Developing a New Project Management Course for Electrical Engineers

by

M Schulz and I D Longstaff
Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
The University of Queensland

 

Synopsis

Electrical Engineers undertake a four-year professional degree and the accrediting body requires the course to include management subjects. These subjects have traditionally been very unpopular with the students who see this as boring and irrelevant. University lecturers often compound this problem who typically have little or no project management experience and who resort to teaching out of textbooks.

At the University of Queensland we have been evolving a solution, which is gaining increasing popularity, and this paper describes our experience and lessons learned. We also describe the current structure of the course and plans for next year when we compress a two-semester program of low credit point courses into a full single-semester course.

The structure of the teaching and learning program is based around each 4th year students acting as team manager to a small team of second or third year students. Each team is tasked to build a working system to a technical specification in one semester.

 

Background

One of us (Longstaff) came to Australia a decade ago from the UK, where experience had shown the importance of project management skills for professionals in the disciplines of electrical engineering, electronics, communications, and computer systems engineering. These technologies are fast moving and are used in the design and development of extremely complex systems. There is no way in which a satellite communication network, for instance, can be put together without a carefully designed project management structure, tightly run by staff trained in project management skills. In Australia at that time there was little working level appreciation of this; probably because there were few if any large projects to develop such a culture in the disciplines mentioned above. (although the Australian mining industry has world-best-best project amnagement skills, these have not read across into the high-tech systems area). Evidence of the project management problems are now seen in the difficulties and cost blow-outs of the ANZAC Frigate, JORN and the Submarine programs, each of these costing the taxpayer many hundreds of million dollars.

Recently a number of government ministers and advisory bodies have identified project management as one of the most important deficiencies in the national capability; this impeding Australia's progress from a resource based economy to a high-tech value added economy.

Against this background Longstaff came to work at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering some seven years ago and elected to teach Project Management. At that time this was a fourth year elective subject with 25 students choosing to take the subject out of a cohort of about 100. This was a 4-credit point subject, which implied two contact hours and two non-contact hours per week. The contact hours were lectures, mostly given by academics who had never managed a project in their life. Non-contact hours were textbook exercise. The course was viewed by students as extremely boring, and the only reason it attracted students was because it was also seen as an easy subject.

For two more years we continued the course along similar lines, trying to bring better lectures based on personal knowledge and experience in the field. But student numbers only improved marginally. Student feedback showed there was a aversion against taking on "management" subjects, this mainly coming from the younger students who perceived management as a boring office job.

So here we were, with a subject of strategic importance, which was not getting through to the students. Clearly something more radical had to be done.

At that time the other one of us (Schulz) had just completed the Graduate Certificate in Education and had been introduced to, and enthused by, action-learning techniques. So between us we hatched a totally new and integrated approach to teaching both electrical engineering and project management subjects with an action learning emphasis on both. This is the approach adopted:

 

New Syllabus Structure

Second year and third year students are now taught a substantial part of their electrical/electronic engineering, by action learning, through working on teamed projects. The projects are to design, test, and demonstrate a product to a specified performance and cost within a given time-scale (one semester).

A typical second year project is to build a multi-meter from components costing no more than $30.

A typical third year project is to build a voice activated TV remote controller for no more than $50.

These projects have an appropriate degree of challenge such that the project can be successfully completed provided the students search for and acquire some basic knowledge and understanding. The subject's home page has sufficient clues to get them started in seeking ideas, more knowledge, and more understanding, using the Web and library resources.

Team projects are undertaken during the second semester of the academic year.

Fourth year students are first taught project management techniques in the first semester of the year. This is currently with more traditional face to face teaching. They are then required to act as project managers for either a second -year or a third-year team project in semester two. Here they are able to practice the techniques taught in the previous semester.

The advantages of this approach are several:

• The second and third year students are required to seek and find knowledge to solve their project, hence developing skills for lifelong learning.
• They also developed interpersonal and self-management skills through working in a team
• Studying became more fun and more relevant to young people wanting to study engineering.
• The fourth year students have the opportunity to develop management and leadership skills and to further develop their interpersonal skills.
• Students feel more empowered as engineers because they have had the opportunity to make things, which actually work and they have seen how good teamwork enables this.
• Students feel more empowered to take on leadership rolls. (This has been a remarkable experience for some female students from other cultures, where they are normally more subservient to males, and where they have used their new skills to manage a team of Aussie males.)
• An "embodied culture" develops. The younger students are given visibility of the needs for good team management. They recognise and learn the good and bad points off their team leader, and perform better when it is their turn. These improved skills are then passed on and improved again.

 

Problems Encountered

Problems	Solutions
Acceptance by the Old School A number of the more established academics have criticised these new methods of teaching. We believe the underlying problem is that the students really enjoy their projects and put more time and effort in than is justified by the credit-point value. This has been at the cost of less time spent on subjects with more traditional lecture-based delivery. The obvious answer might be to teach all subjects with action learning programs, but this would need to be accepted by the Institute of Engineers (Australia) (the IE(Aust)) who accredit all our professional engineering courses. The IE(Aust) has accredited our syllabus which included this innovative team project and project management combination, but there has been no opportunity to converting the whole BElecEngg degree program due to other demands for curriculum design effort.	Student popularity has given a strong pressure to continue. A Graduate Survey showed how our students found project management one of the most important courses once they had entered the workforce. The IE(Aust) accreditation process commented very favourably on the new team project/project management courses.
- Logistics Matching the numbers is a problem each year. We have approximately twice as many fourth year students as team projects. Another difficulty has been in timing, The students need to make a very quick start in forming teams in order to have the benefit of the full 13 weeks to complete their project.	After trying various options we have settled on each team having a Project Manager and a Minute Secretary, and swapping these roles at week 6 so each fourth year students has experience at both tasks. We emphasise the need for time management and to get organised quickly
Lectures attendance We found lecture attendance by the fourth year students in the first semester dropped off to less than 50%. This was very disappointing since we had many invited speakers.	We now require the students to produce a summary and reflective critique of each lecture as part of their assessment.
Assessment Assessment by examination is not effective for students with little need for essay writing.	We now use Continuing Assessment only. For the fourth years we assessed lecture notes, A business Plan, Minutes of Meetings and a Reflective Appreciation. We also have a component of peer evaluation.

 

Progress

A course valued by a good majority of the students, tolerated by a substantial minority and rejected by a few, currently 150 students per year coming through. TEVAL score gradually improving. In spite of continuing problems of not appealing to all students the course is highly appreciated by the employers of our students and past students (Ref 1).

 

Outcomes

We have a 100% job uptake rate for those students who look for work when completing their degree

Our students are highly sought-after, both here and overseas.

Overseas fee paying students have especially benefited from the team project and project management courses. Feedback from these students has indicated this and has perhaps contributed to our burgeoning growth in our overseas fee-paying student numbers.

Unsolicited thanks specific to the project management component received on a number of occasions. This is quite unusual, but I think it happens with students who have been somewhat reluctant to undertake the course but then been surprised at how important it is when they start work. We also suspect find they have a running start compared with contemporaries from elsewhere.

Companies like Boeing have recently moved to Brisbane and they freely admit it is the quality of our education in the Brisbane area that contributed to their choice of a location

 

The Future

Now that the course is just about bedded down we have to go back to the drawing board for the fourth year component. This was structured to give knowledge-dump in the first semester and skill development in the second semester. Course unitisation now obliges us to combine these two small courses into a single full course for next year (2000).

Perhaps it makes sense to combine knowledge-acquisition and skill-development into a concurrent process, but he logistics problems become more difficult. It is essential for the teams to make a prompt start, yet they will have little idea of what is required until they have had a number of lectures. We may have to arrange a number of lectures in the first week of the semester if the timetabling allows. They will need to understand a number of concepts like work-breakdown studies, earned value, how to enter work plans onto Microsoft Project, how to update these as the work progresses, and how to interpret the differences between planned progress and actual progress. We also require them to hold formal progress meetings with their teams, so they need to be taught the formalities of chairing meetings and writing minutes. All this needs to be covered as early as possible. This is our new challenge and we will be working with TEDI and Goeff Issacs in particular to design the new format of this course

 

Lessons Learned - Using Student Feedback

Second and third year students of Electrical and Computer Engineering really enjoy the action learning program based on team projects. However the student feedback from the fourth years still shows a residual ambivalence towards the subject. On the other hand, feedback from graduates shows they are highly appreciative of their skills in later years.

So one thing is quite clear from our involvement with developing this course. Student feedback can be helpful with the processes but not the content of courses, and popularity is a dubious requirement.

 

Acknowledgments

Special thanks are due to Dr Gordon Wyeth and Dr Adam Postula, for their work in developing the Team Project; also Dr David Noon and Dr Anna Djamaludin, for help in developing the Project Management course. Also thanks are due to TEDI at UQ, for the changes inspired by their Graduate Certificate in Education, and to Geoff Issacs for his special help with this topic.

 

References

Manley K and Bennett R,. "Graduate Survey Final Report". Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of Queensland, July 1996

 

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The University of Queensland
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Modified: 8 March 2002
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