Reference no: EM132195913

Assessment - Group presentation

Your presentation can be about:

1. Any area of project management that is related to the weekly topics and adds a significant body of new material, a different perspective or depth to the information already covered in the course lecture material. It is important that you extend your knowledge and that of the class beyond what will be covered in this unit during the term.

There is scope to research and present more information about many of the weekly topics. For example, in the Quality Management week students may wish to investigate Six Sigma further or ICT students may wish to cover more detail about quality management in the Software Engineering discipline.

2. Any other topic that is related to project management that is approved by your tutor.

Some suggested topics are shown below. Remember it is only a 15 minute presentation so you have to decide what aspects of a topic you are going to focus on in your presentation. Some topics below have more content than could be covered in a 15 minute presentation (e.g. procurement management). In that case the tutor may allow different groups to focus on different sub-topics.

You are expected to find appropriate reference material (at least three, good, recent, relevant references).

Remember to relate your presentation to managing a project and explain the significance of your content to project management. Often this is best illustrated with examples from your experience or actual project management scenarios.

a. International Projects: This is a chapter from the text book that is not covered in this course, so aspects of this topic would be appropriate for your presentation. You can read this chapter get an overview and understanding of this area. Some of the areas that could be discussed in your presentation are:

• What additional challenges are there when you are involved in managing an international project?
• What is culture shock and what are strategies for coping with culture shock?
• How do you select and train personnel to work on international projects
• What are cross-cultural considerations?

b. Outsourcing/Procurement Management: There is a chapter on outsourcing in the text book that is not covered in this unit. Some of the areas that could be discussed in your presentation are:
• What is outsourcing and what are the advantages/disadvantages of outsourcing?
• What is an RFP and what is involved in selection of a contractor?
• What are best practices in outsourcing project work?
• Discuss the art of negotiation
• What are the different contract types and their risks (from the contractor and customer perspective)? What is the "point of total assumption" and how do you calculate this?

c. Leadership: For example:
• Different leadership styles
• The types of power leaders use
• How to learn to be a good leader and what makes a good leader
• Stephen Covey and improving effectiveness

d. Human resource management: For example:
• Motivation Theories (e.g. Maslow's hierarchy of needs, Herzberg's Motivation-Hygiene Theory, McClelland's Acquire-Needs Theory, McGregor Theory X and Y, Ouchi's theory z etc.)
• Developing the Project Team
i. Training
ii. Team-building Activities
iii. Different "personality types": Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, The Social Style Profile, DISC

e. Quality Management: Quality management in only briefly introduced in the unit. There are a number of topics within the broad area of quality management that could be covered in more depth. For example:
• Tools and Techniques for Quality control
• Six Sigma

f. Agile Project Management: Agile project management is introduced in this unit. However there is scope to extend this topic. For example
• discussion of alternative agile PM methodologies (e.g. Kanban, Scrumban)
• Scaled Agile Framework
• DevOps (Agile development and operations)

g. Effective Communication: For example
• Keys to good communication?
• Use of technology to enhance communication
• Running Effective Meetings
• Using E-mail, Texting and collaborative tools effectively
• What makes a good presentation?

h. Software Tools and Systems for Project Management

i. Systems Engineering and Project Management: Topics to be covered could include:
• What is Systems Thinking?
• What is Systems Engineering?
• What are the dimensions of Systems Engineering?
• What is the Systems Life Cycle?
• What is the relevance of Systems Engineering to Project Management?

j. Value Management: For example:
• What is value management?
• What are the benefits of value management?
• What industries use value management?

In this assignment, you can also draw from your experiences and incorporate them into the assignment. If you don't have any work/project experience, that's fine too. You can also take the opportunity to be controversial and find academic and trade literature that challenges an aspect of the material you are presenting. Pose questions - make your audience think. Both on-campus and off-campus student, are required to produce the script for the presentation that should include some potential questions and responses indicating where you would pose questions to engage your audience. In addition, the end of the script is to include three potential questions (with their answers) that you would anticipate being asked by your audience at the end of the presentation.

Students should contact their local tutor on issues such as the membership of their group, selection of presentation topic, and schedule for their presentation. You must provide your tutor with the details of the members of your group and your top two preferred topics by the end of week two. This allows time for you to negotiate an alternative topic if necessary. The earlier you send the tutor details about your group and your preferred topic, the more likely you are to get your preferred topic. Your tutor will notify you about the topic and when your group is scheduled to present in class. The topics and presentation schedule must to be decided by the end of Week 3.

Off-campus/Distance students:The unit coordinator takes on the role of the tutor. Off-campus are not required to present in class, but are required to submit a recording of their presentation. It is an individual task for you. All recordings must be submitted by due date as mentioned in unit profile.