This course provides a comprehensive introduction to project management to students engaging in a master’s degree in Queen Mary University of London. It starts with the basic premise that projects are an essential part of every economy in the world and that all organisations engage in project work of some description. This means that understanding project management is a critical skill for university graduates, since it is inevitable that during their professional careers, they will either work on projects, be responsible for project delivery or manage a programme or portfolio of projects.

We will address the project management concept from many dimensions such as managing the implementation of project requirements, human resources, project budget, schedule, quality requirements, deliverables, stakeholders and much more. We will also analyse and categorise projects based on their complexity, criticality, severity, and other elements that impact the type of project management methodology.

To do this, we will discuss existing methodologies to understand the definition of projects and project management. The module aims to provide a critical commentary on the existing methods and techniques/tools in the modern context. We will extensively cover the agile approach against more traditional approaches and discuss recent disruptions in project management methodology, such as role of technology, sustainability revolution and managing AI projects.

Last, but not least we will go over the Project Manager profession and will discuss what a project manager does in a corporate environment, what is the career path to become a project manager, what responsibilities they have and how project management is related to program management and portfolio management. The course also provides insights into the professional body of knowledge that is available to practitioners such as the APM (Association of project managers), PMI (project Management Institute), and introduces the Project Manager profession and the industry trends. We discuss PRINCE2 methodology and PRINCE2 Agile in the second part of the course in detail.