Name: Truong Tuan Dung (Richard) Student Code: M0545015

PROJECT MANAGEMENT FIRST ASSIGNMENT (3/7)

SAMUELS APPROACH TO PROJECT MANAGEMENT
How do you think Joe will feel six weeks after the project is underway? Compare his new
approach of project management with his previous approach.
In my opinion, after approaching a new style of Project management which he expected to
transfer his role from Supervisor - who tends to be a micromanager, to be a Facilitator -with
system approach (In his expectation after reading the article), Joe would still feel that his new
adoption is not successful for the following reasons:
Although he has specifically defined the objectives and tasks for each member of the project
team, he also wrote individual contracts for each member to sign; this implementation of him
as the first step to launch the project seemed to give the members clearer detail of what their
responsibilities are. However, from my point of view, according to the fact that no one in the
meeting raised questions, his meeting as a launch meeting can not be considered as a
successful meeting because it lacked sufficient communication. The fact that no one raised
questions in this meeting can be interpreted as his team still not gets used to this approach so
there would be more questions when they implement the projects. For this reason, in the initial
period of the project, he might feel that his project approach is suitable for the team, but as time
goes by, he will see the downsides of this approach.
Joe might think that his new approach might avoid the style of a micromanager, however, this
new approach might not lead to the outcomes that he wants. It is undebatable that making people
be responsible for their roles by forcing them to sign contracts without having much time of
consideration and ideas for the target they must achieve would save Joe time and effort.
However, by assigning all the majored tasks including project plan, objectives, completion dates
and so on in a too detailed way is somehow just a new version of micromanagement style with
an analytical approach. The team members, besides following his instructions and contract,
wont prepare their mind to collaborate with their colleagues. There might be a problem that the
member might fulfill their tasks just as what Joe expected, but when combining all the task
together, it wont work well and cause suboptimization.
There are some differences between his new approach and the previous one. The core difference
is the way Joe assigned tasks and outcomes to the team members. There are not so many helpful
details to give a reasonable guess that in his last project, in spite of the fact that he might be
successful with the result of the projects, he still could not manage the team in the effective way
that he wanted because of his teams members lacks awareness of what they are doing, that
caused him the babysitting role. In this approach, he tried to assign the task and expected
outcomes, date of completion in the most detailed way that he has ever done. However, the
result of this project is not just from the contract that they signed, the quality of subtasks but the
devotion of the people for the job, the way members collaborates, and the way Joe combines
subtasks together.