Engineering Project Management

Project management (PM) is said to have lost its relevance for innovation initiatives, such as new product development (PD). PD projects bring a dynamics of budget, schedule, and quality, which is distinct from the traditional way of managing projects, thus requiring integrated planning among program managers and systems engineers.

The Engineering Project Management (EPM) course was designed to take this opportunity. Its main learning objective is that the students became able to create a PM plan for the design and development of a smart product, and where the plan must guarantee the alignment between the management and engineering goals.

Learning outcomes

The EPM course is focused on mechanical and mechatronic engineering applications, and on the development of smart products. The project manager role is presented as a person who plans, controls, and optimizes a multi-task project towards a singular goal in a timely and cost-effective manner. The course learning outcomes (LO) are:

• Identify and differentiate the concepts related to project management to strategic management, operations management, and crisis management.
• Identify and differentiate the concepts related to portfolio, program, project and subproject.
• Create a project management plan according to the 5 project management process groups: Initiating, Planning, Executing, Monitoring & Controlling and Closing.
• Reflect about the strengths, weaknesses, and applications of traditional and agile project management.
• Apply, by exercising during a practical project, tools and techniques from the Project Manage-ment knowledge areas (integration, scope, schedule, cost, quality, resource, communication, risk, procurement, and stakeholder management).
• Integrate, by exercising during a practical project, aspects from lean product development, systems engineering, and the FBS (function-behavior-structure) ontology during the project planning and execution.

Course structure

The course is restructured into five 1EC modules:

1. Basic EPM concepts
2. Lean project management
3. Value identification
4. Value proposition
5. Value delivery.