Phase I

BUSI 5304 Quantitative Methods for Managers

Today, vast amounts of statistical information are available, and the most successful managers and decision makers are the ones who can understand the information and use it effectively. Statistics, as a discipline, is the art and science of collecting, analyzing, interpreting, presenting and extrapolating data. This course provides students with an understanding of descriptive and inferential statistics concepts including tabular, graphical and numerical summarization of data; random variables and probability distributions; probability laws; sampling and sampling distributions; point and interval estimation; hypothesis testing; simple and multiple regression analysis; and statistical quality control.

Phase II

BUSI 6303 Business Law and Ethics

The primary aims of the course are to introduce ethical concepts that are relevant to resolving legal and moral issues in business; to impart the reasoning and analytical skills needed to apply ethical concepts to legal and business decisions; to identify the moral issues involved in the management of specific legal and ethical problem areas in business; to provide an understanding of the social and natural environments within which legal and moral issues in business arise; and to analyze case studies of actual moral dilemmas faced by businesses.

MGMT 6316 Quality Management

This class is designed to provide students with a solid understanding, based on theory and actual practice, of this critically important segment of business. The foundational aspects of this class are built on the philosophy and techniques offered by many quality experts. A practical application of this understanding assists the student in developing a personal and internalized appreciation for quality. This is accomplished through readings, case studies and involvement in projects within organizations. Prerequisite: BUSI 5304.

MGMT 6320 Project and Change Management

In this course, students learn the fundamentals of project management, including scope definition; work planning; project control; and resource, change and risk management. The course’s techniques can be applied to any area within a company. In addition, this course includes special topics related to information technology projects. Various methodologies and alternative approaches are surveyed, and the class includes an introduction to project planning and control tools. The course is interactive and includes hands-on exercises in which students apply their learning to the completion of their class project. The course familiarizes students with project planning and execution processes and provides an understanding of the key success factors for managing a project in any industry. Delivery of the course consists of short lectures, in-class exercises and the development of a final project. Prerequisite: BUSI 5304.

Phase III

MGMT 6312 Global Project Management

Increasingly, managers are required to manage global projects. The complexities of a multidisciplinary endeavor are substantially increased when multicultural aspects are included. This course examines the art and science of managing a project across national lines. Prerequisite: MGMT 6320.

PROJ 6318 Project Scope and Requirements Management

Project managers are, by their very nature, change agents who live in a world of ever-advancing technology. This course explores the process of change, including invention and innovation, diffusion, change provocation, and change adoption. Students examine the necessity of accepting ambiguity and building in flexibility to allow for the unexpected. Students also learn how to implement damage control in the event that change moves too rapidly. Students learn to employ the checklist for scope definition, which includes project objective, deliverables, milestones, technical requirements, limits and exclusions, and customer reviews; implement a change control process for managing scope creep that is both flexible and responsive and yet ensures accountability and yields reliable projections; and redefine project requirements in order to reduce cost or time while minimizing the reduction in project value. Prerequisites: MGMT 6316 and MGMT 6320.

PROJ 6322 Project Contracting and Vendor Management

This course examines processes through which goods and services are acquired in a project environment. Topics include defining needs and requirements; contract and procurement strategies; legal issues; contract pricing alternatives; technical, management and commercial requirements; request-for-proposal development; source selection; invitations to bid; bid evaluation; contract negotiation and administration; dealing with change orders; and closing out contracts. In particular, students learn how to manage the stages of the procurement/contracting process: requirement, requisition, solicitation, award and contract administration; identify the advantages and disadvantages of various contracting methods that are commonly used in projects; and understand the role of a contract administrator, which includes resolving contract ambiguity, handling contract changes and terminating a contract. Prerequisites: BUSI 6303 and PROJ 6318.

PROJ 6325 Project Scheduling and Cost Control

This course focuses on the planning and control of project schedules, costs and resources. Students gain an understanding of the relationships between project cost and other project parameters including scope, time, quality and risk. Students learn how to design work breakdown structures, identify work packages, allocate resources and develop project schedules using standard networking techniques. Specific concepts and methodologies covered include Gantt charts; critical path method, or CPM, and program evaluation and review technique, or PERT; resource loading and leveling; earned value analysis; time/cost tradeoff; learning curves; and more. Students learn to employ various methods of project cost estimating and updating as well as methods of measuring actual schedule progress, taking necessary corrective action and forecasting revised completion dates. Prerequisite: PROJ 6318.

PROJ 6328 Project Communication and Documentation

This course provides students the opportunity to understand and develop the oral and written communication skills required to manage projects. Students learn how to develop and implement a detailed project communication plan including information collection and distribution, reporting, and project closeout. Students become knowledgeable about what form, method of delivery, frequency and tone of communication are most appropriate throughout the project life cycle. Students learn how to effectively use different forms of personal communication including oral, written and nonverbal; conduct effective project meetings of various types and purposes; develop clear, concise project reports of various types and purposes; prepare and deliver informative presentations; and oversee the collection and retention of documentation necessary for a project. Prerequisite: PROJ 6318.

PROJ 6332 Project Risk Management

This course explores various ways to identify, analyze and mitigate the full range of project risks. Course work explores the risk management processes: risk management planning, risk identification, qualitative and quantitative risk analysis, risk response planning, and risk monitoring and control. Using a practitioner approach, students learn risk management techniques by applying them to problems in case studies. Students learn to identify all potential risk areas in a project and classify them by source, life-cycle phase or other criterion; apply a variety of modeling techniques to quantify the magnitude of a specific risk; explain the possible responses to risk including their advantages and disadvantages and the factors that influence the choice of response; and implement strategies for controlling risk including learning from past experience. Prerequisites: PROJ 6322 and 6325.

PROJ 6340 Multiple Project and Portfolio Management

In this course students learn how to organize, summarize and evaluate a collection of projects and programs called a portfolio. Students see how reports are developed to produce a bird’s-eye view of project objectives, costs, timelines, accomplishments, resources, risks and other critical factors. The course covers how to categorize programs and projects as mandatory, essential or beneficial and how to develop metrics that can be used to measure a portfolio’s success. Students learn to align projects with overall business strategies (and realign as strategies change), select the right mix of projects to maximize overall returns and balance risk, allocate resources and assets properly across multiple projects, and develop summary reports that show at a glance important information about the projects in an organization’s portfolio. Prerequisite: PROJ 6332.

Electives

BUSI 6307 Business Negotiation and Dispute Resolution

This course works with students to develop integrative and distributive negotiation skills. Emphasis is placed on understanding the sources of conflict and determining the appropriate means for resolution. Mediation, arbitration and various hybrids are examined. This course is structured to provide students with the opportunity to participate in several dispute resolution alternatives.

MGMT 6306 Human Relations

This course is a practical examination of personnel laws, principles and techniques that every manager must be familiar with to successfully manage people in today’s environment. This course also focuses on the interactions that occur among people at work in organizations — personal behaviors and relationships that take place within organizations — and how people, groups and organizations behave.

MGMT 6325 Scenario Planning

Scenario planning is a strategy for identifying an organization’s core competencies as found in its vision, mission, goals and values and examining those competencies through a filter of the external forces that determine opportunities and threats to the business in selected possible futures. As organizations compete in a global environment, creating stories about what the future could look like for the organization allows it to track what indicators or forces are most likely to affect the success of the organization. This allows for proactive rather than reactive responses that can provide competitive advantage. In this course, tudents will research the forces in the global environment that could affect future business strategy and will write scenarios for specific organizations.

PROJ 6399 Special Topics in Project Management

This course covers contemporary issues as well as topics of special interest to students. For example, the topic might be project management issues in a particular industry. Prerequisites: MGMT 6320 and other courses, depending on the special topic.

Phase IV

PROJ 6350 Project Management Capstone

Students in this course, which is intended to be taken in the final term, integrate knowledge and skills learned throughout the program. Students develop, design and present a project; plan and justify the project; meet performance, schedule and budget requirements; adjust for unplanned occurrences; and provide status reports. In particular, students are required to precisely define the objective, scope and requirements of a project; identify and minimize potential risks to the project timeline and budget; prepare a project schedule and update the schedule as it evolves; prepare a project budget and perform earned value analysis; and manage a project team and communicate a project’s progress to stakeholders. Prerequisites: All Phase II and III courses except MGMT 6312, PROJ 6340 and an elective.