Project Management

Course Description

Project Management is an introduction to the field of Project Management, covering concepts and skills used to propose, plan, secure resources, budget, manage risk, and lead teams to successful project completion. UWF states the course emphasizes the universal nature of the techniques which enable individuals to manage a variety of projects in diverse organizational settings, and that students individually develop project plans for projects in their respective disciplines.

Within the SCNS taxonomy, MAN is the Management prefix. The University of West Florida publishes this at 3 semester hours through the Department of Business Administration, College of Business. It is offered at approximately 8 Florida institutions.

⚠ UWF says "universal nature of the techniques," and it means it. Project management is not a business specialism — it is entered from engineering, healthcare, construction, IT, education, research and government, and the vocabulary is shared across all of them. The individual project plan is written for your own discipline, which makes this course unusually portable.

This is one of the most immediately useful courses in a business degree, because the artefacts are real: a scope statement, a work breakdown structure, a schedule with dependencies, a budget and a risk register are things employers recognise on sight. Keep them; they are portfolio material.

⚠ The uncomfortable truth the course should teach is that most projects overrun. Cost and schedule overruns are the norm rather than the exception across industries, and the causes are consistent: optimistic estimation, scope growth without schedule change, unclear requirements, and the systematic human tendency to underestimate how long things take even when we have been wrong before.

Learning to estimate honestly — and to defend an honest estimate to someone who wants a shorter one — is the professional skill this course is really about. The critical path arithmetic is the easy half.

⚠ The contact-hour figure is derived — the University of West Florida publishes none

UWF's catalog publishes a credit value in semester hours, the college and department, and prerequisites. It does not publish contact hours or terms of offering for any course. Every contact-hour value in a UWF guide in this repository is derived. The figure applies the standard lecture convention of 15 contact hours per credit, giving 45 hours for 3 semester hours. Confirm the meeting schedule and delivery mode with the department.

Learning Outcomes

Required Outcomes

• Define a project and distinguish project work from operational work.
• Describe the project life cycle and its phases.
• Compare predictive, iterative, and agile approaches and their fit to context.
• Describe project selection and how projects align with strategy.
• Write a project charter and define project scope.
• Identify stakeholders and analyse their influence and interests.
• Construct a work breakdown structure to an appropriate level.
• Estimate activity duration and cost and state estimation assumptions.
• Recognise and counter systematic optimism in estimation.
• Sequence activities and construct a network diagram.
• Apply critical path analysis and calculate float.
• Construct and interpret a Gantt chart.
• Apply resource levelling and describe schedule compression trade-offs.
• Develop a project budget and a cost baseline.
• Apply earned value analysis and interpret its indices.
• Identify project risks and build a risk register.
• Assess risk probability and impact and plan responses.
• Describe quality planning and assurance in a project context.
• Describe procurement and contract types and their risk allocation.
• Describe team formation, motivation, and conflict in project teams.
• Describe project communication planning and reporting.
• Manage scope change through a defined control process.
• Describe project closure, handover, and lessons learned.
• Develop a complete project plan for a project in your own discipline.

Optional Outcomes

• Apply the material to a real organisation or case study.
• Work effectively in a team with defined roles and deadlines.
• Present and defend a recommendation to a business audience.
• Use AI-assisted tools appropriately and verify their output.
• Build a portfolio artefact suitable for showing an employer.

Major Topics

Required Topics

• Projects versus operations
• The project life cycle
• Predictive, iterative, and agile approaches
• Project selection and strategic alignment
• Project charter and scope definition
• Stakeholder identification and analysis
• Work breakdown structure
• Duration and cost estimation
• Optimism bias in estimation
• Activity sequencing and network diagrams
• Critical path and float
• Gantt charts
• Resource levelling and schedule compression
• Budgeting and the cost baseline
• Earned value analysis
• Risk identification and the risk register
• Risk assessment and response planning
• Quality in projects
• Procurement and contract types
• Project teams, motivation, and conflict
• Communication planning and reporting
• Change control
• Closure and lessons learned
• Developing a complete project plan

Optional Topics

• Applied case studies and live organisations
• Team practice and role definition
• Presenting to a business audience
• AI-assisted tooling and its governance
• Portfolio development

Resources & Tools

• The text the instructor assigns — Larson and Gray's Project Management: The Managerial Process and Schwalbe's Information Technology Project Management are the two most used; Kloppenborg is a common third.
• The PMBOK Guide and the PMI standards — PMI student membership includes digital access and is inexpensive; the single best value in this course, since it also reduces CAPM exam cost.
• Microsoft Project — check whether UWF licenses it; free alternatives ProjectLibre, GanttProject and OpenProject do everything this course needs.
• Excel — free through UWF; genuinely sufficient for work breakdown structures, budgets, risk registers and earned value, and more likely than dedicated software to be what your first employer actually uses.
• Trello, Asana, Jira or Microsoft Planner — free tiers; worth using on the team assignments, because familiarity with one of them is assumed in many job descriptions.
• Flyvbjerg's research on megaproject overruns — much is freely available; the definitive evidence that optimistic estimation is systematic rather than occasional.
• The UWF library's business databases — included in enrolment; industry reports and practitioner sources sit behind paywalls a student already has access to, and most never find out.
• LinkedIn Learning — frequently free through UWF or a Florida public library card; strong on specific tools, weak on judgement.

Career Pathways

• General and operations manager (SOC 11-1021) — the broadest destination, and the one most graduates reach through a functional role first.
• Human resources specialist (SOC 13-1071) and human resources manager (SOC 11-3121) — the specialist role is the normal entry point; the manager role follows experience.
• Training and development specialist (SOC 13-1151) and compensation and benefits analyst (SOC 13-1141).
• Project management specialist (SOC 13-1082) — and note that project work is entered from every discipline, not only from business.
• Logistician and supply chain analyst (SOC 13-1081), purchasing agent (SOC 13-1023), operations analyst (SOC 13-1111, management analyst).
• Management trainee and rotational programmes — ⚠ these recruit on a fixed annual cycle, often a year ahead. Students who wait until spring of their final year have already missed most of them.
• ⚠ Florida employer landscape: healthcare systems (AdventHealth, Orlando Health, BayCare, Baptist, Ascension Sacred Heart in Pensacola) are among the state's largest employers and run substantial HR and operations functions; hospitality and theme parks (Disney, Universal, and the cruise lines out of Miami, Port Canaveral and Tampa) are operations-intensive at enormous scale; defence and aerospace (Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, L3Harris, and the Navy presence around Pensacola); logistics and distribution around Jacksonville and Central Florida; agriculture and food processing; and state, county and municipal government.
• Small and family business is a genuine Florida destination, not a fallback — the state has a very high rate of small business formation, and the SBDC network at Florida universities, including UWF, provides free consulting.

AI Integration

Management is being changed by AI in two distinct ways, and they need separating. The first is AI as a tool a manager uses. The second is AI as something a manager must govern — deployed in hiring, scheduling, performance evaluation and forecasting, where the consequences fall on people.

• Where AI tools genuinely help managers: drafting documents and correspondence, summarising long material, preparing meeting notes and first-draft plans, analysing survey and operational data, and rehearsing a difficult conversation before having it.
• ⚠ Where they fail: they fabricate confidently — including citations, statutes and figures; they do not know your organisation, your people, or your context; and they produce fluent text that reads as considered when nothing was considered.
• ⚠⚠⚠ Employment decisions are the highest-risk application, and this is not hypothetical. AI screening tools have been shown to reproduce and amplify bias present in historical hiring data. Under United States law the employer is liable for discriminatory outcomes regardless of whether a vendor's tool produced them, and disparate impact does not require intent. The EEOC has issued guidance specifically on this.
• ⚠⚠ Regulation is arriving and it is not uniform. Several jurisdictions now require bias auditing or candidate notification for automated employment decision tools. Where your employees and applicants are located determines what applies — not where your office is.
• Never put employee or applicant personal data into a public AI tool. Personnel records, medical information, disciplinary matters and compensation data must stay in controlled systems. This is a common and serious early-career mistake.
• ⚠ A human must own every consequential decision. "The system flagged it" is not an explanation you can give an employee, a regulator, or a court. Keep a person accountable, and be able to state the reason in plain language.
• Academic integrity: the course policy governs and policies differ. Read the syllabus, ask if unclear, and disclose what you used when asked. In a course teaching judgement, outsourcing the judgement defeats the purpose — which is a practical point, not a moral one.

Special Information

⚠⚠ A standing requirement — 45 completed hours — not a course prerequisite

• UWF publishes: "Completion of 45 hours of college course work is required prior to taking this course." That measures how far through a degree you are, not what you have studied.
• ⚠⚠ UWF uses more than one threshold in this prefix. Most MAN courses require 45 hours; MAN4280 and MAN4441 require 60; MAN3802 requires none. Do not assume the number carries across courses — read each entry.
• These are easy to overlook because they name no course and so never appear in a prerequisite chain.
• ⚠ Transfer students should confirm how their credit counts toward the total. Accepted transfer hours normally count, but dual enrolment, credit by examination and developmental coursework are treated differently by different institutions. Ask College of Business advising rather than assuming.
• Business colleges commonly layer further gates on top — admission to the major, a minimum grade point average, and a minimum grade in each core course. Confirm all of these against your own catalog year.

⚠⚠ Why projects overrun, and what to do about it

• Optimism in estimation is systematic, not occasional. People underestimate duration and cost even when they have been wrong on comparable work before. The countermeasure is reference-class forecasting — start from what similar projects actually took, not from a fresh estimate of this one.
• ⚠ Scope growth without schedule change is the commonest failure mode, and it is usually a series of individually reasonable additions. A change control process exists to make the cumulative cost visible, not to obstruct.
• Adding people to a late project generally makes it later — onboarding and communication overhead consume the added capacity. Well documented and repeatedly ignored.
• ⚠⚠ A padded estimate you cannot defend is worse than an honest one you can. State the assumptions, state the confidence, and be explicit about what would change the number. An estimate is a forecast, not a promise, and saying so is a professional obligation.
• Risk registers work only if they are revisited. A register written once at kickoff and never reopened is documentation, not risk management.

⚠ The credential path, and why CAPM rather than PMP

• PMP requires documented experience leading projects — typically years of it. A graduating student is not eligible.
• CAPM is designed for exactly this position: it requires a degree or contact hours of project management education rather than experience, and this course may satisfy part of that requirement — ask the instructor.
• ⚠ Keep the project plan you produce. In interviews for project-adjacent roles, being able to walk through a real plan you built is worth more than the credential.
• Agile credentials are a parallel path — Certified ScrumMaster and PMI-ACP. UWF also publishes MAN3281 Agile Principles and Practices in Management, which is worth pairing with this course if agile methods are relevant to your field.

Certifications and credentials worth knowing about

• Human resources: SHRM-CP (Society for Human Resource Management) and PHR (HRCI) are the two entry-level credentials. ⚠ SHRM-CP can be sat by students in their final year at SHRM-aligned programmes, and student membership is inexpensive — ask the College of Business whether UWF's HR curriculum is SHRM-aligned, because it changes your eligibility timing.
• Project management: CAPM is designed for people without project experience and is the realistic student credential; PMP requires documented leading experience and comes later. PMI student membership substantially reduces the exam cost.
• Operations and supply chain: APICS/ASCM CPIM and CSCP, and ISM's CPSM for purchasing. Six Sigma Green Belt is widely recognised in manufacturing and healthcare operations.
• ⚠ A degree and a certification do different jobs. The degree is durable; certifications are current, specific, and expire. Employers ask for both and neither substitutes for the other.
• Experience beats both for most of these roles. An internship, a student organisation officer post, or a real project you can describe outperforms a certification with no practice behind it — and SHRM and PMI both run student chapters worth joining.

Transfer, articulation, and how Florida course levels work

In the Florida Statewide Course Numbering System the first digit is the level: 1 and 2 are lower division, 3 and 4 upper division, 5 and above graduate. ⚠ A lower-division course generally cannot satisfy an upper-division requirement — which matters in this prefix, where MAN2021 and MAN3025 both introduce management and only the second is upper division.

⚠⚠ Business programmes add a layer SCNS does not. Many Florida business colleges are AACSB accredited, and AACSB programmes commonly limit how much upper-division business coursework may transfer in — frequently requiring a substantial share to be taken in residence. A course can articulate under SCNS and still not count toward the major. Check the receiving programme's residency rule before relying on a transfer.

⚠ UWF states of its BSBA capstone that it "must be taken at UWF." Residency rules of that kind are common in business programmes and are worth checking early, because they cannot be worked around late.

Course format and position in the curriculum

• Lecture with case analysis, team project work, and written and oral reporting. ⚠ Management courses are graded substantially on communication, which surprises students who expected a quantitative business course.
• ⚠ No fee notices appear anywhere in the MAN prefix, and no "permission is required" marking except on the BSBA capstone. Enrolment is gated by standing and by MAN3301.
• Ask about delivery mode. UWF offers substantial online provision in the College of Business, and an online section of a team-based course demands more self-management, not less.
• UWF publishes no contact hours or terms of offering. A course offered in one term only will delay a sequence by a full year if missed — confirm with the department.

MAN3583 is 3 semester hours at the University of West Florida.