PSG Extended and tested at University College London

At University College of London, I have the pleasure to teach to a small but excellent group of hard-working and motivated students. As usual, we used the Project Scheduling Game as a tool to learn to cope with project complexity and uncertainty, but we also tested a new extension of our PSG game in class, with promising results. The schedule was as follows:

Friday, January 24th, 2014: A traditional 1 hours introduction session, followed by a 1.5 hours simulation run on the computer and one hour of feedback. This approach has been taken in previous PSG sessions (see previous editions in Suriname, France, UK, Lithuania or Belgium), but now, for the very first time, we have extended this traditional PSG session with a second exercise, called the PSG Extended Game, to even learn more about best practices and good approaches to cope with complexity and uncertainty in project management. Below you see the students working hard on the PSG (top picture), and a screenshot of our new PSG Extended game (bottom picture, under development).

Friday, January 31st, 2014: One week after the PSG Extended session, feedback was given. A written evaluation approach was used to guide the students to the best practices followed by a class discussion of the best project focus ("Should we focus on time or cost?"), good strategies ("Are we flexible enough?") and best practices ("Risk management"). The overall conclusion of this feedback session was that risk managment really is necessary to further improve our approach on project management. And guess what... risk management, well, that will be the topic of next session :-).

Therefore, a warm thank you to the London students for their hard working spirit and good results. Reactions and improvements are welcome since the PSG Extended game still is in the testing phase, and can only be improved by feedback by its users.