CVEN90045: Engineering Project Implementation

Again, like Risk Analysis, you have two main assignments and they’re completed in groups of 4. These groups are self-chosen but limited to the 30 or so people in your tutorial, so it’s a good idea to have some correspondence with the people you’d like (or not like) to work with when you’re setting up your timetable.

Again, like Risk Analysis (I copied and pasted that this time), the first one is qualitatively-based and involves mapping out some project governance structures, defining roles and relationships, and figuring out which tasks would be allocated to who(m). That doesn’t sound too hard (and it’s not really) but it can be tricky to work out who does what and you’ll find yourself doing a lot of googling (it’s also worth checking out the FAQ section on the LMS). It’s nice that the assignment’s set up such that it’s easy to divide between four people, so you shouldn’t need to put too many of the group management skills you're being taught into practice. The instructions are also pretty clear and I think most groups ended up with solid marks.

There’s also an informal presentation you have to give as part of this during a tute, but it’s unmarked and it’s pretty much just involves shining a laser pointer at your diagram and speaking about it for 5 minutes. Unless you go first, it’s safe to assume that no one will be listening anyway, and I’m pretty sure the only reason this happens is that they had to fill in a tute for one of the weeks that didn’t introduce any new content.

The second assignment mainly focuses on using Microsoft Project to create a schedule of a project. You’re given the tasks which need to be done and a time limit for the overarching project, but you have to define the time for each individual task and the sequence in which they're completed. Unless you’re a maverick, this is probably best done together as a group. Then you do some of the probabilistic and resource allocation/optimisation stuff that Lihai ran you through in the lectures. It’s not a difficult assignment, but the software itself is a true bitch. It’s made by Microsoft and is windows only. Therefore, it's extremely fiddly, full of convoluted options, and features an undo button that only works when you don't need it.

This subject is pretty much Risk Analysis 2.0. Same people, same style. In my initial review of that I gave it a 3.5/5. Yeah, I think I must’ve been spellbound by the sultry sounds of Lihai Zhang’s Chinese accent and his generally jolly disposition because I’ve since realised that that subject was actually not that great and maybe not as easy as I thought. There’s literally nothing conceptually complicated in these subjects, so it’s easy if you put in the work come exam time to memorise the key content word-for-word. If you don’t, the specificity of the exam questions is going to be mega frustrating and there’ll be at least a couple of questions where you’ll get no more than 2/10 marks. Back in Risk Analysis, I did put in that work. For EPI, I really didn’t.

So like I hinted at earlier, the exam for EPI was pretty frustrating. Lihai has the tendency to ask extremely specific questions that want word-for-word answers from obscure slides from the course, which is dumb because you could know 99.9% of the content super well and very possibly get asked a qualitative question that is relevant only to that other 0.1%. If you want to put masses of time into study then that’s good and you’ll probably cruise home in first class as there’s nothing in here that should give you a headache. But, if you have 3 other exams to do – all of which are more complex – you’ll probably bludge a bit on EPI and settle for second class like I did. Goodbye project management jobs.

The quantitative stuff on the exam is all pretty easy, but for some reason they make you copy out the network diagrams and fill them in in a script book rather than just on the question sheet, which takes some time and means your answers will look a mess if you rush and have as little sympathy for exam markers as I do.

These make up the two sections of the exam and are weighted equally, but I got through the quantitative stuff a little quicker.

Yes

Lihai Zhang, Peter Bishop and friends

Just like Risk Analysis, EPI starts off with some of the theoretical/practical kinda stuff about project implementation, and it’ll be Peter Bishop introducing the concepts again and hammering them in to the point of tedium for 5 weeks. Content covered includes project governance roles and structures, project management strategies, client/stakeholder relationships, work-breakdown structures, and cost management. This stuff will actually be super, super important if you end up working as a professional engineer, but there’s only so much you can learn by reading definitions and I feel like I’ll learn more in one day of actually doing it than I did in this entire course, provided I somehow manage to land a grad job, which are apparently more scarce than a spare seat in the Baillieu come SWOTVAC. Anyway, Peter’s a decent lecturer and a really nice guy, but his lectures are a bit dull and full of text, most of which can be derived from common sense anyway.

You’ll also have some people from the industry come in to give a few guest lecturers. These aren't important for the assessment, but if you turn up, it’d probably be worth introducing yourself and maybe getting their deets on Linkedin. This is one of those hindsight realisations because I recently set up a linkedin and haven’t added anyone as yet.

After that – and again, just like Risk Analysis – Lihai takes over and runs you through some of the more quantitative aspects of project implementation. This includes stuff like network diagrams and critical paths, time-cost optimisation, resource planning, earned values and productivity. Again, it’s all highly relevant to the field, but it’s also a little dull and never really gets much more complicated than the stuff you’d see in further maths, which I did but despised (and was a massive dipshit in class). Lihai’s lecturing is fine and he’ll run you through more examples than you probably need, and this is also covered pretty well in tutes.

I’m not going to write much about tutes, but as long as your signature ends up on the attendance form each week you’ll get a free 10% (don’t worry, I was a good boy and showed up). They’re all in the computer labs in Alice Hoy, and they’re pretty much what you’ve come to expect from a computer-based engineering tutorial I’d say: tutor speaks for 15 minutes, runs you through an example, you do a similar exercise by yourself in 10 minutes, and then waste the remaining time chatting with group members or being a recluse on your social media platform of choice. Both of those are fine options, but ideally you’d use that time to do some work on the…

EPI is just okay. Like I said, the course content is pretty essential to anyone who ends up working on any kind of infrastructure project. Same can’t be said of subjects like ST&D, Concrete, Hydraulics and the like, which include a lot of complicated stuff that many students will never see again. But again, project management doesn’t translate all that well to academia, so the subject can definitely be tedious, and the specificity of the exam questions is both annoying and ineffective, much like this extremely long review.

No

2.75 out of 5

None

2x50 minute lectures + 1x50 minute tutorial per week

Sem 2 2015

H2A