As required for all other Information Technology Majors at UW-Whitewater, we are required to take a class called ITBE 451: IT Project Management. It was such a great experience for me. It was taught by an excellent professor, Sara Deschner. This class was so cool! Sara actually went out and talked to other businesses that were interested in having a group of college students work on an IT related project. I already had Sara as a professor before this class, so I could really tell that she was excited when she came back and told us that we had a project to work on for CUNA Mutual Group.
Unfortunately, I cannot post any information regarding what the project was about due to confidentiality concerns but it was such an excellent experience for me. I was really motivated when my peers nominated me to lead the project as well with another student. As soon as I got the leadership role, I put on my game face. What we had to research was very broad, so the initial phase of the project was extremely difficult to narrow down on what was business necessary and what was business luxury. Another challenge was establishing a form of communication that everyone could use from anywhere. We ended up using Google Wave (which is no longer being supported by Google) but it worked great for us. It was pretty cool to give that a test drive while working on a large project. Worst case scenario, we had email to communicate with each other.
Another exciting part about the project was that we got to travel to CUNA Mutual’s headquarters two times to give a presentation. They were very impressed on what we discovered and we had a great discussion throughout the whole presentation. Since I had so much presenting experience, I let other get the opportunity to present to a large group. I did run the Q&A session at the end, but that was an easy job to moderate the discussion. Overall, this class project taught me a lot of delegating responsibilities and who will step up and who needs to be told what to do. It was very difficult to communicate with people at times, but we all did a great job. I was fortunate enough to have a great class and we all got along and worked together. This project was the best class project that I have ever had.
