Closure Report

Project Summary

The university has a corporate partnership with the Association for Project Management (APM), and can access a wide range of benefits and resources as a result. These resources are not available to students, they can instead become an individual member at no cost.  Most students are unaware of this opportunity and therefore this project aims to create tools to raise awareness amongst students of what APM resources are available to them.

This project involved creating resources to aid student access to APM resources. This included creating a student guide detailing what APM is, How to make an APM Student account and what resources students have access to with their membership. It also resulted in the creation of an APM student accessibility guide, detailing the prior knowledge needed for each APM resource as well as how useful students might find them. This then went onto show students potential "Learning Paths" which were resources they may want to access and in which order, based on their wants and needs. These APM resources are to be used and distributed to students by the PMO in Project Management training or other Project Management activities following on from this project. There was also the creation of an APM long term student communication plan, where any potential out of scope APM ideas were recorded for future projects as well as different contacts that may be interested in APM. All of these together aim to make APM student membership promotion increase

Objectives and Deliverables Achieved

Analysis of Resource Usage:

Staff Usage Estimate: 10 days

Staff Usage Actual: 10.4 days

Staff Usage Variance: 0.4 days (4%)

Other Resource Estimate: £0

Other Resource Actual: 1.14

Other Resource Variance: 0%

Explanation for Variance

Due to the detail given to the deliverables and the quantity of research required to create these, this meant that the Project required more effort than originally anticipated. Because of this, the project went over budget by 1 day (discussed and approved by Project Sponsor) in order to ensure the deliverables created were to a high quality. 

Outcome

The outcome of this project is the resources created including the two student guides as well as the communication plan. These detail all student essential APM access information as well as helping students to make the best use of the resources they are given access to. This will likely make it easier for those providing Project management training to introduce students to APM without taking up too much time within their training slot. Equally, this will also let students understand all of the resources APM offers to them and why they should be interested in them which is likely to result in more effective student training sessions. On the other hand, with the long term communication plan, this can help with the generation of APM initiatives within the future as well as helping more staff promote APM to students. This is likely to promote APM to students longer term as this project itself is unable to do any direct student promotion activities or events. 

Key Learning Points

The main learning points as a result of this project are:

• It is detrimental to have Sponsor engagement and sign off throughout the entire lifecycle of a project to ensure that each stage can be completed effectively.
• It is good practice to ensure that project deliverables are possible within the allotted effort of the project and to consider what deliverables are going to be during effort estimation. 
• It is good practice to plan your deliverables in detail during the planning stage and when setting MOSCOW ratings as this can ensure that the ratings are correct and that your deliverables created are as effective as possible for the project aim. 

View the learning points in more detail below:

Outstanding Issues