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PRODUCTION/OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT

KEONG LEONG, Feature Editor, Fisher College of Business,
The Ohio State University

Teaching Project Management to MBA's: The Means to How Many Ends?

by Dwight Smith-Daniels, Department of Management, College of Business, Arizona State University

During the past three years, writers in the popular business press (Stewart, 1995) have picked up on a trend that should be of no surprise to operations management faculty. Managers with project management skills have become a hot commodity, particularly in high-tech organizations. This situation is not surprising given the stream of efforts and initiatives that many organizations have failed to execute successfully during the past 20 years, including new product and process development, business process reengineering, total quality management, and time-based competition. Well-meaning managers have rolled out these new products, processes and programs without a clear understanding of the need for a project management process and managers who understand the basics of project management. The result has been failure rates ranging from 40 to 60%, depending upon the nature of the project and its product. High-tech organizations, wishing to reduce these failure rates, have put the word out that they are looking for people with project management skills, and our MBA students have heard the word. They are enrolling in existing project management courses, or asking MBA programs to offer a course in project management. While my emphasis in this article is on the MBA-level course, most of my suggestions and observations also apply to project management courses at the undergraduate level as well.

In the case of our MBA programs at Arizona State University, the impact of the demand for project management has been felt deeply, since high-technology manufacturing and service companies hire the majority of our full-time MBA students. Employees of high-technology companies, including AlliedSignal, Bank of America, Intel, Motorola, and U.S. West populate our evening and Executive MBA programs. Since I have been teaching project management at the graduate level in these programs during the past six years, I have had the opportunity to observe firsthand the reasons for the demand in project management as well as to address the challenges and misconceptions that I've encountered. In this article I will discuss some of these challenges and misconceptions, and the ways that I have attempted to address them in MBA project management course design and activities.

Very Few of Our Students Are Civil Engineers, Carpenters, or Rocket Scientists

Even in the construction boomtown of Phoenix, Arizona, at most 1 out of 30 of my students are civil engineers. While more than a few students of the ASU MBA students are in the aerospace industry, they tend to be involved with products like helicopters or jet engines, rather than moon rockets. As I surveyed the introductory texts in OM, however, I found that they are still building ballparks or launching rockets. These large projects are characterized by huge, dedicated project teams with budgets of $100 million or more (usually more) with dedicated project scheduling and control staffs. Our first challenge is to realize that our introductory texts don't reflect the project environment where most of our graduates will work, therefore we may leave the impression in the survey operations management course that we are not relevant to their world.

We're Too Busy, We Work on Too Many Projects at Once, and We're Confused!

Of my students, 80 to 90% of them work (or will work) in a much different project environment than that found in construction and moon rocketry. Their world is characterized by the short, much lower budget projects discussed in a recent Wall Street Journal article (Wysocki, 1996) that discussed the life of the Information Systems ``Project Junkie,'' who moved nomadically from project to project. In the vast majority of cases, we will graduate MBA students who will be asked to finish projects quickly, in difficult conditions that are usually a year or less in duration, usually without a team that is dedicated full time to the project. They are designing new products, new services, new web pages, or re-engineering business processes. Their organizations for the most part are just beginning to develop a common approach to managing projects, and they will depend upon our graduates to help them design that approach.

I find that my students are working on an average of five different projects simultaneously, based on a survey that I have given the first night of each class for the past three years. Evidence from each additional semester bears out the comment by Kim Clark and Steven Wheelwright (Clark, 1993) that these knowledge workers in organizations are over-committed due to lack of focus in their organization's project plans. Because they are all faced by similar challenges, I found that it is crucial to get students talking from the very first class session about the similarity in the project management problems that they face in their organizations. These problems include lack of strategic focus, lack of support, and poorly designed project management processes, regardless of the application, product or service produced by the organization. This is a very different world from the Man, Moon, Decade focus of Apollo project legend of the 1960's. Our students don't work in a single project world; they work in a world of projects. The second challenge in teaching project management in the late 1990's is to recognize this unfocused, untrained, high-tech multi-project environment and to teach skills and concepts that are in tune with it. Rather than focusing exclusively on the life cycle of a single project, a course in project management should also reflect the needs of a multi-project world, including cross-project learning, managing a project portfolio, and learning across projects.

Teach Me Microsoft Project, Then I'll be a Project Manager

Of course the easy solution is to assume that we can teach our students about project management software and they'll go away happy. The misconception that I am offering a course in using software is shared by a surprising number of managers. Despite the record of bugs and failures associated with PC software, too many managers seem to want to put their faith in whatever solution they arrive at using project management software such as Microsoft Project without really taking the time to learn about the underlying logic of project scheduling, or the process of project management. They believe that once they learn the software, all of their projects will finish on time and they will never suffer from the lack of needed team member again. The third challenge in offering a course in project management is to deal with the misconception that software is the ultimate key to project management success.

The seeds of this misconception may have been planted in our curriculum. In the past, the major OM texts contained a misnamed chapter: ``Project Management.'' The chapters should have been more appropriately titled, ``PERT, CPM, and Drawing a Project Network.'' The reader was given little to no guidance on topics that are now viewed as crucial to project success: structuring the project management process, including required plans, reports, screens, audits and control activities. Since project management software provides a means to a schedule, the critical path, and a network drawing, many of today's professionals are of the opinion that project success is only a shrink-wrap away. Thus, the next attitude adjustment that I offer to students is the following ``list of questions that Microsoft Project can't answer for you'':

  • Which projects should we select for implementation?
  • How should we define, design and execute a project?
  • How should we allocate our knowledge worker's ability and technical skills among projects?
  • When do we review projects, and what metrics should we use?
  • What project documents should we create, and what should be in them?

Project management software, you might comment, can provide invaluable information in answering these questions. However, significant offline work is required by the user of the software to answer these questions effectively -- the software will not provide automated responses. In addition, as you attempt to meld previous writing and research in project management with the major PC software and their manuals you will find that much of the documentation is inconsistent with the preexisting nomenclature. In Microsoft Project, what has been called resource-constrained project scheduling is ``resource-leveling,'' and the previous definition of resource leveling is referred to as ``leveling within slack.''

Instead of spending valuable class time offering a tutorial in project management software, I would suggest having the students use the tutorial that comes with the package at their own pace. Reserve computer lab time for a session where you demonstrate the use of the software on an example that you've solved manually. In a later, second lab session, demonstrate the advantages and limitations of the software package that you have chosen. We chose Microsoft Project for very simple reasons: the students can purchase it at the bookstore for a steeply discounted price and most of the working student's employers use it.

Being Named Project Manager Is Like Being Told That You Are Going to Be a Parent

For 90% of my students, they couldn't define project management or project manager two years ago, but now ``they are one.'' In a situation not unlike parenthood, they have been thrust into the job of project manager with little to no formal training, and nothing approaching the required support network. And like being a parent, many of the skills are best learned through holistic experiences that allow students to learn through trial and error. The fourth challenge to teaching project management is that the most effective means of providing the students with conceptual understanding and skills is to allow them to apply these during the course of the semester.

I have found that a useful response to this fourth challenge is to have students form teams of three of four students and develop a plan for a project that they or others are currently planning. For evening students, teams of three are easy to construct, as one in three students will easily have a project on-site in the planning stage. While management is often concerned about proprietary information, students usually gain approval by disguising key information. Sites are usually easy to find for full-time students, since I have gradually built up a network of contacts of alumni who are happy to have low-cost project planning assistance. As in the case of parenthood, no one has found a way to optimize the process, so each student and organization provides a live case study of best and not-so-best project management practices. The richness of the high-tech environments have yielded projects dealing with all of the initiatives listed in the opening section to this article, and then some:

  • Product Design. These have included the development of high-tech products like semiconductor chips for automobiles and personal computers, to lower-tech products such as beauty bars and meaty dog treats (don't laugh, it's a big industry). Since most of our high-tech firms in Phoenix are international in scope, many of the projects have involved strategic alliances with overseas partners, or overseas manufacturing rollouts.

  • Service Design. Projects include a variety of new service design projects, ranging from phone services to financial services to redesigned hotels and service packages. One of the most interesting service design projects was the development of a process for a large law office to plan court cases, based on a specific case.

  • Software and Systems Development. Projects in this category have included the design and roll-out of a new in-car terminal system for the Phoenix Police Department, as well as a number of reengineering projects involving the design of new information systems to support the redesigned processes. Our information systems projects course involves not only the development of the project plan for the redesign, but also execution of the redesign.

  • Quality and the Environment. Projects in this category have included three projects dealing with the design of a process for annual environmental qualification for high-tech companies that deal with hazardous wastes as well as a project plan for gaining ISO 9000 qualification for an electrical supply house.

    A number of Harvard Cases are useful for illustrating practice, as well as those offered by the Corporate Design Institute and other case sources. The Project Management Institute's publications can provide you with many useful case studies and examples, and the Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (available at http://www.pmi.org), the guidebook for PMI's project manager certification program, can provide a useful guideline for designing your course content. I've found that if you chose to use a project management text in teaching the course, as well as using a project planning assignment, keep in mind the need to sequence the readings and assignments so that skills are developed just-in-time for student use on their projects.

    It's All in the Process

    Of course the major factor leading to success in teaching any course is to manage student expectations, and many of the challenges in this article have to do with the role of the instructor in setting and managing expectations for the project management course:

    • Establish that this isn't a course in construction management or moon rocketry, but a course that addresses the project management process in a wide range of environments.

    • Many of your students will work in a high-tech, rapidly changing environment. The course should lead them to see that there are a wide range of skills and concepts available in the project management tool kit, not just project scheduling.

    • Project management software is a tool, not the answer. We need to discuss its limitations as well as its benefits and its supporting role in the project management process should be clear when the course is complete.

    • The actual application of concepts and tools to actual projects should build student capabilities, as well as giving them the opportunity to benchmark project management performance across multiple industries.

    In the end, your success in meeting these challenges will lead to a response to what I would see as a fifth challengeþconvincing students that project management is a process that is not industry-specific, and that their newly learned project management skills can be the means to many ends.

    References

    Clark, K. B. and S. C. Wheelwright (1993). Managing New Product and New Process Development. New York, The Free Press.

    Project Management Institute Standards Committee, (1996). A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge. Upper Darby, PA, Project Management Institute Communications.

    Stewart, T. A. "The Corporate Jungle Spawns a New Species: The Project Manager." Fortune. 131: 179-180 (1995).

    Wysocki, Bernard, "High-Tech Nomads Write New Program for the Future of Work," Wall Street Journal, August 19, 1996.