Term Project

Aim

After completion of the course, the student should be able to:

• Plan, deliver and evaluate a project, within predetermined timeframes, using accepted project management and/or new product development methodologies
• In teams, coordinate multiple tasks and activities as well as prioritize between them
• Write a project management report according to specifications
• Collect, organize and evaluate the necessary information to diagnose and develop solutions for a problem/opportunity
• Justify and argue for his or her project proposal/outcomes and reflect on the outcomes of actions taken

Content

Teamwork and skills for leading, planning and controlling international projects are critical business competencies to deal with complex business challenges. First, team skills are essential to coordinate individuals and adapt the organization to the unpredictable demands of the new economy. Second, not only multinational corporations are restructuring into teams around projects, product lines, customers, new kinds of partnerships, etc. but also SMEs are portrayed as small teams of highly motivated people, often with little prior business experience. From practical experience, we know that teams are meaningful only if there is something riding on the team performance, such as a common challenge with real consequences. Throughout this course, students will experience and learn how to deal with key and often overlooked managerial challenges e.g. ability to manage without influence, gain the support of stakeholders and access to resources not directly under your control.

In the Term Project course, everyone on the team matters, every relationship influences the team performance, and every conflict is a potential learning opportunity. The main objective of this course is to furnish students with competencies to plan, control and innovate that are necessary to successfully manage a challenge. The specific challenge may be of two kinds and here students make a choice depending on their future career plans. Option one is to take on a company challenge, which allows students to learn about project management with a practical, hands-on approach, in a real company challenge setting. The challenge will then be and students will to come up with a solution. For five weeks, students will work in teams with one business challenge (provided by a company) using different project management and/or new product development tools. Option two is to take on a research challenge and is aimed at students who want to pursue an academic career. Here the research challenge will be carried out within a research project and in cooperation with researchers at the department.