On the use and abuse of Technology and its Management from the perspective of an academic at UCL specialising in Project Management, Systems Engineering and Space Science/Technology.

Thursday, May 12, 2005

New MSc project : assessing engineers' understanding

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Rather than sit and take notes, we both stood and filled the whiteboard. This is fine for planning a short research program.

We started by thinking of an airport-book style subtitle: "Why some engineers are so much better at getting to grips with complex systems projects, what this means for product quality and what to do about it."

I think we both concluded that informal learning mechanisms are going to be quite significant in determining the performance of engineering teams.

In addition, both of us will be feeling slightly nervous as this research gets into social and qualitative areas, as distinct from engineering or physics. There seem to be some tractable fronts of inquiry, so a start can be made.

I'm very interested to see how this one will turn out.

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