Making Project Management Education Less Academic

Project Management Education has come a long way in the last couple years.  Finally starting to gain credibility as a discipline all its own, numerous textbooks and courses have been created around project management. On my way to Tokyo last month, I sat next to a gentleman who was enrolled in one of these courses at a local Boston-area school.

Like many typical college text books, the first thing that I noticed was the price: $160. Perfect. Its already seeming very academic. The text and exercises inside were mixed. Some were reasonable, while others were, in my experience not really useful. I think that overall, project management education needs to become less academic and more practical.

Some of the biggest issues with the current curriculum:

· Earned Value calculations not really practical for most industries

· Most of the math and formulas not up to date

· Little to no discussion of recent and relevant organization behavior theories

· Few practical exercises that deal with most common project management issues

To get more practical, and learn PM skills that are necessary in the real world. New project manager courses should focus on both the hard and soft skills of the job. Hard skills are currently 85% of the many current curriculum’s, and include such skills as earned value calculations, dependencies, critical path determination, standard project methodology and project phases, etc.

Here are some of my suggestions for areas mostly lacking in many of the PM courses I have taken over the last 2 years:

· Psychology: Add Organizational behavior and psychology to the curriculum. As many PM’s can tell you, most of the problems on the job come from political battles and team friction. Learning to spot these issues and resolve them before they impact the project significantly is real life PM skill that is rarely discussed or taught.

· Team Work: Instead of “team work” discussions on paper, teamwork must be learned and experienced to be truly effective. While you cannot replicate months and years of lessons on teamwork (some of this must be learned “on the job”), there are some key pointers that can be learned and practiced in the classroom. Team exercises and group projects with key crafted objectives can greatly increase team work.

· Project Experiences: To learn actual PM “hard” skills, mini team projects coupled with traditional classroom exercises will cover the necessary elements.