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Welcome to the course

Welcome, Introducing aim and intended learning outcomes for week 3

Managing projects includes fulfilling goals in an uncertain environment. Due to the uncertainty and often complex tasks, project management is a challenge, and many projects fails. Is it possible to plan for project success? What is project success?

This course is designed to give you basic knowledge about project and project management. You will also learn about the transition when going from making a project plan to project realization and, most of all, how you can plan for project success.

”Leading and managing projects has always been my favorite task. Inspiring is fun and challenging, always something to learn and a million ways to fail”. – Project manager

Fredriks avatar

Along the course you will meet me, or rather my animated alter ego, Fredrik Backlund, Associate professor in Quality Technology and Management at Luleå University of Technology. I am a teacher and researcher within the topics of project management, working with continuous improvements, project perspective on doctoral studies, and project- and problem-based learning.

The world of projects

Projects occur all around us, everywhere in the world, and they are used to make things happen. Projects can be of big and small scale, for example:

Design and construct the tallest building in the world: The Burj Khalifa in Dubai, United Arab Emirates versus a family house.
Inauguration and arrangement of Olympic games versus Piteå summer games (soccer tournament for youths).
Climbing the Mount Everests versus a week of hiking in the Swedish mountains (“fjällvandring” in Swedish).

These are all examples of project as they represent to obtain some kind of goal, within a specific amount of resources and a specific time frames. These are also a project since the work have to be done in a context (or an environment) where we are uncertain about negative or positive situations that may occur during the way to reach the goal.

Many businesses perform work in form of projects, and some to a major extent, i.e. are project-oriented. Project-oriented companies are organisations where most of their services or products are offered through projects for either internal or external customers. Projects are an important way of working to implement and manage change and development.

For that reason, projects and project management are a common way of organising work, no matter what your job is. Project management have become a required leadership and management skill in many businesses, and even become a specific profession, promoted by organisations such as the Project Management Institute (PMI) and the International Project Management Association (IPMA).