Industrial Talk 2 by Commerce Dot Com

On the 1^st December of 2020, an industrial talk that titled ‘The importance and trending of IT Project Management’ has been conducted virtually through Webex. The talk started from 10 a.m. to 11 a.m. and it was attended by all the students from the School of Computing of UTM. The speaker of the talk was Mr. Mohd Khairul Reeza Ruslan who is the Head of Project Management Office from Commerce Dot Com Sdn Bhd and the moderator of the talk was Dr Goh Eg Su who is a senior lecturer from School of Computing, UTM.

From the talk, we know that IT Project Management is very important for an IT project. According to the talk, a project has many aspects to consider executing the project successfully.

First, good project management for IT project is important because good project management can bring leadership. If a project is conducted using project management method, it needs a leader which is the project manager. A project manager must be familiar with the project and the process of completing the project and if there is any problem occur in the process of completing the project, the project manager will be the refer to the team and leads the team to solve the problem.

Next, IT project management is emphasized in an IT project is because it can reduce and manage the risk of the project. With excellent project management practice, every single possible risk factor will be analyzed and determined before the project started. For those risk, the project manager will have to develop a series of plans against all the possible risks to minimize the damage of the risk to the project when it happens.

Not only that, a project will also be planned well with great project management therefore a defined goal, scope and project timeline must be done before launching the project. With these, the project can be well keep tracked and preventing it from slowing down and completed before deadline. With good planning, the project will be properly scheduled and a rushing work with low quality can be avoided therefore the quality of the project can be ensured.

The labor market is characterized by the prevalence of short-term contracts or freelance work as opposed to permanent jobs nowadays. This phenomenon causing an IT project distributed to different groups of people and the cooperation between multiple remote teams heavily rely on digital connections causing project management difficult to be conducted. Therefore, IT project management is important to ensure the project that can be done on time, people and task management can be performed seamlessly to smooth workflow.

Besides, data collection and analyzation are important in making crucial and accurate decision. Therefore, starting up a project strategically with planning to collect data to obtain the understanding require. IT project management is important in big data collection because it plays an important role in extracting information and transform the information into human language. This helps people have a clearer insight to reduce mistake occurrences during project development.

Apart from that, high-end AI is used to assist in prioritizing projects and allocating resources. Applying AI in resource management is efficient, however, the AI algorithms unable to perform project management tasks such as empathizing and actively listening. Therefore, human-based project management is important in filling up this shortcoming and maximizing usage of the calculation results in the project.

A project usually has a scheduled, however, the scheduled processes and time might not be followed properly by developer teams and there might exist processes that can be replaced to help streamline project. Therefore, project management is important in noting the spots worth changing and identifying the processes that are not being followed properly.

The increasing tendency of using method melding in project causing project management is important nowadays. Method melding is an act combining different methodologies in project management and apply these hybrid models to the current project. Therefore, project management is important to clearly know which processes are using which methodology to ensure project progression.

Using advanced project management tools and solutions has becoming popular in project management because these tools provide positive changes in project management. These tools help in project planning, scheduling and time tracking, communication and collaboration between people involved, budgets, deadlines, and progress tracking. Project management is important in maximizing the functions of these tools.

Besides, emotions of people involved in the project needed to be managed to avoid emotional activity among the team members. These emotional activities might jeopardize the project because it causes cooperation between people hard to be built even delay the project and downgrading project’s quality. This shows that project management by human being is important because no AI algorithms can replace this function.

Project management is important in many sectors including IT project. The table below shows the relevant IT careers related to project management and their average salary.

First, we wish to thank Mr. Mohd Khairul Reeza Ruslan for his talk and information given. Next, we like to thank Dr. Goh Eg Su and other staff in School of Computing, UTM involved for hosting this informative talk. We also wish to thank Dr. Nor Azizah Sa’adon for giving us opportunity participating this talk.