Experience with Master Theses ran as Projects

An experiment with master students in engineering has been performed for the second year. The school involved is KULeuven Campus De Nayer, a renowned school for industrial engineers in Belgium. The first experiment took place during 2012-2013 and involved about 35 projects and 45 students. This past academic year, 2013-2014, involved 41 projects and about 60 students. The objective of the experiment is to expose the students to modern techniques for project planning and monitoring. Every master thesis is conceived as a project for which a professional planning has to be set up. These projects are then monitored using the same tools and techniques as used in the professional environment. In this process the students are exposed to typical topics as: setting up a clean project structure, the project tree defining the logics, the tasks dependencies estimating task durations, using rational techniques optimising the project flow by organising concurrent tasks when working in team, optimise the work load by organising concurrency in the tasks comprehend the project processes and discovering their dynamics experience the project reporting, learning to analyse the information and discover how one can draw conclusions from these. discover on what aspect one can act, when some recovery of delays is needed. The whole project is intensively reported and all stakeholders, including professors, assistants, promoters and co-students are fully informed. In this paper we give a short introduction to Dynamic Project Control - DPC - the method and tools that were used to give substance to the project.