Description

If you’re looking to take your project management skills beyond the fundamental level or if you’re looking to develop your understanding and ability to apply the advanced project management tools and techniques required for PMP® certification, this is the simulation for you. As projects become more complex and teams become more distributed and more diverse, a project manager needs more than a Gantt or Bar Chart to manage and lead their teams to a successful project completion. In this simulation you will learn through computer simulation, advanced project management concepts like individual and team motivation, leadership, earned value, procurement management, stakeholder relationship management, quality management and risk management. This simulation consists of 22 tasks spread over 22 weeks (iterations) with 30 potential team members to staff your project.

The Advanced Project Management simulation is a dynamic decision-driven simulation designed to replicate the ongoing decisions a project manager makes on a complex project from the project planning phase through the execution, monitoring, controlling and closing phases. The simulation was designed by a distinguished team of project managers, program managers, and technical and business leaders with over a century of combined experience.

Students learn through a computer simulation of real life people, a real life company, and a real life project. The learning comes from doing; making mistakes, experiencing successes, and repetition. Each project unfolds differently depending on student decisions and on random unplanned events. Our simulations do not have students input decisions and then tell them that it was a right or wrong decision with an explanation like many simulations. Students see the results of their decisions similar to what they would see on a real project by giving them time based feedback and using dynamically updated project control reports. The feedback might be a negative impact on quality, or a positive impact on task progress, or it could be feedback received simulated days or weeks later from a team member or stakeholder.

Our simulations are very realistic, including the number of simulation weeks executed. Some simulations only have a few executions which doesn’t give the students enough practice to really learn project management. Our simulations require student teams plan, execute, monitor, control, and close the project. The project objectives are the same as real-life as the student has a budget, schedule and scope they must meet to be successful. Our simulations also have a quality objective to meet, which most project management simulations don’t offer. As a result, our simulation forces students to consider the real life trade-offs between scope, cost, schedule and quality with every decision they make. Balancing these four objectives with the fifth driver, the productivity of the project team members, turns the “iron” triangle into the project pentagon made up of what we call the five key project objectives (scope, cost, schedule, quality and team productivity). What drives the results of the simulation and determines the student success in meeting the scope, cost, schedule and quality objectives are the decisions they make as they execute the project each week.

The Advanced Project Management simulation is only available as part of our Advanced Project Management SPL class.