For the eighth consecutive year, Business Studies Project Management students are competing in the Project Challenge organised by the Wessex branch of the Association for Project Management (APM).  BU took three teams to present their project ideas to a panel of APM judges, along with teams from Southampton University and two teams of apprentices from BAE Systems.  Two BU teams were selected to go forward to the Finals in Spring 2016.

Kamila Pavelkova from Team Date with Destiny tells us about the Project Challenge.

“As we are creating a project for our Project Management module, taking part in the challenge does not require a lot of extra work and we saw it as a great opportunity to get more involved and to connect with project management professionals.

During the knock-out stage, we had to deliver a 10 minute presentation on our project proposal in front of other groups and judges. This presentation covered what are we creating, why are we creating it and how are we going to create it, plus management activities such as scheduling the project, working out budget and allocating tasks. Our team idea was to help SMEs with planning, organisation and time management.

We have now weekly meetings with our mentors which gives us a lot of feedback on our work and forces us to stay on track and not fall behind the schedule. Furthermore, some of the tasks required for the project have not been covered in the lectures yet, so we are doing individual reading and we feel more prepared for the lectures.

The final round is happening in March, we will be required to deliver another presentation covering project delivery, how we managed management of risks, financial management, lessons learnt and project success and benefits realised. We will also have to write two progress reports and then exhibit our project in January.”

Kamila Pavelkova, Team Date with Destiny