Description of the course
The course develops understanding of resources, goals, cost, and development environments used to implement a software project and how the whole process in a project is controlled and managed. It aims to support professionals in conducting effective project management using structured processes that follow emerging and increasingly widespread industry standards. The course addresses industry needs for wider project management training, which is directly linked to productivity, and corresponds to increasingly higher corporate training budget allocations. Upon completion of the course students are able to understand project management in IT contexts, deploy an integrated project management approach that involves scope, time, cost, quality, human resource, communications, risk, and procurement, understand core project management issues, define a scope for a medium-sized project and to use that as the basis to estimate the time and cost required for project implementation, organize a project team and to construct a project plan, monitor the quality of project implementation and introduce adaptations where necessary, and use basic project management tools.
Description of participants
This is an obligatory course targeting undergraduate students in the Department of Information Systems, Faculty of Information Technology, Hanoi University. The course was attended by 150 students in the second semester of academic year 2022 – 2023 all of whom are enrolled in the 3rd year of studies.
Description of gamified design thinking activities
Students were challenged to develop a strategic plan for implementing a specific project. Students were encouraged to implement design thinking for effective project management. Initially, students were exposed to basic concepts of design thinking such as principles, and stages. Subsequently, they practically deployed theoretical design thinking concepts in the development of an implementation strategy for their project. Design thinking supported students to create different strategies from multiple perspectives. Students were encouraged to approach a challenging project from the perspective of their users, stakeholders, or even a potential competitor. By considering a project from diverse viewpoints, students gained new insights towards designing innovative solutions that may not have been possible otherwise.
Activities were organized in the following steps.
Step 1. Identification of project goal or scenario.
Students were encouraged to work in groups towards identifying a project scenario inspired by real-life industry cases.
Step 2. Brainstorming on different project implementation strategies.
Students brainstormed in groups on diverse project management approaches.
Step 3. Analysis of each strategy using different criteria.
Students analyzed the proposed alternate project management approaches using diverse criteria.
Step 4. Finalization of the project implementation strategy.
Based on the above analysis, students finalized their suggested project implementation strategy.
