Designing Effective Projects: Decision Options for Maximizing Learning and Project Success

In recent years, more and more business schools have introduced team-based projects into their curricula as a means of addressing corporate, small business, and community-service issues while teaching students a variety of project management skills (technical and sociocultural). In designing a project-oriented course, an instructor has a number of options available with respect to project identification, project focus and scope, team size, composition and leadership, course content, content delivery, and student project evaluation. This article discusses the advantages and disadvantages of these various options, as well as the factors that are most likely to moderate an instructor’s choices in seeking to maximize student learning and project success.