Critical Path, Risks, and ‘flawed’ Rubrics

Strategic Implementation and Alignment – Week 2 – Weekly Summary

This week expanded the discussion of strategic alignment began last week with an emphasis on planning projects, assessing slack in project networks, and evaluating risk.  There was some deviation from the course outline as the professor for this class likes to post a lot of supplemental information.  This week the professor’s additions were in the area of Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT).  The instructor uses this technique himself, which may have influenced his decision to include more content about that topic.   This was contrasted against Critical Path Method, which the textbook covered very well.
 
The discussions this week were pretty lively around the topic of slack in a project network (a.k.a. project plan).  Risk Management was also a topic of the week, but it received less discussion.  That seems fairly common everywhere, unless you work in the “risk business”, you don’t talk about it much.  It is also easily misunderstood for the same reason. 

The big homework this week was a team assignment to do benchmarking.  This was problematic due to the requirements in the rubric.  Normally the rubric is divided into a number of categories with a percentage of points assigned to each category.  The bulk of the points go towards concepts being discussed during the week the assignment was given.  Unfortunately, in this case that means the paper will be scored on things like “evaluate the need for free slack in a project”.  This rubric translates to ‘go find published research about a company that discusses their experience with needing free slack in their projects, then relate that information back to a fictitious company’.  This also is supposed to be accomplished against two different companies by everyone on the team then assimilated into a team benchmarking paper.  The whole process is tenuous enough, but given core concepts like ‘need for free slack’ makes it very difficult to accomplish with a high level of quality.  The fact that businesses encounter this issue is not in question, the problem is that they don’t run out and get articles published about the topic.  Let’s just say everyone on my team did what they could (myself included), but I think the requirements were flawed (I have another f-word in mind, but I’ll go with ‘flawed’).
 

Aligning Projects with Corporate Strategy

Strategic Implementation and Alignment – Week 1 – Weekly Summary

 And now for something completely different.  This week kicked off a new class, Strategic Implementation and Alignment.  New class, new instructor, new requirements.  This course has a notable change in how weekly summaries are constructed.  Previous courses required a summary posted to the discussion area for the class.  The format was flexible and the emphasis was on content.  This course alters that by requiring weekly summaries be submitted as an assignment and written in the same formal format as all other assignments (APA publishing submission format) and be between 600 and 700 words in length.  All of this isn’t too extreme for a course at the master’s level, but the point value for this work?  1 point.  Yep.  We’ll see how that turns out, but it seems like you either get the point or you don’t, and you’d have to screw up pretty bad to not get the point.

I tried posting the body of the weekly summary.  It is just too long and blah for this blog.  So posting a weekly summary here will require new content, I’ll try to cobble together a summary of the summary.

 The week started with a discussion of strategic alignment.  The discussion around this topic wasn’t much of a “how do you do it” discussion, it was more of a “thou shalt align thy projects with thy corporate strategy”.  I know, you’re thinking, or maybe even saying aloud, “duh!”.  The text and a scenario this week brought home the bacon on the ‘how’ aspects of this topic.  Good stuff, but questionable how many companies actually short circuit these selection processes to get pet and politically-fired projects into the works. 

I was able to resurrect some work from my previous class to make a point about how companies that have a strategic orientation can use that in their project evaluation.  You may, but probably don’t, recall from a previous post that “strategic orientation” is about how a company approaches the market, to quote my own paper, “Three orientations were described by Dreher and Dougherty as defenders who are focused on business optimization, prospectors who tend to be first to market, or analyzers who watch competitors and pursuing the best ideas found (Dreher and Dougherty, 2001)”.

Additional topics this week were:

• Differentiating projects from programs, which was a bit of a tangent since that wasn’t a key concept in the course outline
• Defining the elements of a project (scope, priorities, responsibility, and work and/or process breakdown structure).
• The implications of organizational culture on project structure.

Whew.  That’s better.  Consider yourself lucky to have been spared the “official” summary.

Cause and effect, motivation to performance

Human Capital Development – Week 6 – Weekly Summary 

Another week with a kick off question that begs answering almost everywhere in corporate America; How do you build a rewards system that motivates, drive high quality performance and is affordable?  Of course if a student could answer that question in detail after only six weeks of human capital study the class would be overrun with business owners looking for the answer.  None the less, many people in the class provided some interesting approaches both from their own work experience as well as their own thoughts about things they’d like to try.

The reward theme continued with a lively discussion regarding how companies could reward people when they don’t have cash on hand.  Once that theme had calmed down the discussion shifted to focus on a good question about linking job descriptions to performance to motivation to rewards to organizational performance.

Finally, this week wrapped up with another big problem solution paper.  The final week usually culminates with the largest and most involved analysis of a problem.  The problem itself is not more complex, but the process of suggesting a solution is fueled by more information than the week 3 problem solution.  I don’t know if this makes the solution better or just provides more opportunities to second guess the best solution, either way a lot more work goes into creation of the final paper. 

All together now

Human Capital Development – Week 5 – Weekly Summary  

“All together now” seemed to be the theme of the week. Discussion questions ranged from strategic compensation program’s impact on corporate goals, the HR cheerleader analogy (fact or fiction, discuss), and performance management and performance appraisals (compare and contrast).  The final two discussion questions delved into more casual discussions of sources for benchmarking material and what topics we haven’t yet touched that people are curious about.  The bulk of the work this week was a team benchmarking paper.  The team I’m working with pulled together nicely, yet again, and produced a variety of companies that I’m always impressed with.  Overall, I’m hesitant to say week 5 is “the calm before the storm” of week 6, since it wasn’t exactly a skating rink week, but week 6’s big problem solution paper is certainly looming on the horizon.