How To Manage a Project
Nov. 5th, 2010 10:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livingdebRobin said I am not allowed to talk about that anymore and should instead talk about another person I interacted with today. (Ha! But I slipped in a post when he wasn't looking!)
This other person is in charge of a project to streamline "course relations" and implement several pages of recommendations created by a committee and approved by bigwigs. This is a daunting and complicated project--there are at many ways courses can be related (the same in every way, one (or more) is a replacement for the other(s), they are the same for one semester, they have overlapping but not identical content, they are the same topic of a multi-topic umbrella course, they meet in the same room with the same instructor but are different courses, or they meet in different parts of the same room with different instructors).
Today I was at our second meeting with all the local stakeholders (people who work with the course inventory, room scheduling, course scheduling, degree audit, and the syllabus project) where he laid out his first ideas about how to go about doing all these things.
We could easily have talked about this over forty hours, but he did a creditable job in only three. That's partly because he had already familiarized himself with all the concepts and many of the possible complications and had taken them into account in his planning. All that was left to do in the meeting was a little tweaking.
In spite of this entry's title, I have no idea how he did that. Just a few clues: Be smart. Do your homework. Keep participants from sidetracking the meeting (even if there are nine of them!). I don't know how my employer finds so many great people to work there, but he's another awesome one.
This other person is in charge of a project to streamline "course relations" and implement several pages of recommendations created by a committee and approved by bigwigs. This is a daunting and complicated project--there are at many ways courses can be related (the same in every way, one (or more) is a replacement for the other(s), they are the same for one semester, they have overlapping but not identical content, they are the same topic of a multi-topic umbrella course, they meet in the same room with the same instructor but are different courses, or they meet in different parts of the same room with different instructors).
Today I was at our second meeting with all the local stakeholders (people who work with the course inventory, room scheduling, course scheduling, degree audit, and the syllabus project) where he laid out his first ideas about how to go about doing all these things.
We could easily have talked about this over forty hours, but he did a creditable job in only three. That's partly because he had already familiarized himself with all the concepts and many of the possible complications and had taken them into account in his planning. All that was left to do in the meeting was a little tweaking.
In spite of this entry's title, I have no idea how he did that. Just a few clues: Be smart. Do your homework. Keep participants from sidetracking the meeting (even if there are nine of them!). I don't know how my employer finds so many great people to work there, but he's another awesome one.