Linda Nozick is Professor and Director of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Cornell University. She is co-founder and a past director of the College Program in Systems Engineering and has been the recipient of several awards, including a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation and a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers from President Clinton for “the development of innovative solutions to problems associated with the transportation of hazardous waste.” Dr. Nozick has authored over 60 peer-reviewed publications, many focused on transportation, the movement of hazardous materials, and the modeling of critical infrastructure systems. She has been an associate editor for Naval Research Logistics and a member of the editorial board of Transportation Research Part A. Dr. Nozick has served on two National Academy Committees to advise the U.S. Department of Energy on renewal of their infrastructure. During the 1998-1999 academic year, she was a Visiting Associate Professor in the Operations Research Department at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. Dr. Nozick holds a B.S. in Systems Analysis and Engineering from the George Washington University and an MSE and Ph.D. in Systems Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania.
Course Overview
Research shows that a high percentage of projects take significantly longer than expected and cost more than anticipated. Moreover, if you ask people for an estimate of how long a task will take them to complete, their estimate will usually be overly optimistic.
Sometimes, if you bring in extra people to help with a task, that actually slows down progress instead of accelerating it. Why is this so? And what can you do about it? In this course, from Linda K. Nozick, Director and Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Cornell, you will examine these questions. Students will identify strategies to integrate resource availability constraints into project planning, scheduling, and control.
This course is designed for project managers who seek better practical results for aligning available resources with tasks and bringing activities to completion on time. Students will examine compression strategies for bringing a project that's running late back on track and will explore how to handle common types of project creep, such as handling customer requests that require extra time, and working with team members who decide independently to invest extra effort in a task.
This course combines a focus on formal project management mechanisms with an emphasis on the human element: what can project managers do to resolve issues brought about in the normal course of working with customers, team members, and stakeholders?
You are required to have completed the following course or have equivalent experience before taking this course:
- Organizing the Project and Its Components
Key Course Takeaways
- Use strategies to deal with overly optimistic estimates
- Assess the appropriate considerations and project attributes in deciding how much to level a schedule
- Perform resource leveling
- Identify critical resources for a project
- Make sound decisions as to whether (or not) to crash specific activities or to fast-track them to support schedule compression analysis
- Use strategies for mitigating scope-, hope-, effort- and team-member scope creep
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Not ready to enroll but want to learn more? Download the course brochure to review program details.How It Works
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