Among the Hungarian and foreign members of the research team, who have already taught project management – during courses for adults, even if during training courses spanning a few days, to perhaps during an entire semester – the general consensus is that the two most important methodological rules of educating the topic are practice orientation and small group courses.
Practical orientation means that we need to have the students get familiar with theoretic questions using training-type tasks, meaning practical examples as well. These tasks aren’t worded with the intention of showing an example, but with the express intention of giving experience, working towards routine completion of the example tasks’ types. This is most important for the first phase of project management – the planning phase. Usually, the most problematic thing is to describe our ideas in the form of concrete goals. Almost as hard a task is determining the specific units of measurement (indicators) for said goals. Without proper practice, one, or both of the requirements – listed below – of indicators will be ineffective. The first requirement is validity: the measurement unit has to be directed towards observable phenomena, which cover the real spectrum of the definition, object or process in question, and demonstrate it properly. The other requirement is quantification: they should not only note the existence or lack of a phenomenon, but if possible, its level, quantity, in other words, the changes in its volume should ideally be described as well. Without this, it’s impossible to match planned and actual results, processes can’t be followed, and comparison between the “before” and “after” becomes inaccessible.