The One About Overconfidence

Well, two down and one more to go. :-P And I don't think I want to say too much about it now. Basically, I thought I was going to rock my Labour Relations final...so much so that I didn't study too much for it. Boy, that was a mistake. Oh well, no one to blame but myself. Don't get me wrong, I passed the course but I was aspiring for a higher grade. Unfortunately, I didn't put enough effort into it - I know, you're wondering, "Well how the hell did she expect to get a better grade if she didn't put any effort?" Okay, I get it, stopppppp lecturing me. :-P

Oh well, like I said, two down and one to go (Sales Management, which by the way cannot be used as a credit towards my HR degree. >_<). As it stands, I have taken 3 courses which are counted as "extras". Apparently, I'm bloody rich!!! NOT! :-P

What else? Oh, I got an email from my Project Management instructor this afternoon. The course isn't starting until May 8th but I guess he wanted to give a brief intro to the course. So anyway, here's the 411:

Hello all,

They tell me that some students are very keen and like to do a bunch of work even before the session starts! I thought I would try out this e-mail function and check that it works.

My name is *NAME WITHHELD*. I have a Ph.D. in Engineering Management. I am a professional engineer and I work at a real job full time. I am teaching this course more out of a sense of civic duty than anything else. Almost all of my experience is with projects and "real" projects where the end result is a physical entity that you can kick and see and know that it works (as opposed to a computer system or a study).

I have not spent a lot of time developing the course in advance because there are two things I am considering. Project Management is all about dealing with people. People are not as predictable as numbers and inanimate objects. If you let someone choose between an apple and an orange, they may pick the orange because they like oranges better than apples. If you offer a banana and an apple, they may pick the apple over the banana. If you then offer this same person a banana and an orange, logic dictates that they will pick the orange because oranges are prefered over apples and apples are preferred over bananas. I hope you can see where I am heading where a person might choose the banana because they like bananas more than oranges, or even they might feel like having a banana that day.

So this course can be the cut and dry presentation of process and rules that has become the Project Management body of knowledge. This is the type of material that is easy to memorize and test and learn. For example it would test whether you learned the three main project constraints and to list them. If the course takes this direction, I will learn along with you, because the material may not necessarily be things that I encountered in my 15+ years experience in Project Management and not things that are particularly interesting to me.

The other way the course could go is to explore the types of people problems that need to be handled as a project manager. Develop an understanding of the nature of project management and project managers. Instead of learning a set of rules that you may or may not use, the second way this course could go is to develop an understanding of projects, which will be useful regardless of whether you manage projects or deal with people who do. I recently had a chat with a priest who is an ex-engineer, and he was involved with having the church renovated. He did not need to know the seven factors of whatever, but he did need to know how to
communicate with the construction contractor what exactly needed to be done.

So if you are keen and need to be working on this course even before it starts, you can think about which way you would like the course to go. We will spend some time on the first day discussing what exactly you students want out of this course. If the answer is you are taking the course for the credits you need to graduate and you need to take something, that is a totally acceptable answer.

Looks like it might be an interesting course - though that little note about civic duty kinda turned me off a bit. Anyway, I guess I should make more of an effort for this last course, even if it doesn't count towards my degree (but it does affect my GPA). Shhhhhhhhh...I'm studying.