UVA Master’s in Management of Information Technology - Retrospective (Part 4 of 6)
This is part 4 of my retrospective on the UVA Master’s in Management of Information Technology program I graduated from in May 2010. See part 1, part 2, and part 3 for context.
Mod 2
Mod 2 covers managing information technology projects. A lot of the material is related to PMBoK (Project Management Body of Knowledge). Some people in the class earn their Project Management Professional (PMP) certification by taking the PMP test after finishing Mod 2. I cannot speak to how easy or difficult Mod 2 makes the PMBoK material since I did not take the test.
By far the most interesting part of Mod 2 is the group project. Groups are assigned by classmate geography to facilitate interaction. For example, I lived in Charlottesville at the time and my other four group members lived within a half an hour of me.
Groups are responsible for finding a completed (or failed) IT project and performing a retrospective. There is a laundry list of things that can go wrong on IT projects and groups have to analyze what went right, what went wrong, and what future projects can learn to do better.
Each group interviews project stakeholders, analyzes documentation and deliverables, and views demos of the system if it was completed. The analysis objective is to piece together the outcome and the project’s significant intermediate events. At the end of the three months, each group presents a retrospective on the project.
Things I wish I knew before going into Mod 2:
- Learn to work well with your group. Your group members will change in Mod 3 but the lessons learned while working under the stress on a difficult project will be very beneficial for the remainder of the program.
- Practice, practice, practice for the presentation. It makes a major difference in the Mod 2 grade! We ran through our presentation in full six or seven times in person and made adjustments as we went along. That’s at least four hours of time spent only on speaking our lines in the presentation plus several more hours for slide edits.
- Do not wait until the night before your presentation to practice it for the first time. You will make changes to the slide deck and if the changes are drastic you will not have enough time to become comfortable with the section you are speaking on.
Mod 3
The main topics for Mod 3 are enterprise integration, data warehousing, and business intelligence. Although I found Mod 2 interesting, Mod 3 was where the classwork really became fascinating because it focused on enterprise-wide issues.
The Mod 3 topics are all major challenges that frustrate even the best IT organizations. Class discussions on enterprise integration and business intelligence were interesting because many of my classmates were working on these large projects. Professors provided best practices and case studies while classmates provided concrete examples.
The group project for Mod 3 comes from a list of choices on relevant issues in IT organizations, such as social networks, cloud computing, and the “data deluge” (how to process and make sense of the exponentially increasing amount of data organizations produce). As a side note, the data deluge and big data are the topics this blog usually focuses on so if you have further interest in that area, please check my archive for relevant posts.
Advice for Mod 3:
- Pick a topic everyone in the group is interested in. If one person dominates the topic choice then others will have less motivation to learn the subject matter.
- Start pinging contacts in your network to find out the level of access to C-level executives they have. You want to have several potential companies lined up for Mod 4 by mid-December.
- Take a few days off either during Thanksgiving or around Christmas. You will be working for four months straight on a very difficult project in Mod 4.
Mod 4 is introduced even before Mod 3 ends. Mentally prepare yourself for the most difficult part of the program.
My Mod 4 retrospective can be found in part 5.
