Short Programs

Successfully Managing Complex Projects

This course is in development for 2013 or beyond. The below description should be taken as an example of content and is subject to change. If you are interested in this course, please
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Course Summary  |  Learning Objectives  |  Who Should Attend  |  Program Outline  | 
About the Lecturers  |  Location  |  Updates

Course Summary

The course focuses on principles, methodologies, techniques, and tools to effectively engineer, plan, design, monitor, and manage large scale projects for complex system- and product-development, including change and risk management. Following a brief review of techniques such as critical path method (CPM), PERT, systems dynamics, and Design Structure Matrix (DSM), we introduce research frontiers in Project-Product Lifecycle Management (PPLM), which calls for integrating the project and the product models to improve both the performance of the project and the quality of the delivered product. A combination of industry-standard and advanced software tools, recently developed in academia, is applied by students to develop team mini-projects in their area of interest in order to gain insights into the value of model based project management.

Learning Objectives

1. Understand the guiding principles of engineering and managing projects.
2. Acquire working knowledge of project planning and monitoring techniques including PERT, CPM, WBS, DSM.
3. Understand the significance of integrating project and product lifecycle models (PPLM).
4. Gain experience in conceptual modeling of a product and the project that delivers it.
5. Analyze strategic, tactical, and operational perspectives of project management.
6. Understand reasons for project schedule and budget overruns and how to avoid them.
7. Get introduced to change and risk management in products and effects on the project.
8. Become hands-on-experienced in engineering a system project.

Who Should Attend

Project managers, project leaders, team leaders, systems engineers, senior software engineers, middle management professionals in enterprises, and executives of small and medium companies. The course is of particular value for those professionals interested in maximizing the value from projects they design, manage or are involved in as decision makers.

Program Outline

Day 1

1. Guiding principles of engineering and managing projects

2. Project planning and monitoring techniques:

• Program Evaluation and Reviewing technique (PERT)
• Critical Path Method (CPM)
• Work Breakdown Structure (WBS)
• Risk Breakdown Structure (RBS)
• Design Structure Matrix (DSM)

3. Team-up and prepare project and product scope document

Day 2

4. Conceptual modeling of systems and projects with Object-Process Methodology (OPM)

5. Project-Product Lifecycle Management (PPLM) principles

6. PPLM-based conceptual modeling of a product and the project that delivers it using a combination of OPCAT and MS-Project

7. Present project and product scope, get feedback, start modeling with MS-Project and OPCAT

Day 3

8. Strategic, tactical, and operational perspectives of project management

9. Why projects fail? Project schedule and budget overruns and how to avoid them

10. Present work-in-progress of project and product models, get feedback, improve project-product links in the models

Day 4

11. Introduction to change and risk management in project and related product

12. Hands-on PPLM-based engineering of a system project

13. Systems dynamics: The human aspect of project management

14. Present improved models, get feedback, finalize models, use for analysis

Day 5

15. Presenting and discussing the Hands-on PPLM-based engineering of your system project

About The Lecturers

Olivier de Weck
Professor de Weck’s research is in the fields of Systems Engineering and Space Logistics. He focuses on understanding future uncertainty and strategic issues in large-scale projects and how complex systems evolve over time. Currently, many systems in the aerospace, automotive and other industries are rigid point designs that cannot easily be changed after their initial deployment. Professor de Weck has developed quantitative and implementable methods and tools that explicitly consider both changeability and commonality over a system’s lifecycle. Specific examples of such methods are Time-Expanded Decision Networks (TDN), the sensitivity-Design Structure Matrix (sDSM) and the Technology Infusion Analysis (TIA) process. These methods have been implemented in a variety of software tools and have been demonstrated on systems and products of real-world complexity in space exploration (NASA), oil and gas exploration and production (BP) as well as complex electro-mechanical products (Xerox), among others.

He is an Associate Fellow of AIAA, and serves as Associate Editor for the Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets. He won two best paper awards at the 2004 INCOSE Systems Engineering conference, the institute-wide 2006 Frank E. Perkins Award for Excellence in Graduate Advising at MIT, a 2007 AIAA Outstanding Service Award and the 2007 outstanding paper award from the journal Systems Engineering. Since July 2008 he serves as Associate Director of the Engineering Systems Division at MIT, an academic unit with 53 faculty members and teaching staff and 440 graduate students.

For more information on Professor de Weck’s research and teaching activities you may visit http://strategic.mit.edu.

Dov Dori
Dov Dori is Visiting Professor at MIT's Engineering Systems Division (ESD). Between 2001 and 2008 he was Head of Technion's Area of Information Systems Engineering at the Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management, and Research Affiliate at MIT. Between 1999 and 2001 he was Visiting Faculty at MIT's Sloan and ESD. Professor Dori received his B.Sc. in Industrial Engineering and Management from the Technion in 1975, M.Sc. in Operations Research from Tel Aviv University in 1981, and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel, in 1988. Between 1978 and 1984 he was Chief Industrial Engineer of the MERKAVA Tank Production Plant. His research interests include Model-Based Systems Engineering, Systems Development and Lifecycle Methodologies, Information Systems Engineering, Computer Aided Software Engineering and Web systems engineering. Dov Dori has developed the Machine Drawing Understanding System (MDUS) and Object-Process Methodology (OPM). Between 1999 and 2001 Prof. Dori was Associate Editor of IEEE Transaction on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (T-PAMI). He is Associate Editor of Systems Engineering, INCOSE's flagship journal. He is author/co-editor of four books and author of over 130 publications. Prof. Dori is Fellow of the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR), a Senior Member of IEEE and ACM, and a member of INCOSE. He has been consultant and invited lecturer for companies including Pratt and Whitney Canada, Ford Motor Company, FAA, NASA, The MITRE Corporation, Xerox, Kodak, and others.

Home page: http://iew3.technion.ac.il/Home/Users/dori.phtml

Location

This course takes place on the MIT campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We can also offer this course for groups of employees at your location. Please contact the Short Programs office for further details.

Updates

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