Lawrence Tsang Head of Development School of Continuing Education, Hong Kong Baptist University

Jointly operated by the University of South Australia, the two-year, part-time Master of Project Management program teaches people how to manage jobs that require involving people from different functional backgrounds, such as finance, human resources, and marketing. Lawrence Tsang, Head of Development for Baptist University's School of Continuing Education, says managers usually know how to handle work within their department, but they often don't know how to achieve high results with a diverse team.

An engineer might be a technical expert, but could be totally lost when it comes to organising a contract tender, or dealing with human resources issues. The project management program teaches students how to deal with issues involving different departments.

"Most of the students coming to this programme really need project management skills to carry out their work rather than general management skills," Tsang says.

The project management course looks at basic principles behind co-ordinating cross-functional jobs and then moves on to explore how to organise procurement tasks, risk management, managing time and costs, quality management, legal issues linked to projects, human resources and communication management.

Students taking the Master degree program must write a 20,000-word dissertation. Those who do not write the thesis may complete a graduate diploma.

In today's economy, project management skills can be applied in many industries, but Baptist University has focused on skills required for construction-related industries.

"When it is too generic, it is harder to teach," Tsang points out. "When you talk about construction management very often you have to quote examples and cases to enhance the students' understanding so that if we have students from too wide a spectrum, it is hard for everyone."

About 80 per cent of students enrolled in the program come from construction-related industries, such as property development, construction, engineering and public works. Most of the remaining students are from the Information Technology sector.

"IT projects are getting really large now so they really need project management skills," Tsang says.

Lecturers cope with this diversity in backgrounds by organising discussion groups where people from non-construction-related industries are given information that they can understand. However, the school would prefer to keep enrolment in the program limited to its niche construction-oriented group.

"We don't rule out the possibility of developing a generic project management course sometime later," Tsang says.

About 50 people apply each year for the 35 spots available in each of the two groups. Applicants tend to be engineers.

"Because of their previous training, engineers are technology people; that's why they need to learn management skills," Tsang explains.

They also tend to be people who are already involved in some kind of project management. The great benefit for these students is that they can implement their new knowledge immediately.

Tsang advises people working at a more senior level, where they are not actively involved in project management, to consider joining an MBA program where the skills taught are more suited to general management.

Before enrolling, people should also think about their short-term and long-term goals, Tsang advises. For short-term goals, each person will have to decide if the program will provide information that can be used immediately. For long-term goals, people need to decide if their chosen career requires project management skills.

Taken from Career Times 2002/04/12