Defining Projects to Integrate Evolving Team Fundamentals and Project Management Skills

1. INTRODUCTION A goal of undergraduate curriculums such as Information Sciences/Information Technology and Business is to prepare students for entry into the workforce. In addition to technical skills, industry is demanding entry level workers who have the ability to work on teams and execute projects (Peterson, et al., 2003; Woratschek and Lenox, 2002). Project management practices must focus concurrently on people, processes, and technology and shift emphasis from project management to project leadership (Nidiffer and Dolan, 2005). 1.1 Motivation and Objective Students are often provided satisfactory exposure to the technical details of a domain in an evolving style but the team and project skills are typically provided in a disconnected manner. That is, while curriculums strive to define a set of structured courses to address students' technical skills over the span of the program, team fundamentals and project knowledge concepts receive minor focus (Hogan and Thomas, 2005). In order for graduates to complete a degree program and meet the expectations of future employers, students must be provided an environment in which to learn, apply and evolve their team and project knowledge. Students should have an opportunity to learn, practice and develop team and project management skills, in a near-commercial environment, with opportunities for reflection and interaction with real-world clients (Jones and McMaster, 2004; Rawlings et al, 2005). To educate successful young IT professionals, teamwork fundamentals and project management concepts should be integrated into the curriculum (Schneider et al., 2005). The goal of this paper is to define an approach to project selection that spans the four years of a traditional baccalaureate curriculum. The approach is rooted in the Project Management Institute's (PMI) Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) (Project Management Institute, 2004), and is integrated with a competency matrix for team assessment, which define how students' team competency is expected to mature as they progress through the curriculum (Smith and Smarkusky, 2005). 1.2 Background and Related Work The human engineering factor is often the most important, but frequently overlooked, aspect of IT project management (Laplante, 2003). In order for students to both practice and exhibit desired team skills, projects need to be defined in a way to provide such opportunities. As it is unrealistic for students to both simultaneously learn and demonstrate mastery of team fundamentals and project knowledge, an approach that enables students to evolve independently in both dimensions is required. Within the literature there is significant discussion on the merits on various team-oriented learning such as problem-based learning and service learning (Cameron et al., 2005; Duch et al., 2001; Eyler and Giles, 1999). Further, discussions of projects that address the needs of specific courses, such as for introductory courses in a given discipline, are numerous. However, the literature is vacant with respect to defining evolving projects over significant time spans that focus on integration and enhancement of project knowledge and team fundamentals. This article serves to fill that void by merging a competency matrix approach to evolving team skills, scaffolding and problem-based contextual learning. To address the need to provide an approach that gradually evolves a student's team skills, Smith and Smarkusky (Smith and Smarkusky, 2005) employed a competency matrix that defines the expected maturity of various team skills for each student level (i.e., freshman, sophomore, junior or senior). The approach also abstractly describes the evolving nature of the projects for each student level. The projects can be described in two dimensions: the formality of the project structure and the explicitness of the project objectives. In order for freshman students to focus on practicing team skills, freshman projects are highly structured and have very well-defined objectives. …