Introduction

Your instructor

Your instructor for this course is Dr Giorgio Locatelli. Giorgio is a lecturer of Infrastructure Procurement and Management at the University of Leeds.

Giorgio also works as a consultant and visiting academic for several institutions. He is author of more than 90 international publications, the majority of them focussed on major projects, nuclear power, project management, energy economics and policy, and energy storage. He is a Chartered Engineer and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (HEA). You can stay up to date with Giorgio's research and teaching by following him on Twitter: @LocaGiorgio .

The course

This coursemap provides a quick overview of the five weeks ahead. Each week you will work through a series of lessons. Each lesson contains a series of learning pages.

You can get an overview of the course by viewing or downloading the learning outcomes and syllabus for this course. The learning outcomes for each lesson are displayed in the lesson overview.

This course will introduce the topic of projects and major projects. You will explore the peculiarities of projects and their life cycle, and learn how projects relate to programmes and portfolios. You will also consider what constitutes project success.

Successful completion of this course will help you to:

• identify the key characteristics of projects, programmes and portfolios

• understand the key challenges in the delivery of a major project

• interpret the performance of historical major projects

• discuss major project performance related to time and budget and explain the causes for major projects to often go over budget and be delayed

• describe the success of a project according to different criteria and stakeholders’ perspective.

Throughout the course, case studies will illustrate how major engineering projects are planned and delivered.

Learning with your peers

The course is designed so you can share your own experiences of project management, whilst learning from the experiences of other learners. To maximise your opportunities for learning we recommend you to use the discussions and opportunities for peer assessment. Learning and reflecting with others will enrich your learning experience.

So, there is quite a journey in front of us. In a sense this is also a project which we will work on together. I hope you enjoy the course.