Personal Finance- Final Exam Comments & Financial Advice

Congratulations! You are approaching the end of your 9-week Personal Finance Course. I hope that you have learned tons, and I hope that you take what you have learned out into the world and apply it in your daily lives when it comes to your finances and money management. It's that time....EXAMS...and that means it's time for review and preparations before enjoying your Christmas Break.

As your last extra credit opportunity, I'm asking that you post a comment on my blog. I would like you to give some feedback on the class and what you have learned. Also, provide some financial advice to those who won't have the opportunity or have yet had the opportunity to take this course. The best advertisement is by word of mouth, so share your knowledge with others.

You will be awarded 2 extra credit points per posted comment. REMEMBER to leave your name at the bottom of your comment so that I know who to award credit to.

It has been a pleasure getting to know each of you & and even bigger pleasure being your teacher!

Happy Holidays!!!

WPD: Case Study- We Need an Intranet!

Mary Kate is a project manager in the IT department for a university. She has been asked to manage a project to create a faculty intranet. The university has multiple campuses in various locations, and professors and other faculty need to be able to easily post questions, schedules and other documents to share in a secure environment.



Mary Kate performed the following steps to begin the intranet project:

• She performed a needs analysis. Mary Kate interviewed the university faculty to determine their need for an intranet and the uses they foresee for it. She discovered that several of the professors were working on a research project and wanted to use the intranet to facilitate group discussions, as well as host periodic Webinars for professors at other universities.
• She chose the project team. Mary Kate enlisted members of the IT department for the project, including someone to install firewalls so users have more secure access to the Internet, and someone to set up the site to host Webinars.
• She determined the project constraints. Mary Kate determined when the intranet needed to be live. She considered how long she would have the services of the various team members, how long team members could work on this project before being assigned to other tasks, and when the first Webinar was scheduled. Once she gathered all of this information, she was able to determine the project scope and constraints.
• She created the project schedule. Mary Kate worked with the project team to outline the tasks and task relationships required to complete the project. She assigned resources to specific tasks so that each person was aware of his or her role in the overall project plan.
• She scheduled weekly meetings for the duration of the project. Mary Kate included the CIO, project team members, faculty members and all other stakeholders in the meetings.
• She created a project status and an issues log. Mary Kate used these documents in each meeting to apprise stakeholders of the project's progress and to introduce any problems or issues that had arisen since the last meeting.

Once Mary Kate had performed all these tasks, she was ready to begin the executing phase of the project.

As a class, we will discuss this scenario and then you will individually comment below on the following questions:

• Which steps already performed by Mary Kate are part of the initiating phase for this project? Which steps are part of the planning phase?
• Has Mary Kate overlooked any steps in the first two phases of this project? What other tasks might she need to perform?
• What tasks might Mary Kate perform in the executing phase? In the controlling phase? In the closing phase?
• How might scope creep occur in this project? How could it be managed?