Welcome to Week 2 of ITC571. This week I focused on the commencing the project planning and addressing the Week 2 Topic activity:

1. Identifying which project management tool I would be using – MS Project was chosen as this tool is commonly used in organisations, including my own.
2. Establishing a project gantt chart – this can be found as a preliminary
   schedule in the Project Plan.
3. What gained project management skills would I be able to utilised from my current day job for this project – this summary is provided below.

My current role in mining involves the use of various project management knowledge areas – stakeholder management, resource management, cost management, time management, communication management, scope management, procurement management, integration management, quality management, risk management and schedule management.

For this project, I will predominantly be leaning on my skills for the following:

• Time & Schedule Management – Project scheduling has become an art form that all project managers will continue to learn more about as time permits. Understanding resource capabilities and velocity at which work can be completed (in this case my own as I will be completely the assessment). This leads into the project schedule and understanding given those two variables, when tasks can be done in parallel, or should be completed earlier to ensure deadlines are not missed. Always planning with contingency – as in life, you don’t know what you don’t know.
• Communication Management – Posting weekly blogs, weekly progress reports and posts to the CSU Discussions threads allows open dialogue throughout the project. Enables myself as the Project Manager to provide updates, seek direction on certain decisions, but also allows peers and advisors to provide feedback on the project progression and any changes to be known.
• Stakeholder Management – Posting weekly progress reports to ensure that all stakeholders, both peers and academic markers are able to review my project progress. This also enables a forum to raise early in the project any ‘show-stoppers’ or issues arising.
• Scope Management – Whilst emerging technology itself can be quite a large topic, new innovations have the ability to impact far and wide in multiple scenarios in multiple industries. It is important given the timeframe of this capstone project to be precise with the scope, clearly identify what will be researched and future research opportunities that will not be included this time in this project.