Assignment:
Part I
1. Assume that you are the leader of a virtual team that includes members who are in New York, London, Kuwait and Tokyo. You would like to choose a day and time for a weekly conference call to keep the project on track. Choose a day and time and explain your choice and the compromises and problems it will likely cause for each participant.
2. Consider the communications technologies with which you are familiar. Describe how they can be used on projects. Relate these ideas to what you learned about project management and describe how new communications technologies could be used to innovative project management.
3. Where would you place the importance threshold for involving a client in a decision? What criteria would you use and how would you involve the client with that process of establishing the threshold?
4. Recall a project or teamwork in which you were involved where the participants did not know each other well enough to trust each other; describe the effect of this lack of trust on the project. Describe alignment activities that could have increased trust on that project.
Additional exercises
Part II
1. Do you think formal SoW, WBS and Responsibility Matrix are necessary for a project that only involves six people? Support your opinion with examples.
2. Consider a project the planning effort of which is completed by a group. After all planning is done (including SoW, WBS, specs and RM), a project manager is appointed. Can this way of proceeding work? Why or why not?
3. Why is a post-project review valuable to future projects? Which project documents should be archived? Do you think there are documents that should not be made accessible to future project managers?
4. A project is about two-third of the way through its scheduled activities when the customer (or sponsor) demands that the deliverables are doubled (in size, quantity or other measurable specification). You are the project manager; what do you do?