Learning Objectives
The management of projects is a difficult and complex task. The experience of recent years has shown that many projects failed:
The costs grow enormous, appointments cannot be kept, the developed product does not meet expectations of the customer or is faulty or employees are not used appropriately.
| Often these problems are caused by lack of experience of the project managers. |
Role of the Project Manager
By using the simulator in addition to theoretical knowledge, students should also learn the practical aspects of project management. During a simulation run, students will assume the role of a real project manager and learn how to plan and execute projects.
Also, the ability to make decisions if any required information is missing should be trained, because project managers often have to make their decisions with only a small level of information about the project. However, students should also be confronted with typically difficulties, which may occur in the planning and control of projects and they should know, how to handle it.
In particular, they should recognize how stress and excessive work pressure can be avoided at the end of the project through careful planning.
What Students should learn
This means that the students should understand the following points and also know how to implement them practically:
- The students should learn project management skills and should be able to understand the consequences of the implementation or the omission of various activities.
- The students should undergo critical situations in project management and learn how to avoid or to master them.
- The students should undergo the complex coherences of projects and learn how to make useful decisions for the project, taking into account all relevant factors.
- The students should exclusively concentrate on their role as a project manager in order to understand the full significance of the project manager for a project's success.
- The training should interest students for project management and encourage them to deal with this topic beyond their education.
Evaluation of Simulation Runs
| To achieve these objectives, the project simulation training needs components of conventional teaching, combined with lectures and preparation of the simulation results. |
After a simulation run, the project runs which were performed by the trainees, should be evaluated. This will give the students feedback on their strengths and weaknesses in project implementation and shows them the coherence between their activity and their achieved results.
