D370 IT Leadership Foundations carries the banner number ITBU 2201 and is worth 3 competency units. It covers the organizational structures, communication patterns and leadership styles that are specific to information technology work, alongside the personal disciplines that make someone effective inside them: time management, problem solving and emotional intelligence. D370 and ITBU 2201 are one requirement. The course looks softer than a technical one and is scored just as strictly, because reflective writing still has to hit every aspect at depth.
Technology teams have their own organizational physics
Leadership in a technology setting differs from leadership in general in ways this course takes seriously. The work is often invisible until it fails. Expertise is distributed, so the person with the most authority is frequently not the person who knows most about the problem. Estimates are uncertain by nature and get treated as commitments by everyone outside the team. And the pace of change means today's expert can be a beginner next year. Every leadership question in this course sits on top of those conditions.
Structure explains a lot of behavior that otherwise looks like personality. Whether technical staff report into a central function or sit inside business units changes what they optimize for. Whether decisions are made by a hierarchy or a group changes how fast they happen and how well they stick. When a submission attributes a conflict entirely to individuals without asking what the structure was rewarding, it has missed the more useful explanation.
Communication in technology work has one recurring demand: translation. The same fact has to be stated for engineers, for managers and for executives, at different levels of detail, without becoming false at any of them. Practicing that translation is one of the most transferable skills the course offers, and it is regularly the subject of an aspect.
Emotional intelligence is not a soft add on here. Noticing your own reaction before acting on it, reading what someone else is actually worried about, and choosing a response rather than defaulting to one is what allows a technically correct person to be heard. In technology teams the most common career limiter is not skill, it is the inability to disagree well.
Time management gets its own treatment because technical work is uniquely interruptible. Deep work needs uninterrupted blocks, and support work arrives without warning. A defensible personal system says what gets protected, what gets triaged and what gets refused. Work here is marked Competent or Not Competent, WGU issues no letter grades and no ordinary grade point average, and these 3 competency units fall within a six month term charged at one flat rate.
Turning scored aspects into a reflective plan
If your version of D370 is assessed by a performance assessment, the aspects your evaluator scores are the outline, and reflective aspects are scored as strictly as technical ones. WGU requires a score of 2 in each aspect for a task to pass and judges each aspect alone, so a thoughtful section on communication will not carry an aspect on time management you answered in two sentences.
Budget the words before drafting. Imagine a rubric of six scored aspects against a target near 1,700 words, which suits a reflective deliverable where depth matters more than length. Reserve 130 words to introduce the setting and 70 for the close, leaving 1,500. Three aspects that ask you to analyze a situation and apply a concept to it take 320 words each for 960, because each needs the situation, the concept, the application and the outcome. The three remaining aspects, usually covering self assessment, a development plan or a specific personal discipline, take 180 each for 540. The two figures add to 1,500 exactly.
Anchor every reflective claim in one specific episode. Reflective writing fails when it stays general, and generality is the default when a writer is uncomfortable. One concrete situation, described in three sentences, then the concept applied to it, then what you would do next time, is a complete answer to almost any reflective aspect.
Keep budget for the development plan. Aspects asking what you will do about what you learned are common and are usually answered with an intention rather than a plan. A named action, a timeframe and a way to tell whether it worked is a stronger answer and takes forty words.
Shape for a leadership self assessment and plan
D370 deliverables usually combine analysis of a workplace situation with reflection on your own practice. These proportions carry that document.
| Section | What belongs there | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Setting | The team, its structure, and what it is responsible for delivering. | 10 percent |
| Structure and its effects | How the reporting and decision structure shapes behavior, with an example. | 17 percent |
| Leadership style analysis | The style in play, the style the situation called for, and the gap between them. | 18 percent |
| Communication | One message translated for a technical, a managerial and an executive audience. | 16 percent |
| Self assessment | Your own tendencies, evidenced by something that actually happened. | 16 percent |
| Personal disciplines | How you manage time, approach problems and regulate reactions under pressure. | 14 percent |
| Development plan and close | Two actions, when you will do them, and how you will know they worked. | 9 percent |
Sourcing a reflective paper properly
Reflective work still needs sources, and this is where students at this level most often lose an aspect. When you name a leadership style, an emotional intelligence model or a team development framework, cite where it comes from. These are published models with authors, and using their vocabulary without attribution reads as borrowing rather than applying.
Use the framework rather than describing it. A paragraph defining a model, followed by a paragraph about your workplace, has not applied anything. Applying it looks like naming the component of the model, pointing at the specific behavior in your situation that corresponds to it, and saying what the model predicts would happen next.
Your own experience is legitimate evidence in reflective writing, provided it is reported as experience rather than dressed up as fact. Say what happened, in what order, and what you noticed. Keep other people anonymous and be careful with anything confidential to an employer, since a submitted document is a document that exists.
Use the citation style your task specifies, cite at the point where the model is used rather than only at the start of a section, and make sure everything in the reference list appears in the text. A short reflective paper with three well used sources reads better than one with ten sources named and none applied.
What earns Competent, and what comes back
Competent reflective work is specific, honest and applied. It names real situations. It uses published models as tools rather than as decoration. It says something about the writer that is not flattering, because a self assessment with no weakness in it is not a self assessment. And it ends with actions rather than intentions.
Returns follow familiar shapes. The paper describes concepts accurately and never connects them to anything that happened. The self assessment lists strengths and one carefully chosen weakness that is secretly a strength. The communication aspect is answered in the abstract instead of by writing the actual translated messages. Models are used without citation. Or the development plan is a paragraph of resolve with no action, no date and no measure.
A useful test before submitting: reread your paper and mark every sentence that could appear unchanged in another student's submission. If most of the paper is marked, the reflective aspects are unanswered, however well written the prose is. Specificity is the whole assignment.
Revising and resubmitting a performance assessment carries no grade penalty at WGU, so submit when every aspect has a genuine answer rather than waiting for it to feel finished. If your section carries an objective assessment as well, that exam is proctored and our line does not move: preparation only, meaning concept drills, model comparison work and a candid read of your preassessment result. We do not sit an assessment for a student, we play no role while one is under way, and we never request or hold portal credentials.
Reflective paper reading as generic?
Send the D370 rubric and a few lines about your team. We rebuild it around specific episodes, applied models and a development plan with dates.
Six mistakes that cost time in D370
- Writing in generalities. One specific episode, described concretely, answers a reflective aspect better than a page of principle.
- Describing a model instead of applying it. Name the component, point at the behavior it matches, say what it predicts.
- Using frameworks without citing them. Leadership and emotional intelligence models have authors. Attribute them.
- A self assessment with no real weakness. A disguised strength is transparent to an evaluator and weakens the whole paper.
- Answering communication abstractly. Write the actual messages for each audience. That is the evidence the aspect wants.
- A plan made of intentions. Two actions, with dates and a way to check they happened, beats a paragraph of resolve.
Three questions students ask about D370
What if I have never led a team?
Is a reflective course easier than a technical one?
Is D370 the same course as ITBU 2201?
Where D370 sits in WGU's programs
The July 2026 catalog places this code in 8 current WGU programs. Open a program page for the complete standard path and term positions. The live Degree Plan remains authoritative after transfer credit, substitutions, and mentor planning.
The assessments, one by one
The public catalog does not publish this course's PA/OA identity or task count. WGU Tutors publishes at most one PA manual per course and only from a WGU-controlled public rubric. Until that source exists, PA help begins from the student's real Course of Study and OA support remains preparation only.