Project Management and Collaboration

This page holds some basic information and links related to my course on Project Management and Collaboration.  

Catalog Description

This course provides a comprehensive introduction to project management.  Projects provide businesses a time-delimited tool for improving, expanding, and innovating- the primary means for converting strategy into action.  Success differentiates top performing firms.  We will use Project Management Institute (PMI) materials and focus on discussion and analysis of business cases that convey core project management skills.  We will particularly focus on the challenge of managing projects involving dispersed team members from multiple organizations.  This course can be credited toward PMI Project Management Professional (PMP) certification.

Teaching Goals

This course targets its content at students with little to no background in project management as well as students highly experienced in project management.  The experienced students will have an opportunity to reflect on and refine their own practice, extending their understanding to alternate contexts beyond IT or engineering to finance and marketing, for example.  The students with little to no background will learn about the basics of project management including how to manage projects and use PM tools.  This course assumes project management applies broadly to all strategic change efforts in firms and can enable improved effectiveness of all sorts of business activities including mergers and acquisitions, new product/service development, brand management, and product/service distribution and production.

Learning Objectives

• The specific learning objectives exist for each session of the course. The course materials and techniques have been aligned with the objectives to best achieve them.  For example:
  • Describe how effective project management enables achieving strategic goals of firms.
  • Apply basic techniques for planning, implementing, and evaluating projects effectively.
  • Use and manage at least one project with one project management software package (in a case at least), and describe pros and cons of at least three other PM software alternatives as well as at least 10 project collaboration tools/techniques.
  • Describe different types of projects, and evaluate appropriateness of different PM strategies for each type.
  • Apply frameworks to evaluate ailing projects and craft interventions to fix them.
  • Evaluate a project against its portfolio brethren using portfolio management techniques and use applicable research findings to recommend a best course of action, such as pulling the plug.

MS Project Links:

• Codeplex is an open-source MS project site.  Here is a tool for exporting Earned Value data from Project 2007 to military and UN compliant software.
• http://blogs.msdn.com/project/archive/2009/05/26/now-free-on-codeplex-ea...