's personal researches will be different. What you need to do is to give yourself enough time to reflect and show how you have thought and come to grips with the ideas that address the learning outcomes of the unit. The amount of time you should be allocating to the unit is 12 hours per week. So there should be a fair bit of time for you to make the reflections and reach a depth of insight that will make the portfolio meaningful.
With each weeks portfolio that you submit you do not include the writing that you made for a prior week. Instead you use the same portfolio template using only the section for the week you are writing about. In other words each week's portfolio is a reflection upon that week. You should however, revisit the whole of the unit learning outcomes each week. The portfolio for any previous week is a reflection of your insights and thoughts for that week. Once you upload the portfolio then leave it for that week. Over the duration of the unit you will find that there is a development and change of your ideas as you study the material. You will then have opportunity at the end of the unit to consolidate everything and show how you have gained the insights that the unit is seeking to provide. At the end of the unit you should review your weekly portfolios and consolidate them into a single submission. You should make a personal reflection in this submission. This is the assessment that gets marked.
It is to your benefit to have the personal discipline to make sure that you do not get behind. If you are allocating 12 hours per week for the unit then there is plenty of time for the portfolio. If you find that one week you slip then ok, but the unit is fundamentally planned so that you need to allocate 12 hours each week.
The unit is straight forward, but there are lots of web sites to visit and material to download. The text books are only part of the story and you won't be able to do the unit with just the text books. Unfortunately, much of the material is written from a North American perspective. You will need to consider other industry sectors and also to be able to translate the learning outcomes into an Australian or other cultural perspective. Therefore, you will need to download other files and visit web sites to be able to gather the material you need in your portfolio.
There are no bonus points for getting the portfolio perfect from the first week! Understanding and familiarity will only develop over time. As you do the portfolios' each week and keep revisiting the learning outcomes and adding the unit material then you will gain insights required. Unless you do that on a weekly basis you won't have the appropriate perspective to make the journey and reach the destination by the end of the unit.
Consolidated Portfolio
You will be provided with a template for the consolidated portfolio due at the end of the unit. Since you'll have made your own journey studying during the unit then the material that you will want to include in this portfolio will be unique for you. Your final portfolio will explain how you have developed your understanding of the learning outcomes and the topics with each week's study.
You final portfolio MUST be made as a single submission. i.e. merge all your weekly submissions into one file and submit a single big file
You must NOT use an index and numbering system to identify material from prior week's leaving each portfolio on the unit web site.
The final portfolio is the important one! It's important that you make it clear to the marker what your consolidated portfolio refers to otherwise you may not get the marks you expect.
An analogy for the final portfolio is that you can imagine that you are going before an examination board at the end of the unit and presenting to them a complete portfolio of your journey through the unit. You will hand each board member a package that they should then be able to read and from it appreciate everything that you have done and learned during your work life and the unit.
Referencing Style
American Psychological Association (APA)
2. Essay
Task Description
Your task is to consider the contents of:-
- SEBoK
- AS/NZS 15288 Systems engineering - Systems life cycle processes
- Full Final Report from the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling Chapter 5:
- Overarching Failures of Management of the Chief Counsel's report from the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling
- Other material as you feel appropriate
Then you must write an essay describing how these contents address the questions they pose and that explain the relevance of systems thinking to a project and an organisation by using the theories and ideas related to:-
- General systems management Organisational
- structures, forms and culture Engineering risk,
- risk management, Portfolio alignment
- Business value
- Portfolio management process cycle
- Organisational maturity.
You should illustrate your arguments by identifying what different systems thinking tools and techniques might aid project managers solve project problems, such as what occurred with Texas City and Deepwater Horizon.
Purpose
The primary purpose of this assessment item is to help you to be able to define systems thinking and classify the tools and techniques related systems thinking. The secondary purpose of this assignment is to give you the opportunity to enhance your analysis, critical thinking and written communication skills; particularly in the areas of argument development and essay writing.
Structure
Your essay should be a properly constructed academic essay of 2,000 words.
It should contain an effective introduction, body and conclusion. The introduction should introduce the essay and include your argument. The body should present the evidence you have collected to support your argument, and the conclusion should restate your argument, summarise the evidence and make a conclusion regarding your argument. The essay should contain a coherent, but necessarily restricted review of the academic literature on the topics in question. The literature review should be integrated into the essay, not a separate section. Do not include an executive summary or an abstract. A reference list formatted in the prescribed APA style is compulsory. Do not include a bibliography.
This assessment item involves researching your assigned topic to enhance your understanding of project management concepts and utilisation of academic literature. Whilst you use the recommended textbooks you may also refer to relevant peer reviewed, academic journal articles. You will be expected to present information and evidence from, and cite, at least twenty (20) times from the prescribed unit material and you also are encouraged to use other PEER REVIEWED sources. The assessment submission must be made online through the unit web site.
Attachment:- Program and Portfolio Management Information Systems.rar