Introduction

I spent many years as a practicing engineer, including many assignments as the manager of engineering projects. The projects that I managed ranged from very small to very large; as I got older and more experienced, the projects that I led tended to get larger and more complex. Our teams were in general successful in delivering systems and products that our customers found useful, and at times constituted revolutionary improvements over previous capabilities. The teams that I led have been credited with saving lives, money, and time, all on a large scale.

As I progressed from project to project, I drew certain conclusions about managing such engineering projects and developed my own techniques and methods. I took courses offered by my company in project management, and read books on the subject. I found a significant difference between what I experienced as a project manager, and what the books had to say. What I did as a project manager, what I spent my time doing and worrying about, seemed very different from what the books said.

I also, learned through my reading and research, that the overall track record of success in engineering projects is not very good. A shockingly large portion of the engineering projects that are started turn into failures.

Recently, I elected to retire from full‐time work as a practicing engineer and engineering project manager and took an appointment at a university as a full‐time professor of engineering in a department of systems engineering. Systems engineering is my love and my passion, and I wanted to create courses that taught systems engineering my way, and to continue my researches into how to do systems engineering better than we do it now.

After I had a good start in creating my systems engineering courses, the university asked me to teach a course in engineering project management. It had never occurred to me to want to teach that; I was completely focused on systems engineering. Of course, systems engineering and engineering project management are, in my mind, very closely related. When I was the manager of an engineering project, I employed what I characterized as the “systems engineering mindset” in order to plan and manage the project.

I discovered that I had quite a lot to say about engineering project management, and enjoyed teaching the course quite a bit. The students seemed to find my approach – grounded in actual experience as an engineering project manager, and full of examples from actual projects – both informative and enjoyable.

And, of course, I had to select a textbook for my engineering project management course. I purchased and read several of them. They were all as I remembered them: they talked a lot about stuff that I didn’t actually do and said nothing about many things that I had found were vital. After I had taught the course a couple of times, I realized that perhaps there was room in the world for a textbook that would describe my approach to engineering project management, one that would teach the activities that I found myself actually spending time on and worrying about when I was the manager of large, complex engineering projects. This book is the result.

1 Concept of the Book

The book is “sized” for a one‐semester course, but could easily be adapted to either one or two quarters of instruction.

The book is intended to serve both upper‐division undergraduates (e.g., juniors and seniors) and students who are just starting graduate studies. I use essentially the same course materials for both of these student audiences; the graduate students will get additional readings and a lot more homework (in ways which I will describe within the text).

Engineering is all about achieving practical results, and in that spirit of hands‐on, practical results, my class does not consist entirely of lectures. For most of the weeks within the course, I use at least one class session for what I call a “facilitated lab session.” During these facilitated lab sessions, I take only a short amount of time to explain a technique, and then provide the students with a problem which they work on (in teams) during the class session. They are allowed to consult with each other, to look at their class notes and books, to ask me questions, to show me their in‐progress work, and get feedback on the spot. What I find is that they seldom actually finish the work during this class session (and therefore they still have to do that work as homework), but by the end of each facilitated lab session, they understand the method properly, and are able to do the problem correctly.

So the course – and therefore this book – is laid out as two parallel, week‐by‐week tracks: one a progressive set of lectures, and one a progressive set of practical techniques and team exercises. As the students’ knowledge and practical techniques are built up and mastered, this leads to a set of gradable course materials, and an integrated set of learning (via a combination of reading, lectures, hands‐on facilitated sessions, individual homework assignments, and team homework assignments) for each student. I supplement these gradable materials with a mid‐term and a final examination, in order to develop grades for each student.

At the ends of the chapters that correspond to the weeks which have these facilitated lab sessions, therefore, there will be a subsection that addresses the topic, technique, and assignment for that week’s lab session.

Many of the artifacts that I ask the students to create could be viewed as sections of a project plan. The graduate students get assigned to create more elements of a project plan than the undergraduates, commensurate with their extra year or two of previous instruction, and most especially the fact that a large portion of engineering graduate students who are taking a course in engineering project management have a few years of actual work experience. That experience is likely to have been focused in just a couple of small teams buried within large projects at their companies, but they are at least aware of the larger world of project management and are motivated to want to learn quickly about that larger world.

The organization of the book is described in the following table: