Many GI institutions provide substantial knowledge in geoinformatics to their students. However, knowledge in GI is not sufficient for a professional career. In 2004, the Institute for Geoinformatics in Münster performed a survey about what GI professionals think important for GI education in order to ensure success in a future GI career: Brox, C. and P. Pires (2004). Education in Geoinformatics - Career Profiles, Requirements, and Chances. EUGISES, Villach, Austria. http://www.cti.ac.at/eugises_2004, pre-published version see [pdf]

One of the major outcomes was the high relevance of additional key qualifications or “soft skills”. The following table provides an overview of the results:

Project management is considered to be one of the most important issues to learn and to be familiar with for your professional career. But the other soft skills will also be addressed in this course. In the second part of this course, you will do practical exercises, e.g., elaborating a project budget. All of these exercises will be performed in teamwork. English is the language of all teaching materials.

Already during your studies at the university, you can profit from project management skills. In many courses, you will perform small projects in teams with your colleagues. Then you will have to deal with questions about how to organize group work, communication, time, and deliverables. A larger undertaking will be your thesis, which also can be considered as a project, requiring, for example, planning your resources.

The lack of project management skills also has an economic dimension. The Standish Group analyzed more than 8000 IT-projects in the US (Standish Group 1994, The CHAOS report [pdf]). The results were rather shocking:

• 16,2 % of the IT projects succeeded
• 52,7 % were “challenged” meaning costly changes in time, money, or results were necessary
• 31,1 % of the projects completely failed.

Although this report is more than 10 years old, we can assume that the trend is similar in 2006 resp. 2009 (see here). You can imagine that these “challenges” and “failures” cost billions of Euros. And offer the chance to you to make it better.

Before you proceed to the next section, please read the Standish Group report [see pdf].