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Project Management Applied to Student Design Projects

Andrew N. Vavreck Penn State University, Altoona College

Abstract Student design projects are very useful for practically bringing student knowledge areas to bear, for giving students open ended, creative experiences, in developing team skills and for enhancing communication abilities. Management of these projects through sound project management principles can help expand the range of experiences, as well as simply help keep projects on track. Project management is performed to some extent on many projects in many schools, as a survey in this paper of publications indicates, with mixed results being experienced. The paper then focuses on an extensive application of project management techniques to capstone design courses involving engineering technology students and to other student design projects (e.g. SAE Mini Baja) at Penn State Altoona, through involvement by business school faculty and students. Future plans, lessons learned and student perceptions are discussed and recommendations made.

Introduction The importance of group design projects to today’s engineering and engineering technology programs is indisputable,1 and multidisciplinary teams on such projects are of growing significance, to give students exposure to other ways of addressing problems and to other fields’ content.2 Project management techniques can help enable multidisciplinary group projects, in an organized way, to enhance the learning experience for students3 Consequently, many faculty have decided to incorporate project management or multidisciplinary teams to augment design in their engineering or engineering technology programs.

Project Management Courses It has been found4 that project managers need to have the following skills, in decreasing order of importance: communications, organization, team building, leadership, coping and technological expertise. To help develop these skills, many engineering programs have implemented project management courses. For instance, a dual-track project management and engineering design two course sequence has been developed,5 in which the students are taught time management, creative thinking, business memoranda, research and project presentation to help guide them in the project work. Still, disconnects between these two courses took place, and was reduced in part by increased attention to the project timeline at weekly team meetings. In another effort,6 experiential learning was focused on to improve student skills in time management, rehearsal and flexibility. In a similar vein, another work7 describes a course in which students gain an understanding of engineering project management. The major components of the course are an

Proceedings of the 2002 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2002, American Society for Engineering Education

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Vavreck, A. (2002, June), Project Management Applied To Student Design Projects Paper presented at 2002 Annual Conference, Montreal, Canada. 10.18260/1-2--10315