P7+D2 - carry out a review of the project management process and evaluate the effectiveness of the tools used to plan the project.

Jonny Smart

In this essay I am going to carry out a review of my project management process. As well as evaluate the effectiveness of the tools used to plan the project. It is important to evaluate to the strengths, weaknesses and improvements of a project so that the project can improve and expand. My information blog for John Bentley School meets the requirements of the project brief given to me at the start of the project. My brief was as follows; you have been voted by The John Bentley School sixth form to design and create a blog for news and events across the year. The blog will include information about all key dates such as exams, prom, holidays and any another important information. The best way to review my project is to specify the strengths, weaknesses and improvements.

Strengths

My information blog covers important information for a variety of audiences. For example, there is information for different year groups and their parents. In addition, there is a very interesting colour scheme that makes the blog more interesting to navigate. With this in mind, because I chose the simple blog template in blogger, the pages are very easy to navigate. This makes the information on my blog more quickly accessible. A user can quickly access the important information needed with little hassle. However, even though these features are good, it doesn’t mean the blog is perfect.

Weaknesses

Although the information I have is very useful, I could do with more of it. For example, more information like contact details is very handy for parents because if they didn’t find the correct information on the blog, they could phone the school and get a direct and detailed answer.  Furthermore, I could’ve included features that made my blog more interactive so the user finds the blog more interesting. If I wanted my blog to look more professional and complex I could’ve used some my detailed software instead of blogger, for example Squarespace. Blogger is a very basic blogging site and doesn’t offer the more professional features like other sites.

Improvements

After reviewing my information blog; I now know the improvements I need to make. Introducing more information and features that make my blog more interesting to navigate will improve the popularity of my blog. In addition, I also think introducing interactive features will particularly boost this because it is something few blogs have, most modern blogs nowadays are strictly written based. If I was to repeat the process again I would select a more detailed blogging site because blogger is a very basic site which lacks the complex features that other sites use.

In this project I have used various different tools to plan and complete me information blog. To gain a detailed understanding on the success and floors of my project I need to evaluate the effectiveness of these tools.

To gain a detailed understanding of the 5 steps of project management I used Photoshop to create a detailed and informative poster. It was very detailed software tool originally designed for photography. I wanted to use it despite this because I wanted to use the large variety of shapes it has to offer. It was every good at making my poster interesting to look at however, it was difficult to write the text because you can’t produce text boxes to hold the text.

To present some of my findings I used Microsoft PowerPoint to present my work. It is a software program that I am very familiar with. Therefore, it was very easy to use which meant it didn’t provide much time and effort. I was able to make my presentation look very appealing by using the design templates and exporting interesting images into my PowerPoint. However, PowerPoint doesn’t have the more interactive features that software programs like Prezi contains.

To hold all my work in one place I used Blogger so that I could hold all my work in one place as well making it easy for my assessor can access my work.

I used Blogger to write essays as well as import work from different software programs like videos. It was very good at holding my work in an easy and accessible place, as I previously mentioned, there is a very interesting colour scheme that makes the blog more interesting to navigate. With this in mind, because I chose the simple blog template in blogger, the pages are very easy to navigate. This makes the information on my blog more quickly accessible.

If I wanted my blog to look more professional and complex I could’ve used some my detailed software instead of blogger, for example Squarespace. Blogger is a very basic blogging site and doesn’t offer the more professional features like other sites.

In conclusion, in my project management unit I managed to generate a successful and interesting information blog that met the project criteria. It shown important like dates, events and was easily accessible to users. It was successful thanks to the effective software programs I used to complete the tasks. They were all simple programs that performed effectively, saving me time and money.