Journey behind PLOT

Every high school prepares their students for several careers. With a combination of self-directed learning and experiential learning through team projects, teachers in high schools prepare their students for entering college.

While students are not taught the basic principles of managing their personal and professional life by applying project management and agile principles, how can these students maximize learning that should occur and continuously improve?

My experience as a parent led me to believe that most high school teachers don't even know the project management as a profession, let alone the benefit from using it to maximize the learning outcomes for students.

Even parents focus only on STEM as the main foundation. They fail to recognize the principles of prioritizing initiatives, managing time, engaging stakeholders, working with teams, addressing risks, building quality, and managing costs. How are their children poised for continuous success, then?

It was painful for me to see students waste the precious resource of time by enter colleges without knowing what they want or even not having a game plan in their junior years.

This is why I started PLOT. To provide young generation in their 9th - 12th grade with life saving skills that these disciplines offer.

The Story of PLOT

Dr. Rajagopalan's initiative to introduce project management as a life skill.

PLOT Benefits

There are some of the benefits that I have heard from learners that have taken my course.

Learners manage priorities and claim gaining more time by managing their time effectively.
Learning develop checklists helping them submit assignments meeting teachers expectations and claim having received more points.
Learners use several techniques to critically think and have mentioned using them to their benefit in debate clubs, college essay writing, etc.
Learning to manage stress will help reduce anxiety and have claimed effective management of their college application process.
Learners claimed putting risk management principles during the pandemic as well as managing themselves better.
Learners claimed working better with other team members and manage their individual goals to meet the team confidently.

PLOT Testimonials

Student names removed for privacy reasons

PLOT highlighted in PMI Today

Curriculum Structure

Course Objectives

This curriculum is designed to introduce project management principles including basics from both the linear and adaptive project management framework.

Course Overview

This course is a 10-week course that

Covers the five process groups of project management (PM) framework.
Gives overview of the tools and techniques used for the critical PM knowledge areas.
Introduces the adaptive framework to organizing work for productivity.
Helps you with organizing yourself and contributing to any project.
Incorporates project-based learning with an individual and a team-based component.

Time Commitments

Learners will need to have between 2 to 4 hours every week. The anticipated spread is as follows:

~1 hour of reading from the book, watching suggested videos, and completing assigned assessments on Google Classroom
~1 hour of class time on Google Meet as noted above
~1-2 hour of working with the other team members for the project outside the class

Course Focus

It covers nine critical knowledge areas that are pivotal to managing oneself better to contribute to any project or lead any project. Focusing primarily on the student learners, the course aims for students to use these skills in their practical academic and extra-curricular so that they can become better as they complete school assignments, prepare for colleges, and aim to gain gainful employment.

There will two main components in this course.

The first component is working individually with the student learner to come up with one or two important goals that they can either achieve or have a game plan to achieve by adapting the project management principles.
The second component introduced team-based project work for learners to develop their skills to contribute, manage, and lead a project.

PLOT Book

PLOT Course uses this book

Sound interesting

For more details, please contact through LinkedIn.