Project Management lectures

As mentioned previously, last week there were three evening lectures held in the Project Management course, delivered by the course supervisor from Edinburgh. I am told that such lectures occur for each course about once every two years; out of the four courses that I have taken so far, three have had guest lecturers. After a quick check, I see that I wrote a year ago about attending the lectures for the accountancy course.

In my opinion, these lectures are a great help and those who don't attend can only blame themselves. The reason for their non-attendance is probably in my blind spot: maybe they have difficulty in understanding spoken English, and even more of a problem in understanding English spoken in a Scottish accent.

The PM exam seems to be more rigidly structured than the other subjects: the first question demands an OBS (organisational breakdown structure), the second is either CPM or PERT, the third is EVA and the fourth is a general essay question, normally about risk management. There are no multiple choice questions. This makes preparing for the exam somewhat easier than it might have otherwise been. As the lecturer pointed out, one only needs 50% in order to pass, and most numerically inclined people should have no problem in achieving the maximum marks from the CPM/PERT and EVA questions.

But of course we have to aim for the sky! The OBS question also should not be too hard, especially as we now know all the downfalls that await us. The lecturer had put at our disposal thirty six different files (I know - I printed them!) which give background and foreground material; one of these documents discusses where students went wrong in the exam. So I know, for example, that it is a very good idea to take several coloured pens with me into the exam in order to differentiate the types of links which I will have to draw in the OBS.

Possibly, revising for the exam will boil down to committing my thirteen pages of notes to memory (and two pages of those are CPM and PERT, for which I don't really need notes).

I wrote to the lecturer today, thanking him for the lectures. I noted that these lectures always have the same psychological affect on the students who participate: their self-confidence increases, and a certain amount of social binding occurs. Unfortunately, there is very little socialising in class and I rarely know anybody's name, so this affect is welcome. Actually, our regular lecturer asked in the first lecture for everybody to say their name and a few words about themselves, but social cretin that I am, most of what was said was quickly forgotten.

The Scottish lecturer several times used his flight back to Heathrow as an example for PERT: when El Al buys a landing window for a huge sum, it has to be confident that it can land 95% of its planes within that window. Planes landing outside of that window will mean fines for the company, an expense which has to be weighed up against the cost of widening the landing window. As it happens, the "plane missed its allocated landing slot! An air conditioning unit failed while the aircraft was still on the runway so there was a delay of about one hour at Ben Gurion. The pilot made up about half an hour en route but then we had to circle for over an hour at Heathrow in the ‘stacking queue’ resulting from extreme high winds over the South of England".

As a side affect of these lectures, I know see everything as a project!