This website provides lecture materials, exercises and videos for Information Systems instructors interested in
developing courses for teachingIT Project Management. All exercises come in an editable (often MS Word or Powerpoint) format so instructors can customize exercises as they see fit.
The current contents are:
This module employs developing a simple IoT device as a running example to illustrate developing
a network diagram and then calculating critical paths and final project duration. I teach two
kinds of critical path analysis-the standard unconstrained critical path analysis and
critical path analysis given limited skilled human resources, a common problem in IT projects.
The video here introduces students to unconstrained critical path analysis. This is the
standard form of critical analysis taught in most project management classes. It assumes
the only limit on schedule is task precedence.
The video here introduces students to critical path analysis when you have a limited number of people. This is a fairly common problem in IT projects where skilled staff are hard to procure.
The problem is actually NP complete, which means there is no practical solution. However,
heuristic solutions exist. The technique taught is a heuristic solution calculable
by a human being.
These are a series of lectures covering how to cost and justify projects.
Cost Estimation
This lecture explores how we allocate costs to projects. We cover the idea of not only
financial costs, but also deferred and opportunity cost - just because you don't pay money doesn't
mean it doesn't cost you. We also discuss the idea of only paying for what you use, not the full
value of the asset.
We now explore the concept of both cost and benefit. We explore financial benefit by looking
at the concepts of payback period, net present value and return on investment. We also
discuss non-financial benefits of a project.
A business case is a formal internal document used to request resources. It is the formal way
of requesting resources for a project. Not every company uses business cases, but in every
company, there is a need to justify the initiation of a project.
We highlight that a project is a temporary and unique endeavor. The fact it is temporary and unique means projects suffer from the problem of the unknown unknown.
A project is then argued to comprise five parts- initiation, planning, execution, monitoring and control and closing. We discuss the iron triangle of scope, cost, and schedule.
Finally, we discuss how IT projects are different. They are highly likely to fail because most people are not experts, the underlying environment is dynamic and changing, and the job
has an inherently high level of combinatorial complexity. Also, people are more critical in IT projects than in other projects.