Project Management at My Company

My company a leading global provider of office furniture and services that create great places to work. They believe in innovation, design, operational excellence, smart application of technology, and social responsibility. In these five areas, my company creates concepts that change the traditional workplace. However, concepts, although critical to the process, do not by themselves help my company to achieve their mission of creating great places to work. Only through the careful selection and execution of projects do these concepts become reality, first for themselves, and then for their customers.

Discussion Questions on Rhetorical Writing Strategy

How do you determine the best rhetorical strategy to use in your own on-the-job writing?

In my own on-the-job writing, I choose the best rhetorical strategy based on the writing situation. For example, writing project change board requests to approve the implementation of a new application is a common situation. The change requests vary in topic, but follow a standard format. They might use any one of the rhetorical strategies, but they always include answers to five questions:

1. How does this application affect the business?
2. How does this create value for the customer?
3. How does this improve your work (productivity, avoid mistakes, etc.)?
4. What are the alternatives? 
5. Why is this the best solution?
   

Two Tips for Project Research

In my project work, I am frequently asked to solve challenging business problems. I typically follow a simple, three-step process: I research possible solutions, I write and present a recommendation, and finally, if the recommendation is approved, I form a project team to implement the solution. This week I learned some keys to researching information and to organizing my writing, both of which will help me write better quality recommendations for my work.

About

As children, not many of us were guilty of saying, "I want to be a project manager when I grow up!" For most of us, project management is something that happened to us. In other words, at some point in our careers we were asked to do something that required us to coordinate resources to achieve a specific business objective. Some of us loved it--others, not so much. This process of coordinating resources is what many call project management.