In response to Phil Rutherford's recent discussion of his use of
project management in his university lecturing, I would like to invite
comments from others who have employed project management theory,
tools or experiential activities in their role as educators in either
university or corporate training environments.
In my case, I have been employing principles of project management in
an increasing number of courses at the Business School where I am a
full time faculty member. Initially, I utilized Clark and
Wheelwright's Revolutionizing Product Development writings as inputs
to my MBA course on the Management of Technology (MOT), and found the
materials were most relevant to my MBA students. Next I began to
require students to design and implement projects as a means of
applying what they have learned in this MOT course.
However, I became frustrated by the limited usage of project
management principles in the university and its confinement to my MOT
elective course and I began to experiment with
applying project management principles to other management education
environments and applications. In my MBA capstone strategy course, I
have worked with MBAs who have substantial responsibilities and guided
them in auditing their recent project management experience in order
to understand how their projects generate useful knowledge that can be
applied to future activites of their companies. This activity has thus
focused on project-based learning.
This summer I will be teaching a four Saturday workshop with executive
MBAs at my university to explore how entrepreneurs can employ
project-based principles to develop a flow of projects that create an
enterprise. I am calling this particular experiment "project-based
entrepreneurship" and it is based on my experiences in helping
entrepreneurs break down their myriad entrepreneurial tasks into a set
of focused projects, each with a set of synergistic and complementary
deliverables, deadlines and dedicated resources.
I would welcome the opportunity to share my experiences with others
who are attempting to apply principles of project-based management
in university and corporate training settings, and I would be
especially appreciative of exchanges of ideas, reading materials and
exercises that might be of relevance to prospective entrepreneurs or
managers with new venture or business development responsibilites.
Robert DeFillippi
Sawyer School of Management
Suffolk University
8 Ashburton Place
Boston MA 02108-2770
617-573-8243
fax 617-573-8345
_______________________________________________________________
Get Free Email and Do More On The Web. Visit http://www.msn.com