SIMPROJET: AN INNOVATIVE SIMULATION PLATFORM
FOR EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING IN PROJECT MANAGEMENT
Dominique Jaccard and Stefano Riboni
Haute Ecole d’Ingénierie et de Gestion du Canton de Vaud (HEIG-VD)
Western Switzerland University of Applied Sciences, Avenue des Sports 20, CH-1401 Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland
Keywords: Project management, Experiential learning, Simulation, Educational concept, Customizable scenarios.
Abstract: Considering the variety of formal and human skills implied in effective project management practice, and
the difficulties at building proper educational programs, this paper describes the innovative concept devel-
oped by HEIG-VD, built around a web-based project management simulation platform. After motivating
the need for newly built educational programs in project management, we point out the requirements for
such a platform, and present our achievements, concluding with future developments opportunities and fur-
ther research areas of interest.
1 INTRODUCTION
The development of the service industry, the reduc-
tion of products’ life cycles and the increased speed
of innovation, in almost all economical sectors has
brought to a continuous and fast growth of project
management, and to its rising importance as a top
management concern. An increasing number of in-
stitutions are moving from traditional divisional
structures to project-based organizations (Whitley,
2006). The demand for skilled project managers is
therefore dramatically increasing. Project manage-
ment becomes an essential part of any higher educa-
tion syllabus in management as well as in engineer-
ing, from undergraduate to executive master pro-
grams. To quickly cope with this increasing need for
project management professionals, companies are
more and more demanding for project management
training courses for their employees, who are re-
quested to manage projects but only have a technical
or administrative educational background.
But current mainstream project management edu-
cation is often seen as inadequate for today's com-
plex projects (Crawford et al., 2006). Programs are
often limited to the transmission of the conceptual
Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK)
edited by the Project Management Institute (PMI)
(Project Management Institute, 2009). A recent in-
itiative ran in the UK called “Rethinking Project
Management” (Winter et al., 2006) (Crawford et al.,
2006) pointed out that “the current conceptual base
of project management continuous to attract criti-
cism for its lack of relevance to practice” (Winter et
al., 2006, pp 638), and argued project management
educators to move away from the delivery of stan-
dard solutions and techniques-oriented pedagogy.
Project management training and education there-
fore needs new pedagogical support materials and
methodologies to be effective and provide project
managers with both the hard and the soft skills
needed to face the complexity of today’s projects.
In this context, the trend for experiential learning
(or learning-by-doing) seems very interesting. Simu-
lations, by creating virtual situations, can provide
the project manager with an environment where this
combination of hard and soft skills can be practiced,
tested, and acquired.
In order to provide project management educators
with an innovative tool to support their training pro-
grams, the HEIG-VD has developed a flexible, web-
based simulation platform called “SimProjet”. Based
on a pluri-annual experience in project management
education in various environments (undergraduate
and master levels, technical and managerial sylla-
buses, academic and professional institutions) Sim-
Projet has been designed and developed with a par-
ticular focus on the scenario-definition capabilities,
allowing educators to customize the simulation to
the learning objectives and to the teaching environ-
ment.
471
Jaccard D. and Riboni S. (2010).
SIMPROJET: AN INNOVATIVE SIMULATION PLATFORM FOR EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING IN PROJECT MANAGEMENT .
In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Computer Supported Education, pages 471-477
DOI: 10.5220/0002858004710477
Copyright
c
SciTePress
In use since 2008, SimProjet has demonstrated its
value, but also shown some limitations and evolu-
tion potentials. Its usage opens for further reflection
and research topics in project management educa-
tion and computer-based business simulation tools.
2 PARTICULARITIES OF
PROJECT MANAGEMENT
EDUCATION AND TRAINING
Project management is a particular area of business
management where variety is the only constant rule:
variety in projects' size (budget, number of persons
involved or duration), variety in projects’ complexi-
ty (technical, social and relational, level of uncer-
tainty and risks) or variety in projects’ nature and
objectives (delivering a product or a service, product
innovation, theoretical research or experimentation).
That is certainly what makes project management so
unique and particular in the field of business man-
agement.
Skills needed for the project manager results from
the specificity of the project management area. Both
1996 Wirth’s (Wirth, 1996) and 2003 Zika-
Viktorsson, Hovmark and Nordqvist’s (Zika-
Viktorsson et al., 2003) research show evidence that,
except in some industries where project’s object is
very clearly defined and designed (like construction
or industrial equipment/machinery), the psychoso-
cial aspects are key to the project’s success. The
more complexity and uncertainty in the project, the
more soft skills are required: communication, lea-
dership, motivation, coordination, conflict-
resolution, problem-solving, team building, flexibili-
ty, creativity or trustworthiness. So, on one hand, the
set of methods and tools specific to project man-
agement is well known and quite limited (WBS,
PERT, Gantt, EVM), but, on the other hand, manag-
ing projects successfully is less dependent on the
knowledge of these tools than on the capacity of
applying the right tools, mixed with the project
manager's soft skills (Pant et al., 2008). These find-
ings highlight the inadequacy of current project
management education programs based on
PMBOK-type knowledge, whereas these references
are recognized as providing theoretical knowledge
but not a real practical application of the theory.
Therefore, a new way of thinking project man-
agement education is necessary to broaden existing
approaches. Meaning education and training pro-
grams should combine classic lectures with practical
activities giving the learner the opportunity to expe-
riment real project management situations. In this
way, experiential learning, where one learns through
reflection on doing, seems to be a very interesting
approach. The interest of experiential learning has
been proven in various other domains where tech-
nical skills are essential, but not sufficient to suc-
ceed if not completed by particular psychological
and behavioural capabilities (medical, aeronautics or
organizational) (Aldrich, 2005).
In the professional environment, experiential
learning can be done by putting junior project man-
ager directly on the job, with some senior coaching,
and completing the education with classical training
about the formal aspects and tools of project man-
agement. But real projects rarely give the opportuni-
ty to the learner to individually experiment and
make mistakes (risk and cost of such mistakes might
be too high to be acceptable). Actually, the coach is
most of the times telling in advance to the learner
how to act, moving away from real experiential
learning, and therefore limiting the knowledge ac-
quisition, avoiding the junior professional to really
understand the reason for acting in a certain way.
This confirms the need, in both academic and
professional environments, for giving project man-
agement learners experiential environments where to
freely act, being really in charge of the given tasks,
with no supervision or coaching, feeling free to
make their choices and their mistakes. This can be
done through creating virtually realistic project
management situations, where to facilitate learning
according to Rogers’ recommendations (Rogers,
1969): “(1) the student participates completely in the
learning process and has control over its nature and
direction, (2) it is primarily based upon direct con-
frontation with practical, social, personal or research
problems, and (3) self-evaluation is the principal
method for assessing progress or success.”
Project management simulations are the ideal
educational way to complete classical teaching, con-
fronting learners to real situations adapted to the
pedagogical objectives. Simulations (if sufficiently
customizable) can reproduce a wide variety of
project management issues and situations. They of-
fer instantaneous and asynchronous feedback to the
learner on the consequences of his decisions and
actions. And feedback is essential in a “learning-by-
mistake” process, which is the best (if not the only)
way to acquire psychological, behavioural and so-
cial capabilities.
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3 PROJECT MANAGEMENT
SIMULATION PLATFORM
REQUIREMENTS
There are different ways to build simulations: (1)
board games, (2) role plays and (3) computer-based
simulations, each of them presenting advantages and
limitations. The latter is certainly nowadays very
effective, allowing:
- realism, as most of today's business tasks are ac-
tually achieved using computers (e-mail, chat or
video-conferencing communication, data and infor-
mation access);
- adaptability, as scenarios development allows to
adapt these to the situation we want to simulate, and
to the pedagogical objectives of the educational pro-
gram;
- accessibility, as software can easily be diffused,
and in case of web-based simulations, instanta-
neously accessible with no distance or time limita-
tion.
Having chosen this latter option (computerized web-
based project management simulation), we had to
identify the key requirements for having it corres-
ponding to what we considered was missing in tradi-
tional project management education programs.
First of all, the simulation needs to be in line with
the defined pedagogical objectives.
- Technical knowledge (hard skills): planning using
PERT and Gantt, evaluating financial outcome using
net present value and internal rate of return, control-
ling using earned value management, ...
- Psychosocial knowledge (soft skills): building and
managing a team, and a variety of relationship with
other stakeholders, communicating, motivating, tak-
ing decisions, solving problems, handling conflicts,
...
Therefore, the simulation should not be limited to
learner-computer interactions, but also imply colla-
borative team work, making learners experiment
interpersonal issues, through some role-play aspects.
Second, the simulation has to be adaptable to dif-
ferent contexts of use: academic (undergraduate,
postgraduate and executive programs levels) as well
as professional environments. The original idea was
to use it in an undergraduate project management
course, taking 16 sessioons of classroom presence
spread over several months. But we considered from
the beginning the need to have it designed to fit also
shorter, more intensive 2 or 3 days long training
programs. The simulation should also allow teachers
to have it running a complete project, from initiation
to conclusion, or to have it focusing more on one or
the other project phase (initiation, planning, execu-
tion, closing).
Third, the simulation should be based on project-
types where the learners could feel in an unders-
tandable environment, in line with their technical
knowledge domain. IT students will feel more com-
fortable working on a software development project,
mechanical engineers working on a manufacturing
project, and future architects working on a construc-
tion project. We therefore considered essential to the
simulation software to be able to handle any kind of
freely definable projects’ scenarios.
Fourth, the simulation should allow to define dif-
ferent types and levels of complexity in the projects’
scenarios. The scenario definition tool should allow
a combination of deterministic branching stories
(Aldrich, 2004), as well as probabilistic actions and
behaviours. Many authors have shown that neither
the complexity nor the realism of a simulation is a
factor of successful learning of the participants (Hall
and Cox, 1994) (Frazer, 1980). Our experience tend
to confirm this point: participants facing too much
complexity and too much variables at the same time
often take a "try to click and look the result" ap-
proach, observing how the simulator reacts, instead
of trying to analyze all the data and understand the
links between them. Moreover, increase in simula-
tion complexity also increases the time and cost of
development, as well as the time needed for the par-
ticipant to understand how to use the simulation. On
the other hand, if the simulation gives a simplified
image of the reality, it makes it understandable for
participants, gives them the possibility to analyze
available data, and leads to more thoughtful deci-
sions. Globally, the main simulation development
challenge is to find the appropriate complexity level
to create a sufficiently realistic environment (partic-
ipants can believe in the simulation), but unders-
tandable enough (participants are not overwhelmed
by the complexity and can understand what happens
in the simulation).
4 SIMPROJET CONCEPT AND
PLATFORM DESCRIPTION
4.1 SimProjet Concept and Principles
of Usage
SimProjet has been designed to support project
management education programs, creating a virtual
environment for experiential learning. Considering
the above-mentioned criticality of interpersonal as-
SIMPROJET: AN INNOVATIVE SIMULATION PLATFORM FOR EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING IN PROJECT
MANAGEMENT
473
pects of project management, SimProjet is not in-
tended to be used individually, but as a support to
team work, with ideally 3 to 4 learners per team.
SimProjet is not an exclusively computer-based si-
mulation, but requires “off-the-PC” activities like
producing and delivering documents, as well as giv-
ing oral presentations. Thus, the whole concept of
SimProjet combines team work, computer-based
simulation and role play. More than a computer-
based platform, SimProjet is a complete project
management educational concept.
Whatever the context (academic or professional
education), the SimProjet educational program is
fundamentally the same. The course is divided in 4
stages, corresponding to the 4 phases of any
project’s life cycle: initiation, planning, execution
and closing. Each stage follows the same process:
- Teacher introduces the phase and teams are re-
quested to reach an objective and produce delive-
rables,
- Teams work in order to produce the requested
documents or oral presentations,
- Teacher gives a feedback to the teams.
Phase 1 – Project Initiation: Teacher introduces
the course explaining that participants, by teams,
will have to conduct a project, in a simulated/virtual
organisation. Information about the organization and
the project, as well as interactions with it (communi-
cation with management and colleagues, decisions,
actions, news) are available and made through the
SimProjet web-based platform. Each team plays the
role of a project manager in charge of proposing,
planning and then conducting a project. The project
initiation phase starts with an idea (product innova-
tion, problem-solving, ...) being submitted to the
team. The team must develop the idea and trans-
formed it in a project proposal. To do that, each
team will find on the platform decisions to be taken
(amongst proposed options), and will also be pro-
posed to make optional actions. Decisions and ac-
tions may give the team the needed information to
establish the project proposal (project goals and ob-
jectives, tasks, duration, costs, constraints, risks,
financial outcome). The platform provides team
with indicators of both organization’s management
and project’s stakeholders satisfaction, which evolve
according to the decisions taken and conducted ac-
tions. Teams dispose of limited time, restricting the
possible number of decisions and actions to be tak-
en. Each team must end up the initiation phase with
delivering a written project proposal, and an oral
presentation to the projects’ selection committee,
played by the teacher, who then gives a feedback to
each team about how they performed.
Phase 2 – Project Planning: Assuming the project
proposal has been approved, teams will be requested
to establish a detailed planning of the project. The
platform will provide them the list of project’s tasks,
the potential human resources, as well as decisions
options and potential actions. Teams will have to
produce a written project planning report (contain-
ing WBS, PERT and Gantt diagrams, and a budget
estimation for the project). On the platform, they
will also have to confirm the planning of the
project’s tasks (in a Gantt visual), to book the cho-
sen resources, and to sequentially assign them the
project’s tasks. Teacher will provide feedback
through a formal project planning report review.
Phase 3 – Project Execution and Control: The ex-
ecution phase takes place mainly through the simu-
lation platform. Time's progress will generate de-
terministic or probabilistic events affecting the
project (change request, extra costs, unexpected re-
source absence, ...). Tasks’ execution rhythm de-
pends on the number, availability, motivation and
competence level of the assigned resources. Period
per period, teams are informed of the work’s
progress, and of the evolution of costs, time and
quality indicators. Twice during the execution,
teams are requested to present a project status report
to the steering committee, played by the teacher.
Phase 4 – Project Closing: During this phase,
learners are requested to step back and conceptualize
the learnings from their concrete experience at man-
aging the project. In order to formalize knowledge
and capabilities acquired during the simulation, a
project closing report may be requested.
All along the simulation process, teacher has the
choice of when and how to provide theoretical ele-
ments of knowledge or reflection. The goal being to
achieve effective experiential learning cycle, all
along the four phases of the simulation.
Thus, SimProjet allows to implement Kolb's Ex-
periential learning cycle.
(1) Concrete experience is made by taking deci-
sions, making actions, and establishing the requested
deliverables according to the available information.
(2) Individual and team reflection is based on the
observation of the reaction of the simulation plat-
form to the choices made and actions taken. (3)
From what they observed, teams try to extract con-
ceptual learning, through self-evaluation of their
actions and decisions consequences. Inputs from the
educator will help this step of the learning process.
(4) Teams will then try to experiment the knowledge
newly acquired in the next stages of the simulation.
This educational method, combining “learning-
by-doing”, “learning-by-mistake”, team work, role
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Figure 1: The Experiential Learning Cycle, according to
Kolb (Gibbons et al., 1994).
play and simulation, added with classical teachers’
lectures, should generate a virtuous cycle allowing
acquisition of a variety of hard and soft skills.
4.2 SimProjet Platform Description
The SimProjet simulation platform is structured in
three different users’ profiles interfaces: Scriptwri-
ter, Moderator and Player.
Figure 2: The SimProjet Simulation Platform Structure.
1 – Scriptwriter Interface: Authorized Scriptwri-
ter can here access Basic Scenarios (non-editable
scripts, provided by HEIG-VD), Shared Scenarios
(editable, written and shared by SimProjet platform
users), and Private Scenarios (editable, not shared,
specific to a particular user). Scenarios can be co-
pied, modified, or created from scratch. Scriptwriter
can define project’s phases names and duration,
project’s tasks and sequence, available resources
with their characteristics and different performance
indicators. The most powerful part of the scenario
editor is the possibility to freely define decisions and
actions the players will have to take or perform dur-
ing the various phases of the simulation. Decisions
will propose different possible options the players
will have to choose from. Every option will generate
an answer to the player, and might influence the
indicators. Players can also made some optional
actions that will also generate feedback and might
influence indicators. The sophistication of the whole
"scriptwriter module" lies in the possibility to define
triggers that can generate events on a deterministic
or probabilistic basis. They can be linked to a deci-
sion or action (testing if decision A = 1 and decision
B =2, then impact = X, whereas if decision B = 3,
then impact = Y), or just to particular situations of
the game (if period > 3 and < 8, then impact re-
source 1 = 1 week unavailability, with probability =
15%), generating events that may impact tasks, re-
sources, decisions, actions and/or indicators. The
scriptwriter interface provides also an automatic
logical checking engine, verifying that all the
branching story events are logically linked (no
closed loops or missing sequences). All of these
tools allow to define customized projects’ scenarios
with the desired degree of details and realism.
2 – Moderator Interface: Teacher can manage
games from this module, by creating new games,
based on available scenarios, and assigning teams to
games. He can follow the teams by seeing their
choices, actions and indicators. The teacher can also
communicate with teams (edit news, send e-mails)
and influence the simulation by generating events
affecting one team or another.
3 – Player Interface: The player’s screens allow
teams to access all the needed information (project
description, tasks, resources, news and mails), to
take decisions upon the proposed choices, to act
upon other proposed initiatives, to plan tasks, book
and assign resources, and to access to the history of
the project and their actions. Through this interface
teams can concretely experience project manage-
ment, and observe impacts of their decisions and
behaviour.
5 EXPERIENCED BENEFITS
AND LIMITATIONS IN USING
SIMPROJET
Experiences were made in quite different contexts:
bachelor, master and executive courses, as well as
in-house training programs for business profession-
als. Participants with various project management
experiences (from no experience in bachelor to more
than 10 years in executive courses) found that the
simulation was a good pedagogical tools. It was
used in courses of different length, from 4 to 16 ses-
sions of 4 hours, and also in 2 to 4 days seminars.
SIMPROJET: AN INNOVATIVE SIMULATION PLATFORM FOR EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING IN PROJECT
MANAGEMENT
475
Figure 3: Screenshots of the Player’s Interface: Decisions, Resources Planning and EVM Reporting (clockwise).
In academic usage, SimProjet has given very pos-
itive results, with increased interest and participation
of students. Even if not formally measured, the feel-
ing is that it allowed learners to much better under-
stand the value and limitations of formal project
management tools and techniques such as PERT,
Gantt and EVM. It surely increased students aware-
ness of the complexity of relational issues affecting
a project, therefore making them acquire some abili-
ty in approaching the kind of situation they will
meet in their future careers as projects workers. Ex-
perience seems to indicate that the theoretical know-
ledge level at the end of the course is the same that
with the former course without the simulation (the
results at the theoretical exams are similar). But it
seems that the ability to apply the acquired know-
ledge has significantly improved. The limitations we
saw so far stand in the deep motivation of each indi-
vidual: the gap in knowledge acquisition between
motivated and less-motivated students is probably
even larger than in classical teaching methods.
In professional environment usage, the flexibility
in custom scenarios definition proved to be a great
asset. It allows to very finely adapt the training pro-
gram to the aimed learning objectives, through tai-
lored situations where trainees can focus on the
wished issues. Several corporations who tested the
SimProjet concept are studying the possibility of
creating their own scenario, with their specific tasks,
events and difficulties. One of the difficulties has
sometimes been to convince that a "gaming ap-
proach" is not just a game, but would result in ac-
quisition of knowledge and competencies. We found
convenient to speak about "project management
simulation" instead of "project management game".
We also observed that in today's world, it is difficult
to get people for a 3 or 4 days course. It is necessary
to convince that knowledge and capabilities ac-
quired through experiential learning are much more
deeply integrated and therefore long-lasting than in
a half a day seminary. When convinced, organiza-
tions that have tested the concept of SimProjet were
satisfied and decided to continue to use it.
Independently from the environment of use, one
of the very positive aspects of the SimProjet concept
stands in the absence of judgment from the simula-
tion itself. Learners have to estimate by themselves
if the impacts of their actions and choices were posi-
tive or not, and conceptualize on their own the na-
ture of knowledge that could be picked-up from the
experience. They therefore not only acquire know-
ledge, but go further, learning to learn, which is the
ultimate goal of experiential learning, according to
Rogers (Rogers, 1969).
Due to its technical nature (computerized web-based
simulation), the SimProjet concept imposes some
limiting constraints: the time needed to learn how to
use the simulation platform and interface (1 to 2
hours), the material requirement (good internet
access, appropriate internet navigator, screen defini-
tion), the limitation of the number of participants
(experience with 36 participants in 9 teams show to
be a maximum) to allow the trainer to give valuable
feedback to all teams.
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6 CONCLUSION:
PERSPECTIVES OF FUTURE
DEVELOPMENTS AND
RESEARCH
SimProjet future developments are already planned:
(1) enrich the player’s interface with the possibility
to dynamically draw a PERT diagram of the project,
(2) provide the educator additional reporting and
monitoring information about the teams playing a
game, (3) try to establish historical statistics about
behaviours over several games played using the
same scenario, and (4) redesign the scriptwriter in-
terface to make it more visual to design branching
stories (the sequence of tasks, events, decisions, ...),
with flow-chart-like drawing capabilities. We work
on a multilingual interface (including English and
German, in addition to French existing one). We are
also building new scenarios, as the real strength of
the platform and concept is this openness and flex-
ibility in designing appropriate storylines according
to the educational context and pedagogical objec-
tives. Some other enhancements are still in discus-
sion within the development team: would it be use-
ful to have an automatic advancement scheduler ?
would it be worth having a more animated player
interface (with characters, sound, ...) ?
Globally, for both the platform development and
scenarios writing, we implemented only functionali-
ties that either (1) were necessary to support a par-
ticular pedagogical objective, or (2) were needed to
provide the necessary level of realism to have play-
ers stick to the story. We will try to keep this philos-
ophy in future enhancements.
Further research will be made on the impact of
the SimProjet teaching concept on learners, and on
the best way to balance experiential learning with
classical lectures. A comparative study could proba-
bly be made to assess knowledge acquisition by
different populations of learners as undergraduate,
graduate and professionals.
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