Can System Dynamics Improve Project Management Teaching? An Experimental Study

Abstract

With the great economic development, more and more well trained projectmangers are demanded. Unfortunately, evidence show traditional project managementtraining fails to provide prospective project managers with the conceptual insight orplanning tools for making decisions in ways that minimize undesirable unintendedconsequences. The process of project management can be conceptualized as acomplex information feedback system. System dynamics modeling to analyze andsupport project management decision-making is a long research tradition. It was usedas the based model tool for simulator in project management education recently. Butin that study, simulator was emphasized in education and students were not trained tounderstand the structure of the project management. Therefore, in our experiment inChina, students with project management background were trained with a SystemsDynamics principle and their performance of a specific project management decisionwas studied. The findings suggest that principles of system dynamics can help personunderstand the interactions in project better and then make better decisions.