When I signed up for the course "Project Management", honestly, I didn't expect too much. Thing is, I attended similar courses before and most of them were just boring. I mean, theory is nice and good, but you don't believe it until you get some hands on experience. People are like that and it's good, though sometimes annoying for the teachers ;)
Anyways, the "Project Management" (compact) course really changed my way of thinking! Why? Well, it had three major reasons (the second and thrid being more important to me than the first):
- The lecturer came from a small company and, thus, new what he was talking about. He gave examples for everything he was talking about. I mean, real-world examples, not these boiled down, idealized, artificial things...
- He used his management techniques to organize the course! He showed us everything in practice by managing 60 students he had never seen before in an agile manner. He let us participate and reacted to our questions
- He let us prepare different aspects in smaller subgroups. Thereby, he made us use the management techniques ourselves. We did Mini-Scrums (4 iterations in 20 minutes: split the work and assign the tasks, begin the work, finish the work, combine the work to the end result), we used timeboxing to prevent discussions to loose focus, etc.
So, in the end, he showed that what he taught worked in the larger scale (whole lecture) and he made us practice it ourselves (subgroups). In the meanwhile he spiced the theory up with stories about his experiences. The result was one of the best courses I every took.
manpreet![Tuteehub forum best answer]()
Best Answer
2 years ago
What is a good project to teach university students project management principles?
I tried one last semester, producing a video, but found it was too simple and the students did not have to work hard enough (and the network diagrams were too simple because there were too few tasks).
The project needs to fit into a semester and should neither be too large or too small. It should not require any extensive technical knowledge (that is, no software development projects).
Edit: Ideally, the project would require only skills that most never-employed 20 year olds would have. The project should ideally not require the students to spend any money (and the school is not going to give them any either).
Edit 2: Ideally, the project would take a group of 4 people 1 to 2 hours per week (per person) for 13-14 weeks.
Has anyone here had experience doing this?