MS Project in a course

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MS Project in a courseSoftware Project
Management
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About a course

• Final IV year students, 14 students
• 1 semester, 2 hrs lecture, 1 hr exercises
• Exam and final mark
• practical assignment in MS Project
• short answers test of 20 questions
• detailed answers test of 4 questions
• Of 14 students, 12 successfully finished their
  practical assignment.
• Marks
• 7 once
• 8 eight times
• 9 three times
• Of 12 students eligible for an exam, 11 showed
  up, each one passing both tests, marks 6 10.
• Each of 11 students accepted offered final mark.

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Content of Course

• Introduction (117 slides)
• IT management (59 132)
• CMM and process improvement (51)
• Cost estimation and COCOMO (71)
• Software measurement and metrics (51)
• Planning (4336)
• Using tools - Microsoft project (65, Exercise)
• Ethical issues (87)

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Excercises

• As an example of project at exercises, students
  were presented with a management of a university
  project Management of an introductory course in
  computer science as a minor, for a large group of
  students
• Mentioned problem is a real-life course held at
  the Faculty of Science in Novi Sad. Approximately
  the same subject is held for some 8 (eight!)
  different groups of students, with some 450
  students.
• Course is held by 2 professors and (at least) 3
  assistants, while the exam is organized through 3
  tests 3 practical work (for those who passed
  tests).
• This allowed us to present a lot of possibilities
  of MS Project, involved material that is
  relatively easy to explain and material that is
  understandable to students.

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Excercises

• For their assignment, students had to create a
  project that will manage production of a software
  for Seminar organization case study that all
  of the students knew very well from the course
  Software Engineering
• The original idea was (and still is, for the
  future years), to contact some actual companies,
  find some concrete practical problems that are
  managed in real-life, and ask students to solve
  those.
• Besides, companies would be able to define a
  contact-person who would work with students as an
  expert, with first-hand experience
• Why not?
• Several reasons
• our companies do not use too many theoretical
  elements in their work, all of the software
  products are usually inventions of individuals
• contact-person can not be properly motivated
  to communicate with students, it would be too
  difficult to organize and too much of hard work
  for them

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MS Project lecture

• Content of a lecture
• Basics
• Project planning Theory and practice
• Definition and planning of activities
• Resource assurance plan
• Project costs planning
• Advanced topics
• Supervision of a project
• Visual supervision of a project
• Each of the topics, consists of two parts
• theoretical background and suggestions
• practical point-and-click description