This course addresses a gap between the needs industry imposes on project managers, and the content of engineering management course curriculums typically offered by universities. Historically, project managers had to learn the project cost control function on the job with little guidance from educational institutions.

The concepts in this course will be demonstrated via an ongoing example project involving the design and development of a Social Media Surfer (SMS) application integrated with a sentiment analysis for determining likely sentiments of the participants being evaluated. 

One of the first things to do when planning a complex digital project is to divide the project into phases separated by milestone events. The milestones act as control gates during project execution where milestone entry deliverable items are prepared, submitted for review and, if approved, the project is allowed to continue to the next phase. Ensuring the quality of these deliverables is how we gain control of a project. Collectively, the combination of the defined milestone events, project phases, and assigned deliverable items for each milestone, are referred to as the project’s Life Cycle Acquisition Process (LCAP).

A project’s defined LCAP also proves quite useful during project planning since it allows us to estimate project costs before we know the architecture of the system the project is acquiring. By looking at each of the LCAP phases, and layering tasks and activities appropriate for each phase, and increasing or decreasing the amount of each activity based on comparison to previous projects, the amount of effort in terms of labor hours for each phase can be determined and converted to cost by multiplying each hour worked by a labor cost per hour to the project. When we add the cost of parts and materials from the project’s Bill of Materials (BOM), we start to get close to defining our project cost.

Topics will include:

• Defining the systems acquisition process and milestone events
• Project planning and estimating
• Developing the Integrated Master Schedule (IMS)
• Project cost control and management
• Project Reporting and accountability
• Steps required for planning and bidding on projects.

This course complements other course offerings and addresses how to break down complex programs into manageable and assignable tasks. This course will prepare students for handling the responsibilities of Control Account Managers (CAMs) regarding how to plan, schedule, estimate costs, set up cost accounts, bid, staff, and execute a project from a project control perspective.