Communication 3650

Communication skills in the second semester were similar to the ones I learned in the first semester of the program, but the second semester focused more on how to provide constructive critiques of others work, how to efficiently use meeting times, and reinforcing some the ideas that I learned in the first semester. Much of the work I did in the communications section in this semester was either class-based discussion or project management work for the EIT Pizzeria project. Therefore, I will provide my blog posts that I wrote during the semester below, as well as a section about my role as project manager for the group project.

Blog Posts

Gemini V Project Management

Gemini V was the team name my group members, and I created for the EIT Pizzeria project. As the project manager, I acted as the liaison between the clients* and my teammates. I made sure the project stayed on schedule and to keep the project on track we regularly updated each other on the status of the project. We used a variety of way to communicate with each other as we worked on the project some of the methods we used were Google Hangouts, both messaging and video conferencing, and UALR Email. During a client meeting, we uniquely utilized the communication tools. We wanted to show the clients our site and database while they were in progress, so we did a Google Hangouts video conference with them and shared our screens with so they would be able to see both the website and the database on their own screens while we discussed it with them. We did this because we thought helped them to envision seeing the site on the web.

As the project manager, I was responsible for creating the project management plan, and a work breakdown structure. The project plan described what we would deliver at the end of the project, in this case, it was a functioning website and database for EIT Pizzeria. A work breakdown structure was a little more difficult to create. Instead of doing it the traditional way which makes the project look extremely complex I opted to use Trello. Which broke our project down into easily manageable sections like, database, web, in progress, project testing and completed. Within each of those sections, we could create cards that listed the specific tasks we need to do and assign them to particular people, and once we completed a task, it could be easily moved to the completed section. Using Trello provided us with a visual progress of the site. Being project manager was difficult at times, but I enjoyed the experience of learning how to lead a project as well putting some of the communication skills we learned into practice. If you want to read more about this project click here.