Week 7 (6th-12th, March, 2017)

This week we had a session on project management from media industry professional, Marie Thouaille. During this we were introduced to several concepts and tools that are key to project management, such as; the project life cycle, S.W.O.T. analysis, scope management, stakeholder management and Gantt charts.

The project lifecycle is a broad plan that can be applied to most projects, in the session we focused only on two of the four stages in the project lifecycle: Define it and Design it. We moved on to S.W.O.T. analysis, S.W.O.T. analysis is a structured analysis of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of anything from projects to products and brands.We were set to work on our own S.W.O.T. analysis chart and decided to use our rebranding task as the focus of it. 

The rebranding of Tesco was the focus of all the tasks set in this session. Next we defined the scope of our rebranding, it’s important to define scope clearly so you have a clear cut idea of what you have to do and to avoid “scope creep”, the constant adding of new ideas that will throw your project off balance.

Our scope for Tesco Rebrand: The project to create and develop a TV advertisement campaign for the brand Tesco, to make it more memorable and modern in todays market.

After that we went on to stakeholder management, stakeholder management is used to figure out exactly who has interest and/or influence over the project process or outcomes. To apply this to our Tesco rebranding task we created a chart, similar to the S.W.O.T. analysis chart, and mapped the influence and interest of the various types of people connected with our project.

Lastly we were told about Gantt charts; a chart, similar to a bar graph, that lays out the duration of the project and divides the time up among the different parts and actions needed to be completed. They’re typically used to make sure the time given to a project is used efficiently, so the project gets done in a timely fashion and doesn't run over the deadline.