INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ENGINEERING DESIGN - ICED 05 MELBOURNE - AUGUST 15-18, 2005 - EFFECTIVE DESIGN PROJECT MANAGEMENT WITH A SPREADSHEET BASED APPROACH

Oct 13, 2026

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Team-based engineering design education depends on strong project management and clear communication to achieve both learning outcomes and high-quality results. This article presents an implementation strategy that applies “textbook” project management methods using Microsoft Excel. Experience and assessment evaluate perceived importance of project management, the effectiveness and timing of related concepts, and improvements in students’ design performance. The discussion contrasts commercial tools and workflow systems with classroom constraints and proposes an accessible spreadsheet solution.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryPresentations

FormatPDF

Pages12

Reading Time4 min

AccessFree to download

Introduction

Project management methods in engineering design teams

Literature Review

Challenges of using commercial tools in classrooms

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ENGINEERING DESIGN ICED 05 MELBOURNE, AUGUST 15-18, 2005 EFFECTIVE DESIGN PROJECT MANAGEMENT WITH A SPREADSHEET BASED APPROACH Madara M. Ogot, Gül E. Okudan, Susan Mohammed, and Xinli Wu Keywords: engineering design projects, design project management 1 Introduction The use of team projects as a way to teach engineering design is pervasive across all engineering disciplines and throughout the curriculum. The success of any design team--both in learning design concepts and performing well--requires that students have a good grasp of technical and management aspects of the design process. Accordingly, poor management or lack of communication within a team and between teams and their faculty advisor/instructor will typically result in a mediocre project, no matter how technically proficient team members are. The importance of team management and common methods to achieve a successful design experience has been discussed [1-5] . Common methods for project management include team calendars, work breakdown structures (WBS), Gantt/milestone charts and Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT) diagrams. This article does not introduce new management methods, but instead focuses on how these“textbook”methods can be effectively implemented using a common spreadsheet application, in this case Microsoft Excel (Excel) . Our experience with the proposed implementation strategy is also presented. Assessment of implementation indicates that our approach is effective in terms of students’ perception on: (1) the importance of project management in design projects,(2) the effectiveness and timing of project management concepts introduced, and (3) the impact of project management techniques used on their design performance. 2 Literature Review Managing the design process, while is essential to successful project completion, is not very easy. The seemingly unstructured nature of designing activity, especially during its conceptual development stages, has been well reported. Several researchers have discussed this for various design domains such as Nagl et al. [6] for chemical engineering, Thorpe and Mead [7] for construction engineering, and developed countermeasures. For example, Nagl et al. [6] have developed a management system that covers products, activities, and resources, and their mutual relationships for the chemical engineering domain. Thorpe and Mead [7] studied project specific web sites (PSWS) for their effectiveness in providing a centralized coordination. However, they report that unless everyone involved in the project uses the PSWSs, they cannot be effective. Chang [8] modeled the engineering project related work as information processing to reduce uncertainty and ambiguity related to tasks, and proposed tracking both completed work and related communication time due to the fact that both external and internal communication is critical for project success. Commercial project management applications such as Microsoft Project support management functions such as planning, monitoring, and controlling [9] . These applications define the milestones to be accomplished and provide the foundation for resource scheduling and cost estimation and control. They are widely used in practice despite their limitations: project plans are often too coarse grained, document flow is not considered, project plans are not integrated with the actual work performed by engineers, and there is no way to define domain-specific types of project plans [9] . Workflow management systems [10] (e.g., FlowMark, COSA) manage the workflow among work participants, according to a defined procedure consisting of a number of tasks [11] . To this end, tasks and documents are passed from participant to participant in a predetermined order. However, workflow management systems are mostly restricted in supporting the very dynamic design process because many workflow systems assume a statically defined workflow that cann

FAQs

Why is project management important in engineering design team projects?

Successful design teams need both technical competence and effective management. Poor management or weak communication typically leads to mediocre outcomes regardless of individual ability.

What approach does the article propose for implementing project management methods?

It focuses on effectively implementing “textbook” project management methods using a spreadsheet application, specifically Microsoft Excel, and describes the proposed implementation strategy.

What challenges arise when using commercial project management software in a classroom environment?

Challenges include lack of faculty familiarity or willingness to learn the tools, limited funds to purchase them, added software burden for students who already must learn many tools, and the time cost of teaching new software.

Oct 13, 2026

Upload by Ben