Assignment 1 brought back many project management memories. As a former manufacturing manager, I was responsible for many projects over the course of my career. I am familiar with the concepts of project and change management and I am especially aware of the challenges that come with change management when implementing a project that affects organizational culture. Although I was not directly responsible for IT projects, I am keenly aware how the implementation of new IT systems affects company culture and behaviour, having been through a complete ERP implementation in the early stages of my career.

I was familiar with many of the concepts in the course materials for this assignment, albeit in a different context. Instead of a software context, it was manufacturing context in which the use cases were manufacturing processes, both on the floor and within the new ERP system. Instead of documenting new use cases, I was documenting existing cases and identifying potential performance improvements. The same process can be applied to code, on a fundamental level. Interface interaction and method performance can be analyzed and improved iteratively the same way as manufacturing processes can. I found it a little more challenging to mentally visualize new use cases in the assignment context than I did re-engineering a manufacturing process, due to the many possibilities for event sequencing for each process. I found it helpful to flow chart each process, which helps to identify events. Use case was the more challenging aspect for me.

In my experience, the report required in Part A was less formal – it took place in meetings in the form of discussion due to the more intimate nature of the small-to-medium sized corporate environment, but many of the same items were covered, with input from all departments within the company. Everything in the report can be covered in these five general questions: 1) What is the problem? 2) How do we solve it? 3) What do we have? 4)What do we need? 5)What are the risks? Input to these questions gave a comprehensive yet concise answer to everyone of them, and I found myself relating my past experience to covering all of the content requirements for the report. I may not have perfectly covered all of the bases due to the new-to-me context of IT project management, however.

Assignment 1, for me, formalized a process in which I have taken part collaboratively many times over the years, focusing the elements of project genesis to one person (or a small number of people) rather than a full collaborative team.