My last core course was ITEC 6200 Project Management in my fourth semester. This was a study in project management in it's purist sense: we got into what qualities make a good project manager and how a project manager spends most of their day. This was my second class taught by professor Charles Coddington whom I took my first introductory course. http://www.tecs.ecu.edu/departments/technology_systems/faculty_and_staff/coddington.html
The text we used was: Project Management: The Managerial Process (Mcgraw-Hill/Irwin Series Operations and Decision Sciences)
A project manager's main responsibility is to marshal resources in order to complete projects on time, within budget and according to customer's expectations. Other responsibilities can be nailed down to 4: Plan, Schedule, Motivate and Control. A project manager must have a good sense of efficiency and cannot get bogged down in emails and other extraneous activities.
A lot of the semester, we were presented case studies that we had to read and answer. One case study involved how Disney Corporation evaulates new ideas for movies. They listed their must and want objectives, relative importance of each objective and how they developed a scorecard that weighted each movie. Disney's objectives were things like generate profits over 18%, raise environmental concerns, be nominated for best picture and ability to generate additional merchandising opportunities.
Our midterm instructed each student to read a case study about a company called Jarvis Communication Corporation. The first problem was to develop the mission statement: Jarvis Communication Corporation is a small growing company that provides high quality telecommunications products and services and is a market leader in the innovations of new communication technology. The next step was to develop 3 long range goals and objectives for Jarvis.
We were assigned a group project. I got in with a really good group of guys again and we had to build a project schedule using Microsoft Project. We identified resources, activites and other important information about a project based around a company that was building a type of razor scooter called Silver Zuma.
Other items that we studied were:
- Discussed advantages and disadvantages of the different types of approaches to managing projects: functional, matrix, virtual and dedicated.
- Using Microsoft Project to develop work breakdown structures for projects and how WBS aid in project management.
- Calculating cost estimates for projects using M. Project.
- Calculating project critical paths
- Determining activites that have the greatest amount of slack time.
- Analyzing and determining when to deliver on a milestone.
- Determining how sensitive a network is.
- Determing under and over allocated resources.
- How to readjust resources to still meet a project deadline in case of shortages.
A really good class. The only pitfalls were that this class failed to mention other types of project management out there today like the Agile Methodology. http://agilemanifesto.org/
