Overview? As you will learn in this course, the foundations of engineering project leadership are communicating a project vision and applying tool
Overview
As you will learn in this course, the foundations of engineering project leadership are communicating a project vision and applying tools and techniques to ensure the engineering team achieves its vision. An engineering team without a vision and a common goal cannot work effectively as a unified and cohesive team. Once the vision is established, the engineering project leader can choose the organizational structure suitable for the objective of the project and the corporate environment, and for maximizing team communication. Finally, the tools and techniques for monitoring the team’s progress are the foundational project elements of cost, schedule, and requirements, and their interrelationships.
In this first part of the final project, you will reflect on best practices for effectively leading and organizing diverse engineering teams to achieve common goals. Specifically, you will need to analyze key project management principles and supply concrete examples from the course, your research, or your own professional experiences to illustrate and justify your leadership perspective. The results of your inquiry will be compiled in an engineering leadership paper that articulates and defends your approach to effective engineering management.
The final project represents an authentic demonstration of competency because you will need to analyze key project management principles and supply concrete examples from the course, your research, or your own professional experiences to illustrate and justify your leadership philosophy of engineering management. The project has one milestone to scaffold learning and ensure quality final submissions. This milestone will be submitted in Module Five. The final project leadership paper will be submitted in Module Eight.
In this assignment, you will demonstrate your mastery of the following course outcomes:
Articulate best practices for effectively organizing diverse engineering teams to realize shared visions and achieve common goals
Analyze key project management principles as foundations for successfully managing highly technical and cross-functional engineering projects
PROMPT
Your engineering leadership paper should address each of the following critical elements:
I. Introduction: In this section, explain the purpose and thesis of your paper. How would you describe your overall philosophy of leadership? Specifically, be sure to address the following:
A. Articulate the role of vision in your overall philosophy of leadership. In your view, what does it mean to have vision? Include examples from the course, your own research, or relevant professional experiences where clear vision was established or not established, and describe the outcomes of each.
B. Articulate the importance of scope in your overall philosophy of leadership. Why is it important to the success of the engineering team to be clear and transparent about the full scope of a project? Include examples from the course, your own research, or your relevant professional experiences.
II. Organizational Structures
A. Analyze the organizational structure of integrated project teams (IPT) by illustrating their characteristics, including its advantages and disadvantages, using specific examples.
B. Explain why integrated project teams are the ideal structure for engineering projects. Cite specific examples and evidence from the course, your own research, or your professional experiences to support your claims.
III. Project Management Principals
A. Analyze the three foundational elements of project management—cost, schedule, and requirements. Why are each important? What are their interrelationships? Specifically, discuss the impacts to the other two variables if any one of the three is constrained. Use specific examples and evidence from the course, your research, or your professional experiences to illustrate your response.
B. Additionally, examine the specific nature of project management within an engineering environment. What are the unique systems engineering challenges and implications of managing projects that are highly technical and cross-functional in nature? Provide specific evidence from the course, your own research, or your professional experiences to illustrate your claims. For example, this is where you might consider why it is important to have strong customer support and comprehensive technical requirements to ensure project success.
C. Using your analysis, articulate your strategies for appropriately balancing each project management element in an engineering environment. For example, what reports would you require from your staff to ensure the project is on track to meet your vision and goals? Which project management tools would you employ? How would you prevent scope creep? Provide specific examples and evidence from the course, your own research, or your professional experiences to support your approach.
IV. Conclusion: Draw your paper to a close by restating your thesis and underscoring the most important guiding principles discussed in your paper. Be sure to connect the principles with your future professional goals, including your plans for implementing these ideas into your professional practice.
!!!!!USE THE FILE PROVIDED AS REFERENCE!!!!!
Guidelines for Submission: Your engineering leadership paper should be 5 pages with double spacing, 12-pt. Times New Roman font, one-inch margins, and citations in APA format.
Running Head: PROJECT MANAGEMENT 2
PROJECT MANAGEMENT 2
Project Management
Introduction
A leadership philosophy is a fundamental belief system meant to guide the decision-making process in an organization. The philosophy must comprise core values, perspectives, and principles that help in shaping the leadership philosophy statement and behaviors to be adhered to. My organization’s leadership philosophy will be “ To motivate team members with long and short-term goal setting to induce the belief of radical transformation”. The philosophy was arrived at because the leadership style in place is transformational leadership. Vision plays a crucial role in organizational growth in the following ways. It will describe the firm’s purpose, what the firm is striving to achieve and what ought to be achieved in the real sense. The vision generally inspires and rewards the processes in which organizations take part. thus offering the organization an opportunity to articulate features that influence organizational strategies.
Organizations that do not have a vision tend to experience serious challenges in terms of restrictions on their independence, mobility, and achievements in terms of education. Further, a lack of organizational vision tends to increase the risks of failing as a team, isolation, and poor human resource management. The members of the organizations will not remain focused because the lack of an organizational vision means that the driving force behind the organization is missing (Habibi, Barzinpour & Sadjadi, 2018). This is the opposite when the situation in which the mean is doing fine. Therefore, the out outcomes will positive. From my professional experience, one of the companies that have significantly grown because of the mission statement they chose is coca-cola. The mission statement for the company is “to craft the brands and choice of drinks that people love, to refresh them in body & spirit.” The firm has made several milestones in terms of growth just by adhering to this statement. Starbucks is one of the companies that have not performed well because of missing an incompatible mission statement with the organization's goals and strategies.
In organizational leadership, the scope normally develops a unique framework through which organizational members come up with an ability and mindsets aimed at developing the members of the organization while fostering teamwork in them. The sole goal of scope in an organization is to produce desired results that are in line with the objectives of the leadership team in place. For an engineering team, a scope plays several important roles the team which includes but is not limited to; scope minimizing the chances of constant variations of project requirements because it will point out all that the team will need before the commencement of the project. The scope also helps in ensuring that the end product of any given project is particularly what the client had asked for (Habibi, Barzinpour & Sadjadi, 2018). The scope helps in ensuring that the project, at any given point in time is not behind the schedule. Issues to do with the budget are also taken good care of given the fact that the scope is adhered to most appropriately. A clear definition of the scope helps in addressing all these challenges by defining and explaining every issue to all the parties that have been involved. Thus, it tells what is valid and what is not valid at any given point in time.
Organizational Structures
The exist several organizational structures that an IPT can follow. For this project, the IPT organizational structure will be line and staff organization. The structure will take a hierarchical structure in which the members of the organization in a lower rank or line of command will have little authority compared to the members above them. The figure below is a typical organizational structure that will be followed although it is subject to minor changes based on the number of roles and duties that the project will demand.
Integrated project teams remain ideal for the management of engineering projects because of the principle through which this works. The structure demands that the suppliers and the clients should work together as a team to ensure that all projects objectives have been met while striving to minimize the associated costs of the project. The collaboration between the suppliers and the workers also aims at improving the quality of the project while making the environment extremely conducive to attaining the set objectives with ease (Habibi, Barzinpour & Sadjadi, 2018). From my personal experience, the road construction companies like H-Young which have been doing road works in developing countries have applied this organizational structure and their progress has been good. The relationship between the suppliers, and local and foreign workers has made it extremely simple to work out the situation. This is among the many examples in which the structure has remained productive.
Project Management Principles
Project cost management is a fundamental issue in project management because it sets the baseline of any project cost that should be incorporated. With effective cost management strategies in place, it is a guarantee that the project budget will remain intact, and hence, completion will reach based on the arrangement which was put in place. Firms can easily lose a lot of money when there is poor cost control. A project schedule can be defined as a document meant for planning, execution, and controlling purposes during project development. The document is meant to define all these matters in line with the project scope that is in place. The fundamental purpose of project scheduling remains to represent the plans to deliver the scope of the project within the stipulated time. Project requirements offer project stakeholders what is needed in ensuring the project goes on smoothly. The interrelationship between the three works together to ensure that the targets in a given project have been attained the expected quality and performance. The major challenges that engineering teams faces include inadequate skills in managing emerging technical skills, impossible deadlines, and poor communication among project teams. There exist several strategies by which fundamental elements of a project can be balanced (Van et al., 2019). Having a contingency plan just in case an issue emerges, having the right plan for natural disasters, and utilization of an appropriate budget and cost tracking methods. These are similar strategies that will be used to prevent stretches on the scope.
Conclusion
In conclusion, leadership in an organization heavily depends on the philosophy that is to be followed. Having the right philosophy in place steers the better performance of an organization. Firms that have not been taking vision seriously have many loopholes of failing in their performance. The flaws are minimized when the scope and vision are well explained.
References
Habibi, F., Barzinpour, F., & Sadjadi, S. (2018). Resource-constrained project scheduling problem: review of past and recent developments. Journal of project management, 3(2), 55-88. http://m.growingscience.com/beta/jpm/2689-resource-constrained-project-scheduling-problem-review-of-past-and-recent-developments.html
Van Den Eeckhout, M., Maenhout, B., & Vanhoucke, M. (2019). A heuristic procedure to solve the project staffing problem with discrete time/resource trade-offs and personnel scheduling constraints. Computers & Operations Research, 101, 144-161. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305054818302491
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