Trey's Internship Experience PPT

Editor's Notes

• #5: I am from Dallas, Texas, and have lived their my whole life. I started my academic career five years ago with a major in Professional Aviation. After some hard thinking I chose to take a different path. With that, I have recently graduated from The University of Texas at Dallas with a major in Supply Chain Management. I chose SCM because it had a small concentration in Project Management, my third and final “Major”. So, currently, I am a Project Coordinator Intern with the EPMO working out of the Richardson office, and am on schedule to meet my short-term goals. GOALS: First, get a better understanding for Project Management in school to see if that’s is something I would like. Second, get a Project Management internship with a large company to gain a real world feel for Project Management. Now that I have a good feel my next steps are to work my way through the different rolls of Project Management.
• #6: So, this isn’t exactly what I expecting as an intern, but I thought I would lighten the mood a little. To be honest with you, I didn’t quite know what to expect. I’ve heard many stories from many interns where they just run errands or are assigned repetitive tasks that are cumbersome for others to do. That is one reason why I chose Project Management. Even though you have to follow similar processes to complete a project, what is entailed in each project and how you go about completing each phase is completely unique. I did not expect to be involved at a high-level, manipulating the course of a project. Rather, I expected to be assigned two or three key tasks within a certain phase and master what role those tasks played in the larger project. Secondly, I expected to gain basic Project Management terminology. Thirdly, I expected to have the opportunity to network with other Project Management professionals giving me even more insight in the Project Management industry.
• #8: I have experienced so much since I started this internship so, I will try and keep this condensed. I think we all went through the same type of training so, I’ll skip completely over the first couple weeks of training, and jump right into what my unique experiences were. When I was assigned with Dennis Render, he was right in the middle of the Planning Phase in the Pre-Existing Conditions Project, a part of Patient Protections. This was when I was first introduced to SDM. Being in the Requirements Signoff phase, he first gave me the task of recording responses from our stakeholders. Nothing too special about this, but I received “Engaged/Not Engaged” emails and attached them into our TeamRoom. I had to make sure all the appropriate stakeholder’s responded according to the Project Solutions Template. Shortly after, I asked for a little more responsibility. Tracking resources’ posted hours on a weekly basis was the next thing he added to my list. Once a week I logged into Clarity, found the posted hours by resource, and exported them into an Excel Spreadsheet that helped track variance. It also gave a quick visual on who was tracking how much during any given time. Simple enough so, I asked again for more responsibility. Status Reports in Clarity was up next. By the end of the each week, I was responsible for retrieving our project’s status reports and capturing them in Clarity. Again, simple enough. At this point I had reached my “three tasks expectation”. However, I was not satisfied. I went back to him and asked for more responsibility. I knew I only had a limited time here so, I wanted to take full advantage of anything I could get my hands on. This time around he informed me that we are fixing to take on a new project in the coming weeks. He asked me how I wanted to approach this project, with more of the PC type responsibilities or more of the PM type responsibilities. I took the red pill. So, he made it clear to me that from that point forward he would take back control of the three tasks assigned before, and start giving me more control over our new project, Non-Discriminatory Wellness. Though my primary focus was now Wellness, I still was involved on Pre-Existing Conditions all they way into Execution Phase. Moving forward with Wellness, my first task was to create a “Kick-Off” deck. I received several documents, including the Business & Regulatory Requirements (BRR) from LRIO and the Legal Regulatory Analysis (LRA) from the Legal Division. After reading through them a few times, I was able to outline the requirements for our project and include them in the “Kick-Off” deck. Next, I took on the creation of the Project Scope and Project Charter documents. (I know this is not the usual order, but this is just how this project got started. You can ask me about it later if you really want to know.) Furthermore, In Clarity/OBW I created the Project Plan by adding tasks, resources, milestones, creating a timeline, and restructuring the plan to better align with SDM. Last, but not least, I created a TeamRoom from scratch. This proved to be quite a challenge, but has allowed me to help others when they have questions regarding TeamRoom.
• #9: I have also taken part in a “volunteer” project with the Culture Action Club. Along side collaboratively creating a Project Charter with Scope Items, I also have an individual responsibility. I update the Communications Plan when necessary.
• #11: Throughout my time here, I learned two important distinctions about Project Management. There is an “Art of Project Management” and there is a “Science of Project Management”. The first thing I was told when I started working here was to have fun. The Art is about having fun, and being able to make your work environment fun for you and your customers. More importantly, communication is a key piece in the art of PM, as well. Being able to communicate in a personable, appropriate manner dissolves many of the intuitive walls people begin to build when trying to complete a task within groups. Communicating well helps build strong, collaborative teams. The Science, to me, is the easy part. The processes (PMLC & SDM), PM terminology, the use of different types of software, etc. are things that can be easily learned. Once you have learned appropriate software, you just plug and chug.