I-Crop Project Management: Team Charter, Learning Cycles, Communication Plan, Essay, Reflection. (70 Characters)

This Assessment  are to be completed using the Virtucon & Globex Scenario.

Working as a team you are to 

• Agree on a suitable team name, list all team members and provide their contact details in a professional looking document.

• Provide an overview of the project on which you are working.

• Complete a project description. This should be written clearly and concisely so that anyone unfamiliar with the project can fully understand the objectives.

After your team agreed on a team name and identified all of the contact details of your team members, address the following points and present them in a professional looking document:

• Skills and Knowledge Inventory – List the specific knowledge and / or skills that each team member can contribute to the project. This could be technical knowledge, communication or leadership skills.
• Roles and Responsibilities – Define roles and responsibilities for each team member. This can be defined for entire project or can be shared or even rotated.
  
  
• Team Communications
  
  
  • Meeting Times & Location – Agree on mutually convenient times and location to convene to work on the case assignments.
  • Define how the team will communicate with each other and share information. Also specify how meetings will be documented and where subsequent resources will be stored for ease of access.
    
    
• Team Rules & Expectations 
  
  
  • Discuss your previous experiences of working in teams, both positive and negative. What is the overall team goal?
  • Team Values – Discuss as a team what values are important. Develop a statement or itemised list that summarises these values.
  • Code of Ethics – Based on your team values, create a statement that summarises a code of ethics to guide your teams ethical behaviour.
  • Rules and Expectations – Build a set of rules and expectation that all members of the team shall abide by. Consider team decisions, conflict, absence from meetings, and an individual’s lack of contribution for example.
    
    
• Signatures – Get each member of the team to sign the team charter. This will indicate an understanding and agreement to the rules and expectations as specified in the points above.

Learning cycles give structure to your team meetings and accountability for when you and your team work outside of the meeting schedule.

Firstly, prior to your next meeting, assign roles to the team. There should only be two central roles – the organiser and the scribe:

• Organiser – organises the meeting by writing down the team’s ideas and then distributes them to the team for feedback.

• Scribe – documents the ideas and action points going forward.

Note: Roles should be rotated for each meeting and assigned so that everyone on the team has equal responsibility. 

As a team, brainstorm and identify all stakeholders to the project. Then individually, develop an appropriate communication plan.

Write a brief reflection of no more than 300 words of your team work experience in this subject. To guide your reflection you should address the following questions:

• How did your experience compare to your understanding of the leadership qualities required to successfully lead a project?
• Based on your experience, what are necessary techniques, skills, methods and ICT project manager requires in the IT profession?

Project name: I-Crop Project Management 

Team Name: HiTech IT Group

Project description: Background and overview of the project with brief description

Presently, there exists many vendors providing Information Technology (IT) solutions, for example, Amazon and oracle. Therefore, implementing recent technologies in companies such as cloud computing has become much easy (Gong, Liu, Zhang, Chen & Gong, 2010). For instance, concerning Globex corporation, most of its IT solutions has been implemented by Virtucon company. Hence, it has contracted Virtucon to develop an online platform – I-Crop. Globex is situated in Riverina Region of NSW. Besides, it has 3 locations Albury, Griffith and Wagga Wagga. It deals with buying of grains from customers as well as growing. Its main reason of developing a platform is to bring growers and buyers together. Recently, it has opened new office at Orange aiming at providing better services in Central West. Moreover, it has described explicitly several transactions that the proposed platform need to facilitate, for instance, offers and bids. Regarding transaction types, the platform should be able to support pay on delivery, which allows payment after delivering of grains to buyers and cash transactions. Furthermore, information sources consist of the following; price and grain silo site information. In addition, system can be accessed freely as a mobile phone application or web browser. My team that is made up of 4 individuals has been tasked with developing proposed platform. Therefore, the main purpose of this paper is to describe entire steps involved in development of proposed online platform; including costs incurred.

Stakeholders to the project

Reflection

Leadership Qualities to Successfully Lead a Project

Leadership skills consists of character traits of a team leader that can enable him to successfully lead a project. It’s essential in project management (Sunindijo, 2015). I’ve lead several teams previously and afterwards, identified crucial leadership skills, for instance, communication skills are vital as it enables project manager to issue directives clearly. Also, a project manager should have organizational skills, therefore; planning activities and strategies (Sunindijo, 2015). Apart from organizational skills, decision-making skills is equally important as it enhances better ways on which problems can be solved. Besides, a project manager should be able to put himself in other people’s shoe, thus empathy is also vital. Moreover, a project manager should have trust and be confident that his/her team can deliver quality work, hence confidence is also a necessity of a good project manager. In addition, perseverance is also essential as it creates stress-free working environment and better solutions to overcome obstacles (Skulmoski & Hartman, 2010).

Other than leadership skills, I’ve also identified some methods and techniques that can enable a project manager to lead a project successfully, for instance, planning of activities is important as it forms basis to which project management methodology can be used (Balaji & Murugaiyan, 2012). Therefore, it’s a necessity for a project manager to understand existing methods and techniques used in system development. For instance, the following are some of the common methods used; agile and waterfall methodologies, which can be differentiated with the ways on which activities are organized. Agile method enables different activities to take place concurrently, for example, requirements collection and design. It is guided with different principles such as accommodating change and small releases (Balaji & Murugaiyan, 2012). On the contrary, waterfall method involves determining all requirements that are required before starting design process. Other methods include; scrum and lean.

Conclusion

Concluding, working as a team has some advantages and disadvantages as evidenced from previous experience of members involved in development of I-Crop, for instance, some of its advantages consist of the following; enhancing creativity as new ideas for solving problems are developed as well as learning. On the other hand, some of its disadvantages include the following; blaming game and laziness. Regarding I-Crop project, I encountered several problems, for example, poor communication skills and incompetence. However, I applied different leadership skills and project management methodologies that resulted in leading I-Crop project successfully. Some of the skills and methods include organizational skills and agile method respectively.  

References

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