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You always want to know exactly what work has to be done before you start it. You have a collection of team members, and you need to know exactly what they’re going to do to meet the project’s objectives. The scope planning process is the very first thing you ...

Ryan Owen holds an MBA from the University of South Carolina, and has rich experience in financial services, having worked with Liberty Mutual, Sun Life, and other financial firms. Ryan writes and edits AI industry trends and use-cases for Emerj's editorial an...

Why Should I Care? There are hidden messages and meanings in landmarks, and objects that cannot speak. They have a story to tell if we know how to listen. Definitions Unobtrusive Measurement: The use of physical evidence, nonparticipant observations, and ar...

Why Should I Care? Some of the best social science comes from field work, but many people are not convinced because it is often exploratory, or descriptive, work.  Definitions Field work: Research that involves studying social phenomena as they occur in the...

Why Should I Care? Controlling the social environment to conduct science is prone to ethical issues. But doing it right produces great science. (First Steps Ch. 6) Definitions Experiment: A study where techniques are used to isolate, control, and manipulat...

Why Should I Care? You would rather spend more time with respondents to dig into a topic. You prefer to reduce the size of the sample. You don’t mind open-ended questions. You want to get to the bottom of things. Objects of Measurement Interviews are about ...

Why Should I Care? Your Questionnaire can sink the scientific validity of your project. There is a right way, and a very wrong way to question your surveyed population. Sampling Typically done on large populations. Sample size magic number is 1,000 responde...

Why Should I Care? Surveys are very common. However, many are not done well. There are many traps most people don’t know about that reduce their scientific validity. Definitions Survey: the act of measuring objects. Social survey:  a research technique tha...

12. Budget Planning Every project boils down to money. If you had a bigger budget, you could probably get more people to do your project more quickly and deliver more. That’s why no project plan is complete until you come up with a budget. But no matter wheth...

The project management game is a series of events that students live through to complete project management tasks with real-life companies.  Rules of the Game  This game was designed to mimic reality as much as possible. The adventures students are living th...

In order to develop our schedule, we first need to define the activities, sequence them in the right order, estimate the resources needed, and estimate the time it will take to complete the tasks. Defining Activities The activity definition process is a furt...

The project team should celebrate their accomplishments, and the project manager should officially recognize their efforts, thank them for their participation, and officially close the project. A celebration helps team members formally recognize the project’s ...

Every project needs to end and that’s what project completion is all about in the last phase of the project life cycle. The whole point of the project is to deliver what you promised. By delivering everything you said you would, you make sure that all stakehol...

After you have carefully planned your project, you will be ready to start the project implementation phase, the third phase of the project management life cycle. The implementation phase involves putting the project plan into action. It’s here that the project...

Even the most carefully planned project can run into trouble. No matter how well you plan, your project can always encounter unexpected problems. Team members get sick or quit, resources that you were depending on turn out to be unavailable, even the weather c...

Communications management is about keeping everybody in the loop. The communications planning process concerns defining the types of information you will deliver, who will receive it, the format for communicating it, and the timing of its release and distribut...

It’s not enough to make sure you get a project done on time and under budget. You need to be sure you make the right product to suit your stakeholders’ needs. Quality means making sure that you build what you said you would and that you do it as efficiently as...

Procurement management follows a logical order. First, you plan what you need to contract; then you plan how you’ll do it. Next, you send out your contract requirements to sellers. They bid for the chance to work with you. You pick the best one, and then you s...

In the previous wedding case study, it is clear that Steve and Susan have resource problems. Getting a handle on all of the tasks that have to be done is a great start, but it’s not enough to know the tasks and the order they come in. Before you can put the fi...

Why Should I Care? There are hidden messages and meanings to media that we are exposed to every day. There is a scientific way to analyze these media content, to discover their true face. Definitions Content Analysis: The systematic coding of ideas, themes,...