Instructions

The purpose of this portfolio is to help you develop in your role as a project leader. The key activities that will help you build the portfolio are:

1. Reflection - thinking about the questions and activities based on your own experience, capabilities and intentions.
2. Collaboration - exchanging ideas with your colleagues, friends and mentors and testing out the solutions and directions you have arrived at.
3. Information - researching further, using your existing knowledge, using ECU library, using academic journals and industry publications, the internet, business and the materials presented in this unit.

Additional instructions:

• There are 5 portfolio exercises for you to do.
• Ensure you use APA-compliant referencing (v7).
• The assignment must be submitted as a single Microsoft Word document.

Portfolio Entry 1

Using the material in the unit and from your own research, assess yourself as a leader by writing a 'pen portrait' of yourself as project leader, as seen from another person's perspective. Ensure that you identify which leadership skills and characteristics are defined, and that the portrait reflects activity on a previous, current or future project. Briefly mention the findings of the first (group) assignment that explored your leadership styles, approaches, models, etc. and your team roles.

Portfolio Entry 2 Discuss the following statement with reference to a project, assignment or other initiatives you have been involved with: "While project management is an activity undertaken with others, the projects themselves involve these other people doingor not doingjust what is needed. This happens in an environment where the project manager has far less authority than responsibility, and it is this limitation of authority that characterises the project manager's role and propels the most successful project managers to demonstrate leadership."

Portfolio Entry 3 With reference to the work you have done for Portfolio Entry 1 and 2, use the leadership aspects that you've identified that suit you best, to address the following questions which explore the implications for your future career in Project Management:

• Which leadership style suits you best?
• How does this fit with your favoured team roles?
• How will you bolster the parts (roles) that you're not so good at, to broaden your personal leadership capabilities?
• How will you manage to delegate those parts that you really enjoy doing?
• How will you ensure that the parts you favour least, still get the attention they need, so that the project has a good overall balance of leadership skills?

Portfolio Entry 4 Make a list of at least three incidents that you have been involved in and that posed ethical dilemmas. Put yourself in the position of your project leadership mentor. Using this vantage point, write a letter to yourself that critiques your handling of each incident. Then, looking back on all the incidents as a whole, summarise the implications in terms of your individual character, and the potential effect on future projects you might undertake.

Portfolio Entry 5

Reflective practice within a project team is important. Create an appropriate system for reflective practice on a future project you might be working on. This system should encourage reflection on practice by members of your future team, and result in suggestions for change, development and improvement.