Karl Smith and P. K. Imbrie

Preface

W hen McGraw-Hill invited me to write a module on project management and teamwork for their BEST series, I thought, What a terrific idea! I had been teaching project management and teamwork courses for seniors in engineering; graduate students in professional master’s programs, especially at the University of Minnesota’s Center for the Development of Technological Leadership; and participants in short courses in the University of Minnesota Executive Development Program, government agencies, and private companies. It would not have occurred to me to write a book for first-year students. I immediately embraced the idea and started work.

I’ve been teaching a course for first-year students at the University of Minnesota for more than 20 years. It has evolved into a course titled How to Model It: Building Models to Solve Engineering Problems, which I have been teaching with colleagues and undergraduate student teaching assistants for the past 10 years. We also wrote a book to accompany the course—How to Model it: Problem Solving for the Computer Age (Starfield, Smith, and Bleloch, 1994). Since this course makes extensive use of project teams, I know that a book on project management and teamwork is needed.

Teamwork and projects are at the heart of the approach I use in teaching students at all levels, including participants in faculty development workshops. I’ve learned that it isn’t easy for students to work effectively in project teams or for faculty to organize and manage them, but the potential for extraordinary work from teams makes it worth the effort. Also, projects and teamwork are a central part of engineering work in the world outside the classroom.

The first part of this book summarizes the context of engineering and stresses the importance of teamwork. The middle part focuses on the nature of projects and the project managers’ role. The last part emphasizes the particulars on scheduling, monitoring, and documentation. Overall, my goals for readers of Project Management and Teamwork are the following:

• To understand the dynamics of team development and interpersonal problem solving.

• To identify strategies for accelerating the development of true team ­effectiveness.

• To understand the critical dimensions of project scope, time, and cost ­management.

• To understand critical technical competencies in project management.

• To explore a variety of “best practices” including anticipating, preventing, and overcoming barriers to project success.

As you engage with this book, be sure to continually reflect on what you’re learning and how you can apply it to the projects and teams you work on each day, in classes, on the job, and in social, professional, and community organizations. An important key to success in projects and teams is to routinely work at a “meta level.” That means you are simultaneously thinking about the task and how well the team is working. Talk with others about how the projects and teams you’re involved with are going, share successes and insights, and work together to identify and solve team problems. The personal story in the accompanying box describes some of the questions I’ve grappled with and how I got interested in this project. I encourage you to develop your own stories as you work your way through this book.

One of the messages of the story in the box is the importance of checking a variety of resources to help formulate and solve the problems you encounter. Another message is that, although engineers spend some of their time working alone, engineering is not individual, isolated work. Collaborative problem solving and teamwork are central to engineering. Engineers must learn to solve problems by themselves, of course, but they must also learn to work collaboratively to effectively solve the other 95 percent of the problems they will face as professional engineers. There may be a tendency to think that this 95 percent—this asking questions and searching other sources for the solution—is either trivial or else unrelated to engineering. However, working with others to formulate and solve problems and accomplish joint tasks is critical to success in engineering.

Many people deserve credit for guidance in this project. Michael B. Mahler, a graduate student in civil engineering at the University of Minnesota, with whom I’ve taught and worked on project management for many years, provided enormous insight into the process of what will work for students and was a source of constant support and encouragement. Robert C. Johns co-taught the project management course with me at Minnesota and provided lots of good ideas. Anthony M. Starfield, co-creator of the first-year course, How to Model It, and co-author of the book by the same title, encouraged me to use the questioning format of the How to Model It book to engage the reader. The five manuscript reviewers provided terrific assistance. Holly Stark and Eric Munson of McGraw-Hill, and Byron Gottfried, Consulting Editor, initiated the idea and provided guidance throughout. A special note of thanks to my daughters, Riawa and Sharla Smith, who helped with the editing and graphics.

A special acknowledgment to Michigan State University, which provided me with a wonderful place to work on this project during my sabbatical leave. Another goes to David and Roger Johnson (whose cooperative learning model provides the theoretical basis for this book) for their great ideas, generosity, and steadfast support.

Most of all I thank the hundreds of students who learned from and with me in project management courses for their patience, perseverance, wonderful suggestions and ideas, and interest and enthusiasm in project management and teamwork.

Preface to the Second Edition

W elcome to the second edition, now retitled Teamwork and Project Management. Many things have changed since I wrote the first edition in 1998–1999. Teamwork has received increased emphasis from ABET and from employers, the world has grown smaller and our sense of interdependence has greatly increased, the importance of professional responsibility and ethics has magnified, projects are becoming much more common. Because teamwork and projects are prevalent in engineering in business, industry, and government, they are also becoming common in engineering classes. In addition to the importance of teamwork in the profession, teams are used in classes because students working in well-structured teams learn more, remember it longer, and develop superior problem-solving skills compared with students working individually. All these changes increase the importance of learning (and practicing) the concepts, principles, and heuristics in this book.

My civil engineering project management course is overflowing with students from across the Institute of Technology at the University of Minnesota. They apparently are voting with their feet, recognizing the importance of teamwork and project management skills. I really appreciate their enthusiasm. The teaching team has grown considerably and now includes several graduate students. The current teaching team includes Brandon Pierce, Connie Kampf, and Lori Engstrom. They have been wonderful in helping revise the course, and therefore have had lots of influence on this book. Two adjunct faculty, Tim Eiler and Randy Carlson, will start teaching the course this year, and I suspect the next iteration of this book will include many of their ideas.

The reviewers and editors made wonderful suggestions for improving the book, many of which I’ve incorporated in this edition. The most notable is probably the title change from Project Management and Teamwork to Teamwork and Project Management, which was suggested by Kelly Lowery and John Griffin.

Project Management and Teamwork was designed for first-year students, but it has been used by other students, especially those in senior-level capstone design courses. Teamwork and Project Management is still designed to be accessible to first-year students, but will be applicable for upper-division students who haven’t had an opportunity to focus on teamwork and project management skills in earlier courses and programs.

Chapter 1, which is an introduction and overview, was extensively revised. Chapters 2 and 3, the teamwork chapters, were updated and expanded. Chapters 4 and 5, on project management basics, were rearranged and new material on scoping projects was added, based on new developments and the importance of planning. Errors were corrected in Chapter 6, but that chapter wasn’t changed much otherwise. The remainder of the book was updated.

Tom Peters wrote in his book The Project 50, “In the new economy, all work is project work.” My intention is that this book will help prepare you to work in the new economy. Good teamwork and project work to you!

Preface to the Third Edition

T he landscape of teamwork and project management in engineering continues to change and at an accelerated pace. There are many signs of these changes, for example, the Civil Engineering Body of Knowledge for the 21stCentury added four outcomes to the eleven ABET outcomes (see page 11):

1. an ability to apply knowledge in a specialized area related to civil ­engineering.

2. an understanding of the elements of project management, construction, and asset management.

3. an understanding of business and public policy and administration fundamentals.

4. an understanding of the role of the leader and leadership principles and attitudes.

Please notice that three of the four additional outcomes involve “soft skills” or what are increasingly being referred to as professional skills (Shuman, Besterfied-Sacre, McGourty, 2005).

The 2004 National Academy of Engineering report, The Engineer of 2020: Visions of Engineering in the New Century, listed the following attributes of successful engineers in 2020:

• Strong analytical skills—at its core, engineering employs principles of science, mathematics, and domains of discovery and design to a particular challenge and for a practical purpose

• Practical ingenuity—the word engineering derives from ingeniator and engineering will always be synonymous with ingenuity

• Creativity—(invention, innovation, thinking outside the box, art) is an indispensable quality

• Good communication skills with multiple stakeholders

• Business and management skills—the growing interdependence between technology and the economic and social foundations of modern society means engineers need to exercise their potential as leaders

• Leadership—engineers must understand leadership principles and be able to practice them in growing proportions as their careers advance

• High ethical standards and a strong sense of professionalism

• Dynamic/agile/resilient/flexible

• Lifelong learners

Linda Katehi, Dean of Engineering at Purdue University, provided her perspectives in a talk to the National Academy of Engineering titled “The Global Engineer.” Here are her responses to the questions “How do we train engineers to solve unknown problems? How do we prepare them for the future?” (Katehi, 2004):

• Our future engineering curriculum should be built around developing skills and not around teaching available knowledge.

• We need to focus on shaping analytic skills, problem-solving skills, and design skills.

• We need to teach methods and not solutions.

• We need to teach future engineers how to be creative and flexible, how to be curious and imaginative.

• We need to help them understand and appreciate the impact of the social/cultural dynamics on a team environment.

• We need to help them appreciate the power of the team relative to the importance of the talent.

• We need to teach them how to communicate effectively, and we need to teach them how to think globally.

• Our curricula need to focus on how to build the skills that will make engineers successful at addressing the unknown throughout their careers.

More and more the broader community is calling for engineering graduates who have not only the traditionally expected technical skills and widely sought-after problem-solving orientation, but also the set of six “professional” skills from the ABET list (Shuman, Besterfield-Sacre, and McGourty, 2005). These skills include communication, teamwork, and understanding ethics and professionalism, which Shuman, et al. label process skills, and engineering within a global and societal context, lifelong learning, and a knowledge of contemporary issues, which they designate as awareness skills.

Other areas that are getting increased attention are design, creativity, and innovation, as highlighted by several of the Engineer of 2020 successful engineer attributes. Within the past year these topics have made the cover and the cover story of Business Week,Fast Company,Time,U.S. News & World Report, and numerous other widely circulated popular magazines.

Another major change is welcoming P. K. Imbrie, professor of engineering education at Purdue University, to work with me on the book. P. K. is a teaming expert as well as a computer guru and he works with lots of first year students.

The main voice of the third edition will be Karl’s and he takes responsibility for any errors or omissions. P. K.’s voice will be noted and he will take a bigger role over the long run, i.e., in subsequent editions. For example, here’s P. K.’s reflection on his connection with me.

P. K. Imbrie

A number of years ago I attended a workshop on cooperative learning given by Prof. Smith (yes the same Prof. Smith that is the principal author of this book). At that time, I strongly believed “the lecture” was the quintessential way to promote student learning and I saw no value (from a leaning perspective) in using student teams. After his workshop I came to realize the most important thing we do as a faculty member is help students learn how to learn—or, another way of saying it, we need to prepare them for the idea of lifelong learning. What I discovered is through a traditional lecture class, we teach them (our students) how to be stenographers and to memorize whatever it is we teach. However, in the active, cooperative classroom, students actually have to learn how to learn, because they have to learn how to communicate their ideas to other individuals while they’re in a team environment.

So you might be asking yourself, what does this have to do with “teaming?” What I have found is whether you are in the classroom, working on homework, or completing a term-long project, moving from being individualistic learners to partner learners and moving from a textbook, faculty-centered learning style to “my peers and everybody else can be equal contributors in this” can provide a phenomenal leaning experience. However, it requires you to learn how to be an effective member team. To be an effective member of a team (or an informal learning group) one must learn how to work interdependently, specify goals, develop a sense of cohesiveness, and communicate (and, if you are on a formal team, one needs clearly defined roles and rules of accountability—norms). The teaming chapters of this book will help you understand what we have found to be important and will hopefully make your teaming experience more enjoyable.

Since the engineering method involves progressive refinement, that is, taking what we know at the present (labeled state of the art, sota 2005 ) and identifying opportunities for improvement, the changes in this edition continue to reflect a focused emphasis on preparing engineering students for professional practice. In the spirit of advancing the state of the art, we’ve made major changes to several chapters and have updated the entire book.

Chapter 1, which is an introduction and overview, was extensively revised to reflect the changing landscape of engineering teamwork and proj­ect management. Chapters 2 and 3, the teamwork chapters, were updated and expanded. Chapters 4, 5, and 6, on project management basics, were updated to include material from the Third Edition of PMI’s Project Management Body of Knowledge. Chapter 7, on project monitoring and evaluation, was updated to include team functioning. Chapter 8, on communication and documentation, was updated based on research presented in Tenopir and King’s (2004) Communication Patterns of Engineers. The last two chapters were updated to include some of the latest technology, such as the video conferencing that Karl and P. K. used, as well as speculations on the future based on the comments of recent commencement speakers.

We continue to provide our reflections and encourage you to reflect on your experience and learning and add your stories to dialogues you engage in. We’ve added reflective essays on stories (the role of narrative), commencement, and the role of the arts and humanities.

Update on the students mentioned in previous Prefaces: Michael Mahler, whose encouragement and hard work contributed enormously in the early days of the work on this book, is a Regional Manager at Home Depot, Inc. He and Kelly Ahneman were married in July 2005. Brandon Pierce, whom I still see regularly since he’s involved in the American Society of Civil Engineers and visits the Civil Engineering department, is very active in project management. He is a project engineer at V3 Consultants and is completing a second master’s degree, this one in Project Management at Northwestern. Brandon and Laura Lapczynski are getting married in February 2006. Connie Kampf, who contributed so much to the writing-intensive aspect of the required proj­ect management course, finished a Ph.D at the University of Minnesota and has taken a job in Denmark. These three students and many other have had a huge influence on this book. You may wonder why I mention aspects of their personal lives in addition to their professional lives. Working closely with project team members over a long period of time often results in personal friendships. The project teams you work on as undergraduate students will in many cases (I hope) lead to long-term friendships.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge with appreciation the numerous and valuable comments, suggestions, constructive criticisms, and praise from the following reviewers: C. Frank Abrams, Jr., North Carolina State University; Paula Cheslik, Glendale Community College; Christopher A. Chung, University of Houston; John T. Demel, The Ohio State University; William G. Dunford, University of British Columbia; Donald Elger, University of Idaho; Phillip A. Farrington, University of Alabama-Huntsville; Tim Hight, Santa Clara University; Brian M. Kleiner, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University; Cesar Luongo, Florida State University; Robert Sterlacci, Binghampton University; and Herbert Tuttle, University of Kansas.

References

Body of Knowledge Committee of the Committee on Academic Prerequisites for Professional Practice, American Society of Civil Engineers. 2004. Civil engineering body of knowledge for the 21st century: Preparing the civil engineer for the future. Reston, VA: American Society of Civil Engineers.

Johnson, P. E. 1982. Personal communication.

Katehi, Linda. 2005. The Global Engineer.Address to the National Academy of Engineering. July 22–23, 2004.

National Academy of Engineering. 2004. The engineer of 2020: Visions of engineering in the new century. Washington, DC: The National Academy Press.

Peters, Tom. 1999. The project 50: Fifty ways to transform every “task” into a project that matters. New York: Knopf.

Project Management Institute. 2004. A guide to the project management body of knowledge, Third Edition (PMBOK). Upper Darby, PA: Project Management Institute (http://www.pmi.org).

Shuman, Larry, J., Besterfield-Sacre, Mary, & McGourty, Jack. 2005. The ABET “Professional Skills”—Can They Be Taught? Can They Be Assessed? Journal of Engineering Education.94 (1), 41–56.

Starfield, Anthony M., Karl A. Smith, and Andrew L. Bleloch. 1994. How to model it: Problem solving for the computer age. Edina, MN: Interaction Book.

Tenopir, Carol & King, Donald W. 2004. Communications patterns of engineers. Piscataway, NJ: IEEE Press.

Comments and Suggestions

Please send your comments and suggestions to me at ksmith@umn.edu.

Personal Story

I have been involved in engineering, as a student and as a professional, for over 30 years. Frequently I have grappled with the questions, What is the engineering method? Is it applied science? Is it design? As a professor I have struggled with the question, What should my students learn and how should they learn it? These concerns prompt-
ed me to address the question, What is the nature of engineering expertise and how can it be developed effectively?

A study conducted by one of my colleagues (Johnson, 1982) provides valuable insight into the activities of engineers. My colleague was hired to collect protocol from engineering experts while they solved difficult problems. Working with a team of professors, he developed a set of difficult and interesting problems, which he took to chief engineers in large companies. In case after case the following scenario was repeated.

The engineer would read the problem and say, “This is an interesting problem.”

My colleague would ask, “How would you solve it?”

The engineer would say, “I’d check with the engineers on the floor to see if any of them had solved it.”

In response, my colleague would say, “Suppose that didn’t work.”

“I’d assign the problem to one of my engineers to check the literature to see if a solution was available in the literature.”

“Suppose that didn’t work,” retorted my colleague.

“Well, then I’d call my friends in other companies to see if any of them had solved it.”

Again my colleague would say, “Suppose that didn’t work.”

“Then I’d call some vendors to see if any of them had a solution.”

My colleague, growing impatient at not hearing a solution, would say, “Suppose that didn’t work.”

At some stage in this interchange, the engineer would say, “Well, gee, I guess I’d have to solve it myself.”

To which my colleague would reply, “What percentage of the problems you encounter fall into this category?”

Engineer after engineer replied, “About five percent”!

Table of Contents

1 Teamwork and Project Management in Engineering 

What Is Engineering?  

Engineering Design  

Teamwork and Engineering  

Fundamental Tools for the Next Generation of Engineers
and Project Managers  

Reflection: Teamwork and Project Management in Engineering  

2 Teamwork  

Definition of a Team  

Types of Learning Teams  

Groups and Teams  

Importance of Diversity  

Reflection: On Diversity  

Characteristics of Effective Teams  

Stages of Team Development 

Emerging Ideas  

Reflection: Interdependence and Teamwork  

3 Teamwork Skills and Problem Solving  

Importance of Task and Relationship  

Organization—Team Norms  

Teamwork Skills  

Communication  

Leadership  

Reflection: That Reminds Me of a Story  

Decision Making  

Conflict Management  

Teamwork Challenges and Problems  

Reflection: Teamwork  

4 Project Management Principles and Practices  

What Is a Project?  

Exploration versus Exploitation Projects  

Keys to Project Success  

Project Life Cycle  

Project Planning  

Reflection: Project Management  

5 The Project Manager’s Role  

Changes in the Workplace  

Changes in Project Management  

Skills Necessary for Effective Project Managers  

Participating in and Managing Multidisciplinary Teams  

Project Manager’s Role over the Project Life Cycle  

Reflection: On Change  

Reflection: Professor as Project Manager  

6 Project Scheduling  

Work Breakdown Structure  

Critical Path Method  

Project Resource and Cost Considerations  

The Role of Computer-Based Project Management Software  

Reflection: Avoiding Analysis Paralysis  

7 Project Monitoring and Evaluation  

Meetings  

Monitoring Team Effectiveness  

Team Talk Analysis  

Peer Assessment  

Self Assessment  

Project Evaluation  

Building Quality into Projects  

Reflection: Paying Attention  

8 Project Management Documentation and Communications  

Project Documentation  

Project Communication  

Communication Patterns of Engineers  

Reflection: Documentation  

9 Project Management Software  

Personal Data Assistants  

Project Management Software  

Project Management and the World Wide Web  

10 Where to Go from Here  

Closing Reflection: On Reflection  

Index  

locate your rep | custom/primis books | publish with us | customer support | mhhe home