Purpose

The purpose of this task is to encourage students to expand their thinking through reading and sharing of their ideas in a web 2.0 format used by many project managers.

Learning Outcomes

The following learning outcomes are reinforced in the completion of this task: K5, S2, S3 and A1.

Background

A blog is a discussion or informational site published on the web consisting of regular entries or posts in chronological order. A blog features diary-type commentary and links to articles on other websites. Many blogs focus on a particular topic; team blogs will focus on an area of project management leadership.

Blogs are useful for first time and experienced project managers, and are widely used in the industry. The purpose of your project management leadership blog is to share the results of your research and investigations with other members of your team, and gather their feedback regarding your thoughts and ideas.

For some examples project management blogs see: http://projectnewstoday.com/2013-top-25-project-management-blogs/

Requirements

Students are required to work in a team (three to 5 members). Each individual student is required to select a journal article on some area of project management leadership related to the course, or extending the course ideas, and write a blog reviewing the journal article, providing a critique of the ideas including conclusions and lessons learned (approximately 1000 words). The review should be supported by references from literature, demonstrating wider reading and critical thinking.

Each team member's blog will be reviewed by the other team members (approximately 100 words per review). Each team member will be required to review two other team member's blogs.

Each team will submit the aggregated blogs, articles and team members' reviews. Team blogs maybe created in Word, in Moodle or some other forum.

NOTE: Each student should confirm the appropriateness of their journal article with the course lecturer and/or tutor completing this assignment. A list of topic areas is provided below:

• project management skills

• triple constraint

• models of change

• resistance to change

• organisational culture

• strategic planning

• project selection methods

• leadership traits

• measures of project success

• team performance improvement.