• Define the concept of a “project” and the essentials involved in the leadership practice of “project management” from the different perspectives developed in the literature over time, and explain the differences between those perspectives.
• Specify the roles, task, and interests of project participants and stakeholders, and be able to assess aspects of team dynamics, power relations, and organizational strategy in relation to the task of leading and managing projects.
• Define and compare the concepts of project risk, uncertainty, and complexity, and present the key conventional and alternative approaches to managing these factors in leadership and management of projects.
• Evidence knowledge of financial and statistical literacy essentials in respect to project management.
• Analyze and explain how intercultural project leadership and management functions within the larger context of complex organizations, with particular attention given to the variance characterized by national or regional employment ecology models and how this variance can influence project leadership and management outcomes.

This course will take up the leadership tools necessary to design, manage, and evaluate project work by exploring the conceptual foundations for successful project management in today’s globalized, complex organizations and societies. We go beyond simple, and simplistic, “how-to” or best practice approaches to the subject of project management in several respects. First, case analysis will offer detailed study and class discussion on leadership and management of projects. Second, the epistemology of project leadership will be steadily developed from case analysis and research literature on project management. Third, a historical sense of the project leadership and management literature will offer essential context for master’s specialization in Diversity and Change Management through study of the comparative employment ecologies of modern organizations in respect to their national origins and encounters in project sites.

Participants will consider how to manage uncertainty and risk associated with project work. We will explore how the human elements of power, politics, and interrelationships play into the success and/or failure of projects. The course will help student grounding in project leadership and management epistemology as a course end in itself, but also as a preparation for study of concepts and practices introduced in other areas of the later DCM curriculum. Such curriculum related themes include culture, complex organizations, strategy, stakeholders, diversity, and geo-political regional differences.
 

Analysis of several project cases that evidence both successful and unsuccessful project management will provide students with practical examples of the themes and principles under discussion. In particular cases, the management of projects in transnational and intercultural contexts will refine student sensibility about the genre of case-based studies: what is provided for reflection – and what is left out.

This course aims to help students become reflective and reflexive project managers and leaders, as reflective consumers of project management literature: able to read such material with a proper sense of case literature strengths as well as weaknesses.

Literature list will be available on Learn.