Project Management Reflection Report

It is important for all managers, especially new ones, to set aside time regularly where they can sit back and reflect. This creates an opportunity to review their recent actions and think through how it led to the project's current state. Where things are going well, they can identify how they helped things along and what they must to repeat these outcomes in the future. Avoiding actions that created problems is also important and this moment of reflection helps identify what NOT to do again. This reflection is often discussed as an important part of a continuous improvement process.

For this class, students will submit memos in which they reflect on their management experiences. For each reflection report, the instructor will provide prompts around which the memo should be organized. Each paper should reflect on the prompts and respond using your experiences as a PM and course material. I am not looking for a dry recitation of experiences and lecture slides, however. Instead your paper should show how those experiences led to your response and how you can use these ideas to do better in this course and future managerial experiences.

These should be written as short business memos and not traditional papers. Brevity is important. While you must include the required items, your manager will stop reading your report after 1½ pages. Professional communication is effective or not, and impresses your management or not, based on how well it is organized, and how well and how directly it addresses the issues at hand. We'll evaluate your responses as follows

If you have more than one team that you are supporting, you still write one reflection. If a particular prompt has different reflection points for each team, break the individual prompt down by team to share the contrasting insights.

Rubric

Topic	Unacceptable (0)	Poor (1-2)	Acceptable (3-4)	Excellent (5)
Organization	Ideas are placed at random making it difficult to follow what is being said. It is not clear which prompts are being addressed.	Some logical ordering to the mem, but is mostly stream-of-consciousness	Individual ideas progress logically, but may not always be grouped into central themes.	Ideas progress logically and are grouped into central themes.
Reflection and response	Does not address any of the topics included in the prompt OR addresses the prompts, but with so little detail as to be impossible to understand	Responds to the prompt topics, but the response does not provide enough context for a supervisor/reader to connect the description to the PM’s project experiences that have occurred this term	Responds to the prompt topics AND the response includes PM's project experiences relating to the prompt	Responds to the prompt topics AND the response includes PM's project experiences relating to the prompt and contextualizes these experience(s) to make the relationship clear
Clarity (pts x 2)	Makes no suggestions for the future OR provides no explanation for the suggestions	Little reflection on their project experiences with limited explanation how these led to their suggestions for future actions	Good explanation of the PM's project experiences and how these led to suggestions for future actions	Good explanation of the PM's project experiences and how these led to suggestions for future actions AND good explanation of how these suggestions improve things
Style	Reading was difficult due to frequent spelling or grammar errors AND document is missing identifying information like name, team, and prompts	Reading was difficult due to frequent spelling or grammar errors OR document is missing identifying information like name, team, and prompts	Paper has identifying information, but is occasionally awkward to read with a few spelling or grammar errors	Paper has identifying informatinon AND uses a professional tone with no grammar or spelling errors.