project management methodologies

Assignment Overview

In this unit you are required to complete a weekly portfolio. A portfolio provides evidence of previous and current experience and presents a dynamic record of your growth and professional learning over the duration of this unit. Your portfolio will provide an account of your learning based on your practise and your critical reflection.

Task

Your task is to write a weekly portfolio reflecting upon your learnings from the prior week. In your portfolio you will identify:

1. the learning outcomes and module/topic of the unit,
2. a description of your experience, including reading samples or records,
3. your learning from your experiences, and
4. any supporting documentation of prior or current learning.

Purpose

The primary purpose of this assessment item is to help you to develop skills for undertaking research and translating, via your technical and creative skills, underpinning concepts about project management methodologies. The secondary purpose of this assignment is to give you the opportunity to enhance your analysis, critical thinking and written communication skills; particularly in the areas of thinking about and reflecting on different project domains and project management methodologies. Developing a portfolio, as a result, makes your learning more explicit as you translate your workplace and personal experiences into documented evidence. You can then learn to critically examine the nature of your learning on this unit in relation to specific experiences in your project management practice and demonstrate that you have learned from those experiences and how you have achieved or maintained your professional competence as a result.

The assignment will also give you the opportunity to enhance your analysis and written communication skills; particularly in the areas of rigorous structured assignment writing.

Structure

You will be provided on the Moodle web site with a portfolio template. You should use this template and upload a weekly portfolio to the Moodle web site. At the end of this unit you will consolidate your portfolio into a single document and upload an overall consolidated portfolio submission.

Your portfolio should contain a coherent, but necessarily restricted review of the academic literature related to the project management topics for each week. You should also include a weekly reference list formatted in the prescribed Harvard style. You are also encouraged to include a bibliography.

This assessment item involves researching the topics to enhance your understanding of each concept through an utilisation of academic literature and secondary sources. Whilst you must use the recommended textbooks and web links, you should also refer to other sources on the Moodle web site and additional relevant peer reviewed academic journal articles of your choosing.

Weekly Portfolio

Your weekly portfolio can be as long or as short as you want it to be. It is your portfolio and shows your development of understanding during the unit. Naturally, this will make the portfolio different for everyone. Each student’s background, education, current and past work experiences is what makes it different. Each student’s personal researches will be different.

What you need to do is to give yourself enough time to reflect and show how you have thought and come to grips with the ideas that address the learning outcomes of the unit. The amount of time you should be allocating to the unit is 12 to 16 hours per week (which includes writing the portfolio). So there should be a fair bit of time for you to make the reflections and reach a depth of insight that will make the portfolio meaningful.

With each weeks portfolio that you submit you do not include the writing that you made for a prior week. Instead you use the same portfolio template using only the section for the week you are writing about. In other words each week’s portfolio is a reflection upon that week. You should however, revisit the whole of the unit learning outcomes each week. The portfolio for any previous week is a reflection of your insights and thoughts for that week. Once you upload the portfolio then leave it for that week. Over the duration of the unit you will find that there is a development and change of your ideas as you study the material. You will then have opportunity at the end of the unit to consolidate everything and show how you have gained the insights that the unit is seeking to provide. At the end of the unit you should review your weekly portfolios and consolidate them into a single submission. You should make a personal reflection in this submission. This is the assessment that gets marked.

It is to your benefit to have the personal discipline to make sure that you do not get behind. If you are allocating 12 or 16 hours per week for the unit then there is plenty of time for the portfolio. If you find that one week you slip then ok, but the unit is fundamentally planned so that you need to allocate 12 to 16 hours each week. Two hours lost in one week means that you need to do 14 to 18 hours the next!

The unit is straight forward, but there are lots of web sites to visit and material to download. The text books are only part of the story and you won’t be able to do the unit with just the text books. Unfortunately, much of the material is written from a North American perspective. You will need to consider other industry sectors and also to be able to translate the learning outcomes into an Australian or other cultural perspective. Therefore, you will need to download other files and visit web sites to be able to gather the material you need in your portfolio.

There are no bonus points for getting the portfolio perfect from the first week! In fact the portfolio for the first week is much more likely to be an amateurish attempt. It is unlikely that you’ll really know what you’re doing in the first and second week, and if you pretended you do then it would be hard to believe you anyway! Understanding and familiarity will only develop over time. As you do the portfolios’ each week and keep revisiting the learning outcomes and adding the unit material then you will gain insights required. Unless you do that on a weekly basis you won’t have the appropriate perspective to make the journey and reach the destination by the end of the unit.

Consolidated Portfolio

Since you’ll have made your own journey studying during the unit then the material that you will want to include in this portfolio will be unique for you. Your final portfolio will explain how you have developed your understanding of the learning outcomes and the topics with each week’s study.

There are a number of ways you can provide a consolidated portfolio. It is up to you to decide which way work the best for you. You final portfolio MUST be made as a single submission. For example:-

1. You could merge all your submissions into one and provide a single big file.
2. You could alternatively zip all of the previous portfolios into one and use a single ‘master’ portfolio to refer back to each week.

You must NOT use an index and numbering system to identify material from prior week’s leaving each portfolio on the unit web site.

Whatever way that you do it; the final portfolio is the important one! It’s important that you make it clear to the marker what your consolidated portfolio refers to otherwise you may not get the marks you expect.

An analogy for the final portfolio is that you can imagine that you are going before an examination board at the end of the unit and presenting to them a complete portfolio of your journey through the unit. You will hand each board member a package that they should then be able to read and from it appreciate everything that you have done and learned during your work life and the unit.

Referencing

Ensuring you have accurate references is important and will allow the marker to easily identify where your portfolio maps to the unit or other peer reviewed material. Also you need to show how you have made critical reflection on the material and added your own unique insights.

Referencing should be made according to CQU’s Harvard referencing guide. To locate the guide then Google “CQU Harvard referencing” and download the PDF file for the current year.

It is as a consequence of your references and academic proficiency with critical analysis that you will be able to gain MAXIMUM MARKS.

Your assignment will be assessed on the extent and quality to which it meets each of the following criteria.

1. Evidence in regular weekly portfolios of meeting the graduate attributes? (20%)
2. Qualitative reflections of each of the unit learning outcomes? (40%)
3. Quantitative achievement of the unit topics? (20%)
4. Clarity of expression, grammar and spelling? (5%)
5. Strict conformity to CQUniversity Australia Harvard Referencing Guide (author-date)? (5%)
6. Document clarity and presentation format? (10%)

To be submitted as weekly Microsoft WORD document files then a final consolidated Microsoft WORD or ZIP file in the review/exam week.