Task Description:-

•The primary purpose of this assessment task is to help focus attention on the discipline of Operations Management and provide an
opportuneity to reflect on how the discipline relates to jobs and careers in management.

•The secondary purpose of this assignment is to give an early opportunity to develop generic academic writing skills within the framework of
reflective discourse. This paper should be written in first person language.

Task
•Choose a topic of your interests

•Write a brief description of your understanding of what the topic is about, and how formal study of this topic will help you develop professional skills

•appropriate to your current or future job. (Hint, choose a topic that is not too familiar to you but you think will be useful).

•No research or references are required for this assessment item

Length: 800 words ±10% (excluding title page)

Assessment Criteria
•Does your reflective discourse demonstrate:
•clear understanding of the nature of the topic chosen?
•appropriate application of the topic area to professional practice?
•a level of self-reflective practice appropriate to managerial work?
•effective use of Australian English?
•presentation and computer skills appropriate for managerial work?

Referencing Style American Psychological Association (APA) or Harvard (author-date)

My topic : managing projects

"The past several decades have been marked by rapid growth in the use of project management as a means by which organisations achieve their objectives. Project management provides an organisation with powerful tools that improve its ability to plan, implement, and control its activities as well as the ways in which it utilises its people and resources.

"A lion's share of the credit for the development of the techniques and practices of project management belongs to the military, which faced a series of major tasks that simply were not achievable by traditional organisations operating in traditional ways. Projects such as submarine development and construction, space programs and military hardware development are examples of the application of these specially developed management approaches to extraordinarily complex projects. Following such examples, nonmilitary government sectors, private industry, public service agencies, and volunteer organisations have all used project management to increase their effectiveness.

"Project management has emerged because the characteristics of our contemporary society demand the development of new methods of management. Of the many forces involved, three are paramount:

(1) the exponential expansion of human knowledge;

(2) the growing demand for a broad range of complex, sophisticated, customised goods and services; and

(3) the evolution of worldwide competitive markets for the production and consumption of goods and services.

All three forces combine to mandate the use of teams to solve problems that used to be solvable by individuals. These three forces combine to increase greatly the complexity of goods and services produced plus the complexity of the processes used to produce them. This, in turn, leads to the need for more sophisticated systems to control both outcomes and processes."

(Source: Meredith, JR, & Mantel, SJ, Jnr 2006, Project Management: A Managerial Approach, 7th edn, Wiley, Hoboken NJ USA (pp.1-2)).

On completion of the readings and activities associated with this module, you should be able to:

1. Explain the difference between a project and a process

2. Explain why good project management skills are important to perations managers

3. Describe and apply the project planning process

4. Explain how the critical path is used in the scheduling of projects

5. Explain how a project is controlled using the 'earned value method'.