Teaching and learning of project management for engineering and technology capstone research projects

Abstract

Project management has become an increasingly important skill for engineering and technology students of the 21st century especially for U.S. students. While much of routine design and manufacturing tasks are continuing to move overseas notably to India and China, creativity and management skills are still in high demand in the U.S. Senior capstone projects are well established as a pedagogical vehicle providing engineering and technology students the opportunity to learn and synthesize their project management skills with their other technical competences. Typically project management instruction is designed and well suited for product development and process improvement projects where the tasks can be clearly defined. It is more difficult to apply project management techniques to research oriented projects even though involving undergraduate students in leading-edge research programs often has strong and long term impact on student creativity. A typical stage- gate development process which includes stages of project definition, planning, execution, and completion, would require that existing competing products are examined and potential market discriminators for the new product clearly identified. For the research based project this stage would focus on more general applications of the technology and describing the limitations of existing technologies. At a Preliminary Design Review (PDR) gate, while a fabrication process would be identified for a product development process, methods and a plan for the research effort would be laid out. The shape of the stages and gates for new product development do not fit well and must be adapted to fit the project management needs of research oriented projects. The paper reports on the challenge of adapting and integrating the well-developed project management principles to undergraduate research projects. By defining the product of a research project as a new piece of knowledge, and the existing market as the existing body of knowledge in a research field, we believe effective teaching and learning of project management through the undergraduate capstone research projects can be achieved and seamlessly integrated with existing product development oriented project management structures. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2010.