Project Management and Senior Design

Course Description

Project Management and Senior Design is the capstone of an Engineering Technology or Industrial Systems Technology baccalaureate. It teaches the planning and control of engineering projects — statement of work, milestones, activity decisions, timelines, scheduling, and resource allocation — and then requires students to use those methods on a real product design and development project, building prototypes, delivering a product, and presenting the result formally.

Within the SCNS taxonomy, ETI is the Engineering Technology: Industrial prefix, and the 4000-level number places this in the senior year of a B.A.S. or B.S. completion program. It appears at approximately four Florida institutions. Daytona State publishes it at 3 credits with prerequisite EGN3613 (engineering economics), offers it in fall, and attaches a $100 lab fee — a signal of the real material and prototyping cost the design half of the course carries.

The pairing of project management with senior design is deliberate and unusually effective. Project management taught alone becomes vocabulary — students learn to draw a work breakdown structure and never discover why estimates are wrong. Paired with a capstone, the schedule the student built in week three is the schedule they are failing to meet in week ten, and the lesson arrives with evidence.

⚠ Two numbers, and the title tells you which course you have

This subject exists in Florida under both a suffixed and an unsuffixed number, and the titles diverge in a way that changes the scope:

• ETI4448C — the C-suffixed form carried in Florida course inventories under the title "Applied Project Management", implying integrated lecture and laboratory.
• ETI4448 — Daytona State's number, titled "Project Management and Senior Design I". The "I" is significant: it is the first half of a two-term senior design sequence, and its published description is explicitly a capstone requiring a working prototype and a final presentation.

SCNS equivalency does not cross numbers, and the suffix is part of the number. The practical difference matters for degree planning: a course that is a project management elective at one institution is a capstone with a deliverable product at another, and a capstone generally cannot be satisfied by transfer. If your program treats this as the capstone, expect a second term (Senior Design II) to follow, and expect the project to begin in this course rather than after it. Confirm on your own curriculum plan.

Learning Outcomes

Required Outcomes

• Write a statement of work that defines scope, deliverables, acceptance criteria, and exclusions.
• Decompose a project into a work breakdown structure at a level suitable for estimating and assignment.
• Estimate activity duration, cost, and resource requirements, and state the basis of each estimate.
• Build a project schedule using network diagrams, and identify the critical path and available float.
• Allocate and level resources across a schedule under realistic constraints.
• Develop and manage a project budget, and apply earned value measures to report progress honestly.
• Identify, assess, and plan responses to project risks, and maintain a risk register.
• Apply change control, and distinguish a legitimate change from scope creep.
• Define and apply quality requirements and acceptance testing to a technical deliverable.
• Apply the engineering design process: requirements definition, concept generation, evaluation, selection, detailed design, and verification.
• Build and test a functional prototype and evaluate it against the stated requirements.
• Apply engineering economics to design and procurement decisions.
• Work effectively on a project team, including role definition, accountability, and conflict resolution.
• Document a project professionally: plans, meeting records, design documentation, and a final report.
• Deliver a formal technical presentation to a mixed technical and non-technical audience.

Optional Outcomes

• Apply agile or hybrid delivery approaches and explain when each is appropriate.
• Use project management software to build and track a schedule and budget.
• Apply lean and Six Sigma methods within a project context.
• Address regulatory, safety, environmental, and sustainability requirements in a design.
• Perform stakeholder analysis and structured project communication planning.
• Prepare for the CAPM or a comparable project management certification.

Major Topics

Required Topics

• The project lifecycle and the project manager's role
• Project charter, stakeholders, and the statement of work
• Scope definition and the work breakdown structure
• Estimating: duration, cost, resources, and estimating error
• Scheduling: network diagrams, critical path, float, and crashing
• Resource allocation and leveling
• Budgeting, cost control, and earned value management
• Risk identification, assessment, response, and the risk register
• Change control and scope management
• Quality planning, assurance, and acceptance
• The engineering design process and requirements definition
• Concept generation, evaluation, and selection methods
• Prototyping, build, and verification testing
• Engineering economics applied to design decisions
• Team formation, roles, accountability, and conflict
• Project documentation and technical reporting
• Formal presentation and design review
• Project closure and lessons learned

Optional Topics

• Agile, Scrum, and hybrid delivery
• Project management software and tooling
• Lean and Six Sigma in projects
• Procurement, contracting, and vendor management
• Regulatory, safety, and sustainability constraints on design
• Intellectual property and design ownership
• Certification preparation

Resources & Tools

• Project Management: A Systems Approach to Planning, Scheduling, and Controlling (Kerzner), or Successful Project Management (Gido, Clements) — the standard texts in engineering technology programs.
• PMI — the PMBOK Guide and the CAPM certification pathway; the vocabulary this course uses is largely PMI's.
• Engineering Design (Dieter, Schmidt) or Product Design and Development (Ulrich, Eppinger) — for the design half.
• Scheduling software: Microsoft Project, or free alternatives such as ProjectLibre and GanttProject; many programs also use Smartsheet, Jira, or Trello.
• CAD and simulation tools the program already teaches — SolidWorks, Fusion 360, or AutoCAD — carried into the design work.
• Prototyping facilities: 3D printers, CNC equipment, electronics benches, and the machine shop. The lab fee funds the consumables.
• ASTM, ANSI, ASME, and NFPA standards where they govern the project's domain.
• Institutional templates for project charters, risk registers, design review packages, and final reports.

Career Pathways

• Project engineer / project coordinator — the most direct destination, and the role B.A.S. engineering technology graduates most commonly enter.
• Manufacturing or process engineer — in Florida's aerospace, medical device, and electronics manufacturing base.
• Continuous improvement / lean engineer — often paired with Six Sigma credentials.
• Production supervisor and operations manager — the management track this degree is designed to open.
• Quality engineer and reliability engineer — adjacent to the ETI4186 and ETI2610 coursework in the same program.
• Construction and facilities project management — the scheduling and cost content transfers directly.
• Project management professional — with experience, the PMP is a well-recognized and well-compensated credential.
• Florida employers: the Space Coast aerospace corridor (Blue Origin, SpaceX, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, L3Harris) and its supplier base, medical device manufacturers, Duke Energy and FPL, theme park engineering and facilities organizations, and a large defense contracting sector. SOC codes 17-3029 Engineering Technologists and Technicians and 11-9041 Architectural and Engineering Managers.

Special Information

⚠ The estimate you make in week three is the lesson of the course

Capstone projects overrun, and they overrun in a specific and instructive pattern. Students underestimate integration — the time to make separately working subsystems work together — and they underestimate procurement, because a part with a six-week lead time does not care about a fifteen-week semester.

Two habits are worth adopting deliberately in week one rather than learning painfully in week twelve. Order long-lead parts before the design is final, accepting some rework risk, because a schedule with a hard end date cannot absorb a supplier delay. And build the riskiest subsystem first: teams naturally start with the part they know how to do, which feels productive and defers the discovery that the hard part does not work until there is no time to change course.

The professional version of this lesson: an honest schedule with visible risk is worth more than an optimistic one, and the project manager's job is to surface bad news early enough that someone can act on it.

⚠ Scope creep is the failure mode, and the customer is usually the source

Capstone projects frequently have a real external sponsor, which is what makes them valuable — and which introduces the single most common project failure in professional practice. A sponsor who is engaged will keep suggesting improvements, each one small and reasonable, and a team eager to please will accept them all. The project then fails to deliver anything complete.

Change control is not bureaucracy; it is the mechanism that makes "yes" affordable. The professional response to a requested addition is not refusal and not silent acceptance, but: here is what that adds to schedule and cost, and here is what we would drop to absorb it — which do you want? Students who learn to have that conversation without defensiveness are demonstrating the most valuable skill in the course.

⚠ Earned value is honest reporting — and the reason teams resist it

Percent-complete reporting is nearly useless because it is self-assessed and optimistic; the classic project is "90 percent done" for half its duration. Earned value ties progress to work actually completed against what was budgeted for it, which makes schedule and cost variance visible early enough to matter.

The reason it is unpopular is precisely why it is worth learning: it makes a struggling project visible while there is still time to intervene, which is uncomfortable for the person responsible. The same dynamic named elsewhere in this repository applies — a measure used to evaluate people rather than to inform decisions stops measuring what it did. Earned value used to blame a team produces creative reporting; used to allocate help, it works.

⚠ Articulation: engineering technology is not engineering, and the difference is worth understanding

This is an honesty point B.A.S. students deserve early rather than late. An Engineering Technology degree is not an ABET-accredited engineering degree, and the distinction has concrete consequences in Florida:

• Professional Engineer licensure in Florida runs through the Florida Board of Professional Engineers under Chapter 471, F.S. Eligibility pathways for engineering technology graduates differ from those for graduates of ABET-accredited engineering programs, typically requiring more documented experience, and some pathways may not be available at all. Anyone contemplating a PE should verify current requirements with the Board before choosing a degree, not after.
• Engineering technology mathematics and science sequences — the EGN2045/EGN3046 track — generally do not substitute for the MAC2311 calculus sequence required for engineering transfer. This asymmetry is well documented and frequently discovered too late.

None of this diminishes the degree. Engineering technology graduates are hired into project engineering, manufacturing, quality, and operations management roles across Florida industry, and the applied, hands-on preparation is genuinely valued. The point is to choose it knowingly, and not to assume it is a route to PE licensure.

Course format, credits, and contact hours

The 3 credits and 60 contact hours reported here reflect the C-suffixed integrated form carried in the statewide inventory, at the 20-hours-per-credit convention this repository's ETI integrated courses use consistently. Daytona State's unsuffixed ETI4448 is 3 credits with a $100 lab fee, offered in fall — this repository also carries a separate guide for that number at 3 credits and 45 hours, reflecting the lecture-only reading of it.

Assessment is dominated by deliverables rather than examinations: a project plan, a schedule, periodic status reports, design review packages, a working prototype, a final written report, and a formal presentation. Peer evaluation of team contribution is common and should be taken seriously in both directions — students consistently under-report a non-contributing teammate and then absorb the work.

How Florida course levels affect transfer

The first digit of an SCNS number denotes the year of offering, not transferability. Courses at the 1000 and 2000 levels transfer transparently between Florida public institutions, and 3000 to 4000 is unproblematic since both are upper division. The boundary that actually matters is 2000 to 3000, where lower-division credit generally cannot satisfy an upper-division requirement.

Two capstone-specific cautions. First, capstone courses are rarely accepted in transfer, because the receiving institution wants its own culminating experience — treat this as a course to take where you intend to graduate. Second, if your institution runs this as Senior Design I, plan the second term into your graduation timeline; students who assume the capstone is one course occasionally discover a term late that it is two.