Lesson 8: Current (and Future) Issues in Project Management
Final Thoughts
I'd like to forego the usual Imaginary Project Manager fun right now, and instead wax inanely a little...please indulge me.
I'd like to say thank you for your time, energy, and commitment to seeing this course to the end. I realize that online education poses some unique challenges to us all, and making your way to the end of this course sets you apart from a lot of other folks out there. This kind of follow-through will aid you profoundly as a Project Manager.
In this course, we have covered the basics of project management, and ohhhhh let me tell you now that is has been an enormous challenge for me to decide which topics to cover, and which should be left out in a basics course. And just when I thought I had actually decided to invite a topic into the circle of life, it dawned on me that I had to further decide what detail those topics would be explored.
The result of a great deal of deliberation, writing, feeling good, feeling bad, and re-writing, and then feeling kinda in-between good and bad is the product that you have experienced over the last few weeks and lessons. I hope that you have found it useful, helpful, and relevant.
But there's more I want to say. Not a lot more, but more, and it is very important, so please bear with me a few moments longer.
There are a lot of project management ideas that we didn't cover in this course because decisions had to be made about what to include, and what to very reluctantly leave out. Concepts that almost made the cut included critical paths, budget analysis, and sub-projects (projects within a project), just to name a few.
What I'd truly love for this course to achieve though, is to give you the confidence to build on what we've covered here, and to explore more avenues of learning about this field. The resources I have chosen for this course, both books and links, will assist you in doing that. However, please don't stop here. Visit your library, engage in online discussions, and build upon this foundation. As strange as it may seem, there are people out there who know what a critical path is, but they don't know that a project is temporary. They are building knowledge on top of a foundation that isn't there, and it is a very scary place to be, because people expect a great deal of competence from Project Managers. Although we might not have coverered your specific topic in this course (e.g. critical paths), I do believe we have laid a foundation, upon which you can now confidently, and enjoyably, launch yourself into the next layer of learning. You have shifted from being an interested layperson, to an emerging professional.
Congratulations on achieving this learning goal, may it be a very small part of your overall strategy towards achieving project management success and satisfaction.
