Catalog Description

EN454: Project Management for Ocean Engineers (3-0-3).

This course covers the fundamentals of engineering project management . Main topics include project planning, project scheduling, project budgets, project performance measurement, project control and team dynamics.

Textbook

Successful Project Management, 4th Edition, Gido & Clements, 2009

Course Coordinator

CDR Angela Schedel

Goals

1. Discuss the activities and milestones for each of the four stages of projects: needs identification, proposed solutions, project execution, and project termination.
2. Understand the main components of a project proposal, including technical, management and cost sections, as well as the bid / no-bid process.
3. Create a Work Breakdown Structure and a Network Diagram for a project, showing the organizational structure and activity dependency relationships for a project.
4. Perform Network Scheduling techniques to determine the early start time, early finish time, late start time, late finish time and slack for each activity. Identify the Critical Path for a project.
5. Perform Schedule Control techniques to make changes to a schedule once actual finish times have been implemented, including time-cost trade-off methods as well as project crashing.
6. Create and track a budget for a project, including Cumulative Budgeted Cost, Cumulative Actual Cost and Cumulative Earned Value at each reporting period. Calculate the Forecasted Cost at Completion for a project that is in work.

Prerequisites

1/C standing as Ocean Engineering major.

Class Topics

1. Project Management Overview
2. Needs Identification & Proposed Solutions
3. Project Execution, Control & Termination
4. Project Risk Management / Decision Trees
5. Project Planning
6. Project Scheduling / Scheduling Probability / Schedule Control
7. Resource Considerations
8. Time-Cost Trade-Off Methods / Crashing
9. Cost Planning and Performance
10. Cost Control
11. The Project Manager: Know Yourself
12. The Project Team: Know Others
13. Project Communication & Documentation
14. Types of Project Organizations
15. Operations Research / Optimization

Computer Usage

The students are required to make extensive use of the capabilities of their spreadsheet program for this course. Advanced features such as conditional logic, table lookup, intrinsic functions, and optimization are introduced and utilized. The students are required to develop spreadsheets for finding the section modulus of an entire midship section of a ship. The students are also encouraged to use their spreadsheet program to solve the design equations in a systematic form so that they can try different combinations of variables in order to do some basic optimization of their design.

Laboratory Projects

1. Class Exercise: Sub-component structural analysis
2. Class Exercise: Boundary Conditions
3. Class Exercise: Weight curve development
4. Computer Exercise: Hull girder analysis using first principles and hydrostatics software
5. Laboratory Project: 4-point beam bending
6. Computer Exercise: Finite Element Analysis (4 labs)
7. Laboratory Project: Stiffened panel under combined loads
8. Design Problem: Midship Section Design (5 labs)