Serious Games Applied to Project Management Teaching

The main focus of this chapter is to report studies that explain how to develop serious games and use them in teaching and learning. The focus has been on undergraduate teaching, experience with which the authors detail in this chapter related to the topic of Project Management. This contribution aims to share experiences and also to assess what has been done by proposing a set of recommendations for development and use of serious games in teaching practices in undergraduate education.

Innovative Approaches in Project Management Blended Education

In recent years, many business education programs have focused on the development of competences, instead of knowledge transfer. For this reason, various innovative training approaches were adopted, including educational simulations. The increasing availability of the simulation resources also contributes to the proliferation of simulation in business education curricula. The chapter presents how the simulations were introduced in a Master degree program on Project Management, in project planning and controlling module. The Master program has a blended-learning approach, which nicely fits to the simulation requirements. The simulations are based on an agent-based model of the project resource leveling process, part of the project planning and scheduling topic. The authors made several evaluations of the students’ results before and after the simulations. The main conclusion of the experiment is that the educational simulations improve the competence development process, only if they are properly designed and performed.

Training of Avatar Moderator in Sliding Mode Control Environment for Virtual Project Management

This chapter describes a development of algorithms, software, and hardware for avatar management and avatar moderator training systems, using the principle of practical tendency in sliding mode control environment and illustrating its applicability in virtual communications project management. The avatar is a computer-synthesized animated three-dimensional model, acting as a virtual representation of a real person, or as a visualization of the communication system of artificial intelligence. It is required to develop and evaluate realistic avatar interfaces as portals to intelligent software capable of relaying knowledge and skills in various subject areas. The chapter focuses on integrating speaker-independent continuous speech recognition, context technology of intelligent dialogue system in real-time, graphics rendering based on motion capture (motion capture is used by avatar to accompany the verbal information with gestures), and the development of applied information systems with avatar technology for different subject areas. Thus, created algorithms, software, and hardware are now use in collaboration works at the Astrakhan State University (Russian Federation) and at HHH University (Australian Federation and the Republic of Armenia) for the development of avatars for project management in design of real virtual control systems.

Managing Organizational Change

Many project deliverables extend beyond a product or a service for sale to customers. The deliverable may include a new or a revised process for internal workflow or relations with customers, suppliers, or partners. The success of these projects will depend upon adoption of the new or revised process in addition to typical metrics for cost, schedule, risk, and quality. The project manager and team will be responsible for “managing organizational change”—a skillset that is not addressed within the Project Management Institute Body of Knowledge. The purpose of this chapter is to provide sufficient knowledge about approaches and implementation for organizational change to achieve total project success. Case studies are included to illustrate best practices and lessons learned.

Green IT Project Management

With the constant evolution of technology and the world critical environmental status, all private and public Information Technology (IT) businesses are moving towards sustainability. Faced with influences from government regulations, market competition and constraints, as well as watchdogs, IT decision makers within organizations are forced to ride the green technology wave with a challenging and uncertain approach. This chapter defines methods to optimize Green IT projects for sustainable value creation within organizations. It only focuses on economic viability and environmental impact, but could be stretched out in the future to social aspects. The contributions of this chapter allow the project management community and decision makers to follow a framework for Green IT project success evaluation and performance follow-up throughout the project life cycle and the three levels of the organization: operational, tactical, and strategic. A macro-model is also developed to aid them in successfully selecting, prioritizing, managing, and aligning their Green IT projects with the corporate and environmental strategies.

Enterprise Information Systems Adoption in Iberian Large Companies

Information Systems (IS) and Technologies assume a wide variety of roles within companies, ranging from operational to strategic support of the company. This fact puts pressure on managers, who are required to manage these investments properly. This chapter presents a study conducted with several Chief Information Officers from large Iberian companies with the purpose of identifying and characterizing the roles played by IS and the motivations currently behind their adoption. The findings of this study reveal the reasons why IS and technologies are being adopted by Iberian companies are evolving and that, while the adoption of certain types of systems such as Enterprise Resource Planning systems is now consolidated, the adoption of other systems like Business Intelligence is expected to increase significantly in the near future.

Preparing People to Manage, Support and Use Enterprise Systems in an Arabian Gulf Context

Preparing organizations and assessing their readiness to implement enterprise systems is a growing agenda in information systems research. This chapter examines the challenges that face the preparation of organizations’ stakeholders in managing and supporting the implementation and using enterprise systems in an Arabian Gulf context. The chapter points out the major issues that have been identified by enterprise systems’ professionals such as: lack of business and IT strategies, continuous top management support, insufficient training, inefficient communication procedures, inefficient change management and cultural barriers. To overcome these challenges, the chapter suggests that the preparation should not be limited to end users since the preparation of other stakeholders, such as top managers, project manager and project teams, is essential to successfully implement and use the enterprise system. Based on insights gained by empirical research with enterprise systems professionals, the chapter recommends a number of factors that need to be considered. These have been grouped into the categories of: organizational, managerial, technical, external, and human/social factors.

Consequences of Disruptive Technology

There is an industry tendency to create new roles to compensate for the unavailability of adequately skilled staff. This contributes to establishing new business management practices in allocating and managing operational responsibility. An example of a permanent parallel organisation structure, namely Revenue Assurance (RA) in the Communications Services Provider (CSP) industry is described in context of the CSP industry challenges to ensure complete and accurate billing of communication services. This discussion is positioned with reference to organisational learning (OL) theory and objectives. This chapter argues that parallel structures be utilised as learning structures rather than operational compensating structures as is the case with the RA implementation in practice today. Future research must focus on competency destruction as a conscious organisational process in association with a renewed focus on targeted recruitment, adequate personnel performance management, and a continued reliance on existing business management practices such as project management and risk management.

Security Management Issues for Open Source ERP in the NGN Environment

This chapter aims to provide a critical evaluation of security issues and potential solutions related to the use of free and open enterprise resource planning (FOS ERP) systems in highly dynamic and heterogeneous next generation networks (NGN). The authors first present a brief state of the art with respect to technologies, features and applicability of the existing security solutions for ERP systems. Second, they address security issues in FOS ERP systems. Further, they consider research directions concerning NGN infrastructure security, with a particular focus to the importance of building advanced security management systems. Properly defined service level agreement between the customer and the provider represents a starting point for provisioning of secure services with the required quality. The authors also propose policy-based security management architecture, in a wider context of quality of service management system.

University of Ottawa Department of Family Medicine Faculty Development Curriculum Framework

In response to the challenges faced by rapid expansion and curriculum reform, the Department of Family Medicine (DFM) at the University of Ottawa (U of O) developed a Faculty Development Conceptual Framework (FDCF) and companion plan as a first step toward meeting the challenges of providing quality opportunities for the continuing professional development of preceptors in Family Medicine. The FDCF outlines the processes, opportunities and support structures needed to improve preceptors’ teaching skills and effectively deliver a newly revised “Triple C” competency-based curriculum. The FDCF acts as a quality standard to guide the design, delivery, and evaluation of a vibrant Faculty Development (FD) Program. It further provides a structure for implementing Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) web applications to facilitate the flow of information between seven teaching sites, provide consistency among programs, and play a tactical role in the sharing of academic resources. This chapter introduces the DFM’s FDCF so other medical departments may benefit from the authors’ experiences and adapt or adopt the framework applications and methodologies to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of FD products and processes. Modifications to the framework are expected as this program continues to evolve.