CIT 380: Project Management

Welcome to CIT 380 Project Management! This course is designed to help you learn to use project management knowledge, tools, and techniques to plan, implement, and manage coordinated work efforts and solve business problems. The course will give you the opportunity to organize and plan the elements of one-time, unique endeavors that add value to an organization. Emphasis is on developing both the “soft” skills such as working with people as well as the “hard” skills including tools, techniques and methods of professional project managers.

The primary goal of the course is to help you improve your answers to the questions “How am I growing as a project manager?” and “How do I learn to take matter unorganized and organize it into something that will benefit others?”

This typicaly involves coordinating people, tools, equipment, raw materials, schedules, budgets, stakeholder relations, quality planning, testing, and numerous other “details” in order to achieve a goal. In short, the term management has to do with how to bring order to complexity.

Instructor Contact Information

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Course Outcomes

The following are the outcomes agreed upon by faculty representing multiple departments:

By the end of the semester, each student will:

  1. Be an effective communicator, team member, and leader
  2. Be proactive, able to operate in poorly defined or constrained situations
  3. Know how to create, coordinate, execute, and evaluate a project plan
  4. Be able to list and define the core principles of project management, identify and implement multiple methodologies, and explain how they can be used to make a project successful
  5. Be self-regulated, life-long learners

You have the option in this course of working with your instructor to develop your own customized outcomes as a potential guiding structure to your learning experience. For example, while somewhat similar to the original (above) set of outcomes the following revised outcomes are descriptive of major themes that seem to be what helps students “level up” in preparing for work, church, family, community, and other project oriented environments:

  1. Grow in the capacity and disposition to act and not be acted upon.
  2. Develop additional comprehension and capacity for stewardship and consecration.
  3. Develop and execute project plans according to modern project delivery methodologies while working within real life constraints.
  4. Expand and deepen knowledge of, awareness of, and experience with how to lead and work individually, within a team, and within an organization to accomplish operational, tactical, and strategic level objectives, outcomes, and initiatives.
  5. Create, practice, and implement professional oral and written presentations, reports, consumable solutions, and project-oriented deliverables.

Course Materials

Depending on the path you choose through the course, the course materials that become relevant to you may vary. The following list is representative, but not exhaustive. You are encouraged to identify your own course materials as that you feel are relevant, but please communicate with your instructor.

Textbooks:

Online Resources:

Software:

Course Explanation

Philosophy

This course takes a different approach to education than many of your courses probably do. In a traditional classroom students are presented with highly structured, neatly packaged problems to solve. The expectations are clearly set, and the instructor generally has all of the say in evaluating quality and completion. If students do as the instructor says, everything will be OK.

Turns out that problems outside of the classroom are rarely presented like this. They are generally ill-structured and quite frankly messy. If you have not had the experience yet, you will: a supervisor comes in and drops some problem on your desk, says "fix this" and then leaves. You look over the pile of documents trying to make some sense of what you are supposed to fix...and you realize you have no idea where to even start!

To help start getting you prepared to succeed in these types of situations this class gives you the opportunity to shift your focus to Acting, instead of being Acted upon should you choose to take it. You can have the flexibility to control every aspect of your experience in this class, from what you will do, to how you will do it, to how you will decide if you have succeeded. Three paths through the course are outlined below. Read through them carefully. One of the most important decisions you will make is which path is best for you.

Three Paths

This course is structured to allow students three different paths of completion. We will label these paths as 'Challenge Path'(Path 1), 'Semi-structured Path' (Path 2), and 'Structured Path'(Path 3). You should decide which path you would like to pursue by the end of Week 2.

All projects will have a required mid-project and end of project report that students must complete. The mid report should happen no later than Week 6, the final report no later than Week 12.

Students are encouraged to complete more than one project over the course of the semester. Completing many small to medium complexity projects can often be more valuable than one large project.

Challenge Path (1)

Path 1 allows the student the most flexibility and the most opportunity to show that you can take initiative and organize and plan a good project. The deliverables, milestones, and grading are owned by the student. Students working on plan 1 should do the following:

The Maximum grade for a Plan 1 student is 100%

Semi-structured Path (2)

Path 2 allows for students to still gain experience in becoming more proactive, but with more scaffolding to help them get started. They are given a project charter and plan template to base the planning of their selected project around. These projects can be completed as a group or individually. Students may modify the provided template provided they support their changes with their rationale. The students must produce at least the following artifacts:

  1. Project Charter
  2. Project Management Plan
  3. Scope Management Plan
  4. Schedule Management Plan
  5. Quality Management Plan
  6. Risk Management plan
  7. Communications Plan: (if done as a group)
  8. Human Resources Management Plan: (if done as a group)

If done as a group the maximum grade is 95%

Structured Path (3)

Not all students are prepared to become more proactive. Plan 3 provides a pre-built project with charter and Project Managment Plan. The project which the students will complete is to prepare to pass the PMI CAPM exam.

Because this plan does not require students to grow in the areas of outcomes one and two, the maximum grade a Plan 3 student can achieve is 84%.

Changing Plans

A important thing to note and mention: students can switch plans! If a student begins Plan 3 for example...but then takes the initiative to organize a group of other Plan 3 students to coordinate and work together towards a common goal they are showing progress on outcomes one and two...this would qualify them for a higher plan.

Changing plans should be discussed with the professor. Either the student or instructor can initiate this conversation. These conversations should take place and be finalized before midterm.

Time Consumption

The first three weeks of the semester will be spent choosing a plan (1, 2, or 3), project(s), and depending onthe plan you have chosen, putting a charters and Project Management Plan (PMP) together.

Weeks 4-6 your time will be spent working on projects. Remember that the project management plan is a living document. As you progress on your projects you can and should be updating the PMP.

No later than week 7 you should complete a Project Phase report updating the stakeholders (primarily the Instructor) of your progress on the project. You can do this before week 7! In fact if you have a plan of completing multiple projects you should plan on doing this before week 7

Weeks 7-11 your time will again be spent working on projects. This could include more preparing more charters and PMPs, or continuing work on existing projects.

Weeks 12-14 will be when all the wrap up will be happening. By week 12 each project should submit a project closure report, and by week 13 students should complete "post-mortem" evaluations of a certain number of other projects.

Project evaluations and Post mortems

Students are required to give projects that they are not a part of feedback throughout the semester. They will be asked to do a bit of research on post-mortem reports and post templates to a class discussion board. They can then choose from this list when formulating their feedback. This feedback can be given at a project mid-point (based on the mid report) or at the end (post mortem, based off of final report). This assignment will be introduced in Week 7 and evaluations can be completed anytime between week 7 and week 13. You should encourage the students to start on these early.

Communicating with the Class

After Week 3 any students not on Plan 3 may or may not be in Ilearn regularly. Make sure that each project you plan has a detailed Communication Plan that the instructor has signed off on. You may consider something like the following plan:

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