Project Progress, Organization/Planning Skills, & MBTI Working Style

Project Progress
As the main technical problem mentioned last week was basically resolved, the project is on the final stage. The first development task is almost finished (only some details left to be discussed with my supervisor) and waits for any feedback of changes or improvements. Next step would be uploading and deploying these documents tested on my local machine to the server-side via Collage system (a kind of software handling enterprise server-side content management) as implement. So, the current status of the project development progress is 80% done.

Organization/Planning Skills
To enable the project to be successfully completed within the development duration while other academic assignments also need to be done simultaneously, organization and planning skills are essential. The organization and planning skills that I have used to develop my project include:

Planning:

• Set up goals
• Define the project scope
• Identify required resources
• Evaluate the development duration in an appropriate manner
• Divide project into several breakdown tasks
• Make a development schedule, defining each milestones according to the breakdown tasks
• Manage risks – identify potential risks, evaluate causes, consequences, level of likelihood and impact, provide resolutions for control and mitigation

Organization:

• Identify what tasks and how many tasks I need to do each day
• Identify the priority of each task
• Assign appropriate time for each task
• Make a checking list to identify the completion status of each task

MBTI Working Style
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) assessment is a psychometric questionnaire designed to measure psychological preferences in how people perceive the world and make decisions. It also can be a reference of a person’s working style as people’s behaviour is affected by their personalities and preferences.

My MBTI type is ENFJ, which means my personality belongs to the type of Extraverted, Intuition, Feeling, and Judging. Theoretically, ENFJ people feel comfortable in a harmonious environment and significantly regard their interpersonal relationships. They prefer to make decisions on the basis of personal values, appreciate and accept others. So team-oriented is a typical working style of ENFJ people. However, regarding to this argument, my own working style is a little different. Although I am sensitive to others’ feelings, highly regard to collaboration, and like to build up and maintain interpersonal relationship, I give task the first priority. Normally I do not want to bother others in the work place. Remain trouble-free, facilitate collaboration, and contribute to teamwork are my working style at present.

Problems & Problem Resolving

Six weeks passed in the twinkling of an eye. Now I have done the half of my internship. My project is on the developing progress. Everything in my internship seems fine, but, of course, there are still problems.

These problems came from different sides including pressure of doing large amount of weekly assessment and thousands of words report while doing internship and technical difficulties encountered during the project development. However, comparing to my friends who is doing help desk job in his internship, I am luckier, because I need not to deal with customers.

Even though, my problems still make me headache. First of all, I need to do two online courses while I am doing the internship. Both of them require a lot of analysing and writing work each week. For example, each week I am required to participate in the online forum which needs to answer several questions and participate in the discussion, and update minimum 300 words career episode report on the Blog. By the end of this term, I also have to submit totally 8,000 words reports including ethic analysis, risk management, and summing-up report of my internship, meanwhile, I am expected to complete the Wesley Mission intranet Cascading Style Sheet refresh project during my internship period. It causes high pressure and time seems to be in sufficient. To resolve this problem, time management is necessary. I need to adopt several time management strategies to deal with this. These strategies I have already posted in this Blog. By following them, these weighty assignments can be ensured to be finished on time.

The other problem regards to the project development. As I mentioned in the report posted in 17th December 2009, my project is to Change the layout form orange colour scheme to blue colour scheme at the Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) level according to the mock-up design. Due to my knowledge and skills, as well as relative working experience in such field, this job is not difficult. But I still encountered technical problem during the development which is my way of coding the new CSS cannot meet the design requirement. To solve it, the first approach I took is researching Internet and trying to get some technical resolutions from online tutorials. I also asked my supervisor Steve for help and he gave me some useful suggestions for solution.

There is also a little problem of communication with my mentor Rowen. Because he works at Wollongong, there is rarely a change for us to meet together. However, we can contact with each other by email or telephone, or we can arrange an appointment to meet if he has time.

Communication Processes

As Nick Scanchez summarized in his article Communication Process, communication is “the transmission of a message from a sender to a receiver in an understandable manner”. It is an essential part of our daily business activities. Communication can be carried out through many different ways such as conversation, meeting, telephone, instant message, letter, and email. These communicational forms are also commonly seen during the daily business operation of our origination. Conversations are usually adopted when an efficient information exchange is required in a casual context, whereas when a more formal conversation is required or an important decision needs to be made, a meeting will be hold as the communicational approach. If the communicational parties can not meet together, telephone will be the way of carrying out the communication to avoid the spatial limitation. The normal process of communication regarding to conversation, meeting, and telephone is, at first, the message senders launch a conversation, organize a meeting, or dial up a phone call, then they transmit their messages, meanings, and even feelings by using spoken words and non-verbal languages such as gestures and facial expressions to the receivers. The receivers receive these messages and meanings, understand them, and reflect their feedbacks. As common as these spoken-methods, written words are also used to convey messages, especially when the situation is not allowed the communicational parties to use spoken-words. Instant message software is popularly used by team members to communicate with each other because this tool is very convenient and efficient for them to exchange information instantly. But as same as normal conversation, it is only used in a less formal context. When in a formal situation, letters and emails are usually recommended. However different from spoken-words, written-words can be easily recorded and traced, so it is very important to be careful in using your language, choosing your words, and expressing your ideas.

It can be normally seen that how these communication processes used in daily business of the organization. I also used them in my internship to communicate with my supervisors and other team members. I normally discuss a particular issue with my mentors through verbal communication, but when they are not currently available, I usually send them emails. As indicated by Nick Scanchez, the meaning of the message is significantly affected by the sender’s experience, attitudes, knowledge, skills, perceptions, and culture. Therefore, it is extremely important for a message sender to select written words, spoken words, and nonverbal language to ensure the receiver understand the sender’s intended meaning of the message. Being polite in the communication is necessary. In my communication process, I always start a conversation by saying “Excuse me, xxx, can I bother you for a while?” In addition, due to the limitation of my English skills, I have to speak slowly or use describing expressions to ensure my spoken-words can be clearly and correctly interpreted by the receivers. Sometimes when the message is too complex to be expressed by using verbal language, I usually employ graphics and drawing pictures as assistance.

References:
Scanchez, N., 2010, Communication Process, viewed at 15/01/2010, <http://web.njit.edu/~lipuma/352comproc/comproc.htm>

Holiday Breaks & New Year Greeting!

From 23rd December 2009 to 9th January 2010 I enjoyed three weeks holiday break. I need this break to go back home city to hold my wedding ceremony. It was really a busy time for me to get all of those ceremony preparations done within the short three weeks. Thanks to god, every thing was going well and the ceremony had been successfully completed.

During this period, some of members of the web development team of the organization also took their Christmas plus New Year holiday break. For examples, two of my supervisors took four weeks break. But not all staff in this department decided to take breaks. I heard from one colleague that in his team, which is the IT support team, no body left their posts through the whole holiday weeks because this period, for them, is a very busy season, even busier than normal working days. Although they sacrificed their breaks due to working demands, I really admire them for their dedication and honour them sincerely.

Here, I wish all of my dear colleagues, team members, and fair internship-mates will have a wonderful year in 2010!