Tim Lockman (Team 1)

Self-Reflection Paper
EDUC 768
Fall 2017

Introduction
After reviewing my Individual Paper from Module 1, I have assembled the following
reflections from my personal experience in the Project Management class. My
reflections follow the pattern listed in the rubric for this assignment.

Needs Assessment and Validation Methods

One of my general takeaways from EDUC 768 is that it’s useful to organize the PM
phases around a solid set of documents. This helps maintain consistency and
accountability, but it also helps managers and team members launch each step with
confidence. Some good forms help get the ball rolling.
A good example of this happens with Needs Assessment. The “Needs Assessment
Training” document from Module 2 gave me not just some sample questions to ask
clients, but also some guidance on what makes for good questions—and what makes for
bad ones—with examples of each. Since I felt a bit intimidated by the needs assessment
process, having this guidance really helped, and I’ve kept a copy of this document—
and several others from the course—for later reference. It gives me some critical
thinking prompts to be sure I’m getting the kind of information I want from a needs
assessment.

Building a Distributed Team

The team-building part of this project was a challenge, since we were from different
geographic areas and had a short timeframe. However, I was pleased with how we
managed to work together.
A key trait that we needed was flexibility. We all had different schedules and different
times during the week that we were able to be most productive. During the first couple
of weeks, we had to figure that out via our synchronous tool, which was Google
Hangouts. Our productivity times also affected our workflow as a team throughout the
week. For instance, sometimes we had to wait for another member to complete his or
her part before we could do ours. It’s hard to describe how we worked this out, other
than to say that we had to communicate a lot and be flexible.
We also needed to be flexible enough to change roles from week to week. For instance,
we alternated the role of submitting our final deliverables from week to week. This
often included some editorial oversight, so we were more or less “managers”
depending the week’s assignments.

Charter Development
The charter is the keystone document for PM, so we needed to get this right. The first
step was to find a place to start. One member developed the scope statement first, since
this seemed like the controlling concept for the whole project. Once that was pretty
much done, we could build the rest of the charter around it. It was kind of like an oyster
creating a pearl around a grain of sand.

Project Plans – Value and Purpose

The heart of our Project Plan was the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS). My part of the
plan was to summarize our scope statement from the charter. This activity helped me to
understand the project in a more focused way. The WBS analyzed the activities in our
scope statement.

Instructional Design Document

I saw the IDD as one piece of the larger puzzle of our project. The activities detailed in
the IDD cover what I’d done up to now in the ID program, but here I saw it as just one
part of an overall project. Early in the course, we discussed the difference between the
ID process and the PM process, and I began to understand that difference better as we
began developing the IDD.

Facilitator Guide/Storyboard Insights

I served as graphic designer as we developed our storyboard. Based on instructor
feedback, I could have done a better job of creating graphics that were instructional
rather than merely “graphic” or decorative. I was focusing on a pleasing and consistent
look and feel, but perhaps I could have approached my role more as visualizing the
learning objectives.

Execution Phase Insights

As with the needs assessment, I was the Execution Phase as being driven by a set of
documents. The (pretend) change request was generated by the client. However, the
meeting documentation, procurement form, progress report, etc. were generated by the
team. And while these could be seen as end products, or artifacts of the process, I also
saw them as generative documents; they helped “kick off” the next phase or step in the
project. So this reinforced my sense of a project as being document-driven.