Message to students: Interested in Project Management? Get Involved!

Project management isn’t just about projects. It’s about people, who are willing to share their ideas on the management of projects. Not only success stories and state-of-the-art case studies are relevant, but different often conflicting points of view, coming from professionals, academics and... yes, young students are inspiring. That is why it’s important to get involved with PM organizations. Join them, visit their events and share your ideas with them. It will increase your ability to exploit opportunities in the (near) future when you start your professional career.

Therefore, step outside your student environment and set your first steps in your professional career by getting involved. In the following two pages, we have published a summary of a number of projects and results that we have obtained in collaboration with other organizations, either as sponsors, clients or collaborative partners. I know that you can consider these pages as promotional material (although most of the things are freely available for students) but that was not the intention. Instead, the real purpose is to link the PM course to the outside world and to inspire you! At least, the pages show how I was inspired and I hope it motivates you to join these or other PM related efforts.

Don’t forget, being a Project Manager is probably the most interesting job in the world. Good luck!

Note: the following two figures contain a summary of the promotional leaflets for 8 different PM related topics (The individual leaflets can be downloaded from the internet). The two-pages leaflet is copyrighted by OR-AS who is responsible for most of the results mentioned below and aims at integrating research and academic knowledge with practice and business results.

• PMKC: Visit our online learning tool and integrate it with the content of the PM course.
• PSG: Play our game at universities and business schools.
• ProTrack: Schedule your projects, measure their risk and control their performance using the third release of the commercial software tool ProTrack.
• Bookstore: Visit our bookstore and download free articles to stay up-to-date.
• P2 Engine: Use all features of ProTrack 3.0 (and more) in a research environment and advance the state-of-the-art using our research tool P2 Engine.
• OR&S research group: meet and greet the people of our research group at Ghent University or join them by applying on a research vacancy.
• EVM Europe: Come and see other PM professionals at our yearly event where research meets practice.
• CRA project: Join our big research study at Ghent University and help us in advancing the state-of-the-art research in Project Management by applying on a research vacancy. ?

Figure 1. PMKC, ProTrack, PSG and the OR-AS bookstore ?

Figure 2. P2 Engine, OR&S, EVM Europe and CRA