Managing projects practitioner development – a successful university-industry partnership

This paper describes the development of an innovative, project management, practitioner development programme Managing Projects (MP) resulting from a successful partnership between BP and the University of Manchester. The target audience for the MP programme comprises experienced, mid-career project managers who have already been trained in, and have experience of applying, the procedures and techniques of project management. The programme, therefore, takes these procedures and techniques as a starting point and focuses on the “why and how” of managing projects within BP and explores concepts of leadership and judgement in project contexts. In this paper we outline the development of the programme design, based around a practical implementation of reflective practice and blended learning, and a successful university-industry partnership. The highly dispersed learning community, the heavy existing workload on the delegates, and the necessity for delegates to remain engaged with their work assignments suggested a distance-learning approach. However, the development needs of reflective practitioners and the broader BP desire for strengthening the project and engineering management community within BP stressed the importance of face-to-face teaching. We therefore chose to combine class-room based teaching with a virtual learning environment (VLE). The reflective practice paper used in the MP programme adopts an experiential learning approach and a dynamic learning framework to help structure the reflection process around the delegate’s current role and responsibilities, including their professional experience to date.