Assignment Overview

In this unit, you are required to complete weekly portfolios and a consolidated portfolio. A portfolio provides evidence of previous and current experience and presents a dynamic record of your growth and professional learning over the duration of this unit. Your portfolio will provide an account of your learning based on your practice and your critical reflection.

Task

Your task is to write a weekly portfolio reflecting upon your learnings from the prior week. In your portfolio you will identify: the learning outcomes and module/topic of the unit, a description of your experience including reading samples and/or records, the learning from your experiences, and any supporting documentation of prior or current learning.

Purpose

The primary purpose of this assessment item is to help you to develop skills for undertaking research and translating, via your technical and creative skills, underpinning concepts about project and portfolio management information systems. The secondary purpose of this assignment is to give you the opportunity to enhance your analysis, critical thinking and written communication skills. Developing a portfolio, as a result, makes your learning more explicit as you translate your workplace and personal experiences into documented evidence. You can then learn to critically examine the nature of your learning on this unit in relation to specific experiences in your project management practice and demonstrate that you have learned from those experiences and how you have achieved or maintained your professional competence as a result.

The assignment will also give you the opportunity to enhance your analysis and written communication skills; particularly in the areas of rigorous structured assignment writing.

Structure

You will be provided on the Moodle website with a portfolio template. You should use this template and upload a weekly portfolio to the Moodle website. At the end of this term, you will consolidate your weekly portfolios into a single document and upload an overall consolidated portfolio. Your portfolio should contain a coherent, but necessarily restricted review of the academic literature related to the project management topics for each week. You should also include a weekly reference list formatted in the prescribed style. You are also encouraged to include a bibliography. This assessment item involves researching the topics to enhance your understanding of each concept through a utilisation of academic literature and secondary sources. Whilst you must use the recommended textbooks and web links, you should also refer to other sources on the Moodle website and additional relevant peer reviewed academic journal articles of your choosing.

Weekly Portfolio

Your weekly portfolio can be as long or as short as you want it to be. It is your portfolio and shows your development of understanding during the unit. Naturally, this will make the portfolio different for everyone. Each student’s background, education, current and past work experiences is what makes it different.

Each student’s personal researches will be different. What you need to do is to give yourself enough time to reflect and show how you have thought and come to grips with the ideas that address the learning outcomes of the unit. The amount of time you should be allocating to the unit is 12 hours per week, so there should be a fair bit of time for you to make the reflections and reach a depth of insight that will make the portfolio meaningful.

With each week’s portfolio that you submit you do not include the writing that you made for a prior week. Instead you use the same portfolio template using only the section for the week you are writing about. In other words, each week’s portfolio is a reflection upon that week. You should however, revisit the whole of the unit learning outcomes each week. The portfolio for any previous week is a reflection of your insights and thoughts for that week. Once you upload the portfolio then leave it for that week. Over the duration of the term, you will find that there is a development and change of your ideas as you study the material. You will then have opportunity at the end of the unit to consolidate everything and show how you have gained the insights that the unit is seeking to provide. At the end of the term, you should review your weekly portfolios and consolidate them into a single submission. You should make a personal reflection in this submission. This is the assessment that gets marked.

It is to your benefit to have the personal discipline to make sure that you do not get behind. If you are allocating 12 hours per week for the unit then there is plenty of time for the portfolio. If you find that one week you slip then ok, but the unit is fundamentally planned so that you need to allocate 12 hours each week.

The unit is straight forward, but there are lots of websites to visit and material to download. The textbooks are only part of the story and you won’t be able to do the unit with just the textbooks. Unfortunately, much of the material is written from a North American perspective. You will need to consider other industry sectors and to be able to translate the learning outcomes into an Australian or other cultural perspective. Therefore, you will need to download other files and visit websites to be able to gather the material you need in your portfolio.

There are no bonus points for getting the portfolio perfect from the first week. Understanding and familiarity will only develop over time. As you do the portfolios each week and keep revisiting the learning outcomes and adding the unit material then you will gain insights required. Unless you do that on a weekly basis you won’t have the appropriate perspective to make the journey and reach the destination by the end of the unit.

Portfolio for week 1 is due in week 2, portfolio for week 2 is due in week 3 and so on. Please note that there is one template for week 10 & 11 portfolio and is due at the end of week 11.

Consolidated Portfolio

You will be provided with a template for the consolidated portfolio due at the end of the term. Since you will have made your own journey studying during the term then the material that you will want to include in the consolidated portfolio will be unique for you. Your consolidated portfolio will explain how you have developed your understanding of the learning outcomes and the topics with each week’s study.

• Your consolidated portfolio MUST be made as a single submission (one file). The weekly submissions should form an appendix to the consolidated portfolio as per the consolidated portfolio suggested layout.

You must NOT use an index and numbering system to identify material from prior week’s leaving each portfolio on the unit website.

The consolidated portfolio is the important one. It is important that you make it clear to the marker what your consolidated portfolio refers to otherwise you may not get the marks you expect.

An analogy for the consolidated portfolio is that you can imagine that you are going before an examination board at the end of the term and presenting to them a complete portfolio of your journey throughout the term. You will hand each board member a package that they should then be able to read and from it appreciate everything that you have done and learned during your work life and the unit.

Referencing

Ensuring you have accurate references is important and will allow the marker to easily identify where your portfolio maps to the unit or other peer reviewed material. You also need to show how you have made critical reflection on the material and added your own unique insights.

Referencing should be made according to CQU’s APA referencing guide. To locate the guide then Google “CQU APA referencing” and download the PDF file for the current year.

It is because of your references and academic proficiency with critical analysis that you will be able to gain MAXIMUM MARKS.

Your assignment will be assessed on the extent and quality to which it meets each of the following criteria.

1. Evidence in regular weekly portfolios of meeting the graduate attributes? (20%)
2. Qualitative reflections of each of the unit learning outcomes? (40%)
3. Quantitative achievement of the unit topics? (20%)
4. Clarity of expression, grammar and spelling? (5%)
5. Strict conformity to CQUniversity Australia APA Referencing Guide (author-date)? (5%)
6. Document clarity and presentation format? (10%)

Task

Your task is to consider the contents of:

• SEBoK http://www.sebokwiki.org
• Kerzner (2017)
• AS/NZS 15288 Systems Engineering – Systems Life Cycle Processes
• Full Final Report from the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling
• Chapter 5: Overarching Failures of Management of the Chief Counsel’s report from the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling
• Other material as you feel appropriate

Then you must write an essay describing how these contents address the questions they pose and that explain the relevance of systems thinking to a project and an organisation by using the theories and ideas related to:-

• General systems management
• Organisational structures, forms and culture
• Engineering risk, risk management,
• Portfolio alignment
• Business value
• Portfolio management process cycle
• Organisational maturity.

You should illustrate your arguments by identifying what different systems thinking tools and techniques might aid project managers solve project problems, such as what occurred with Texas City and Deepwater Horizon.

Purpose

The primary purpose of this assessment item is to help you to be able to define systems thinking and classify the tools and techniques related systems thinking. The secondary purpose of this assignment is to give you the opportunity to enhance your analysis, critical thinking and written communication skills; particularly in the areas of argument development and essay writing.

Structure

Your essay should be a properly constructed academic essay of around 2000 words.

It should contain an effective introduction, body and conclusion. The introduction should introduce the essay and include your argument. The body should present the evidence you have collected to support your argument, and the conclusion should restate your argument, summarise the evidence and make a conclusion regarding your argument. The essay should contain a coherent, but necessarily restricted review of the academic literature on the topics in question. The literature review should be integrated into the essay, not a separate section. Do not include an executive summary or an abstract. A reference list formatted in the prescribed APA style is compulsory. Do not include a bibliography.

1. A description of the theories and ideas specific to general systems management, organisational structures, forms and culture, value management, engineering risk, risk management, systems engineering and an assessment of the linkages between these? (30%)
2. A demonstration of thorough knowledge and application of relevant project and portfolio management principles, concepts, methods and theories in a systems context? (20%)
3. Appropriate and well structured, concise and clear expression of systems engineering arguments in response to the assessment task? (10%)
4. A clear flow of thought throughout the paper with a clear purpose described in the introduction and a comprehensive conclusion? (10%)
5. A critical review and integration of relevant academic and professional literature (cited at least twenty (20) times from six (6) separate reference sources)? (15%)
6. Clarity of expression, grammar and spelling? (5%)
7. Strict conformity to CQUniversity Australia APA Referencing Guide? (5%)
8. Appropriate presentation format and presented within (±10%) of the word limit: 2,000 words? (5%)

• The primary purpose of this assessment item is to help you to identify factors associated with systems thinking for project, program and portfolio management.
• The secondary purpose of this assignment is to give you the opportunity to enhance your research, analysis and critical thinking skills.
• You will be required to complete a series of multiple choice quiz questions related to the material and topics covered in the first 5 weeks of this unit.
• The quiz will be available from Monday 09:00 AM to Friday 11.45 PM in Week 6 on the Moodle website.

• There will be 10 multiple choice questions in the quiz which will be randomly selected from a pool of questions.
  
• You may attempt the quiz 3 times and your average score will apply.
  
• You have 30 minutes on each time to attempt the quiz.

• This is an open book test.
• The test will be of 2 hours duration (120 minutes) plus 15 minutes perusal time. In total 135 minutes.
• You will need to download the test from Moodle, read the questions, make your answers, check, and finally upload your answers back into Moodle within the 135 minutes.
• You should make sure you upload your answers within the 135 minute time-frame otherwise a penalty of 5% will be applied for every 5 minutes of your late submission.
• You should make sure that you upload drafts of your answers frequently in Moodle to ensure that you have partial answers secured in Moodle.
• The test will comprise of 10 questions in which only 5 need to be attempted (students choose the 5 questions to attempt).
• Your submission must be in a Microsoft Word document file format.

Each question that you answer is worth 7 marks (In total 35 marks for 5 questions).