Download E-Coaching for Teaching Project Communication to Increase IT P

E-Coaching for Teaching Project Communication to Increase IT Project Success
Motivation
In today’s modern teamwork-oriented work processes, scientific and technical knowledge can only be
applied effectively if it is combined with interpersonal skills. (German Federal Ministry of Education and
Research, 1999). Stoyan (2007) show, that 8 of 10 of the success factors for IT projects listed in the well
known Chaos Report (Standish 2003) correspond to project management and project leadership abilities
and are not core IT competences. Thus, for educating IT professionals in a way that they have high potential for successful IT projects, the most important measure is apparently to teach project management
and communicative abilities that enable them to lead others and to interact with others fruitfully towards
project goals. It is not intended to say, that these would be more important than core IT subject abilities as
e.g. programming, databases or system architecture. But from the above argumentation it appears to be
reasonable to assume: Education of the abilities considered in this paper has a chance to be the factor in
education yielding the highest leverage towards improvement of IT project success. Also, Stoyan (2007)
show data, that, comparatively to core IT competencies, world wide little teaching of project management
is done at universities, with the exception of a very few countries.
Learning goal
In this paper, the PM-Game (project management game) will be presented. This is a computer game in
development for the learning of project management, team leadership and project communication skills.
They include communication with team members, customers, and the management, as well as making
decisions while pursuing goals, developing relationships, and leading and solving interpersonal conflicts.
These skills are not regarded as being accessible and useful only for managers. Project communication
and leadership skills are taught by the PM-Game in the sense that they are part of the work routine of
managers as well as team members. For some, e.g. project managers, the activities associated with
these skills make up a large percentage of their work time. For members of an IT project team, these
activities constitute a subordinated part of their work time as e.g. occasionally communicating to customers or moderating a small meeting.
Theoretical foundations
By Stoyan (2008) a train-the-trainer based approach has been presented for the above mentioned purpose. In this paper an e-coaching approach will be described. At first sight, ICT support might seem appropriate for project management abilities, but not for the training of project communication and leadership skills, since these involve a great deal of face-to-face communication and personality. We regard elearning of these competencies as an emerging and evolving next step for the following reasons:

Unlike other e-learning content, the issues involved in the training of these skills are subject only
to minimal changes over time. Thus, they will remain up-to-date for a long period of time.

The potential user groups are very large. This justifies the costs for the development of such applications.

The interactivity and liveliness required for the training of these skills are exactly what computer
games provide.
Coaching is perhaps the oldest way of education. It is considered the most effective education means, but
at the same time the most expensive one (Corbett, 2001). Hence the intention to provide affordable
coaching to the broad majority of IT personnel by using a web based game. Ohlsson (1994) and Corbett
(2001) have shown, that e-coaching can achieve learning effects that equals or supersedes those of individual human coaching. The learning objectives were problem solving skills and programming skills. In
the PM Game, their method of constraint based modeling will be adopted for project communication and
leadership skills. The final goal of the PM Game is to achieve progress in the direction of a similar result
for project management, project leadership and business communication abilities.
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State-of-the-art
The educational Engineering Lab of Zurich conducted an intensive market research on educational
games in the area of skills associated with leading or managing projects (Keller 2008). Only very few
games or simulations are available in the market (Viper, SimProject, SimulTrain, Virtual Leader, Infiniteams) and they usually teach project management (project planning, etc), and not project communication or leadership.

2 products (Viper, Simproject) are simulations of project planning and project steering.

1 product (Infiniteams), build up by several smaller games, supports team building processes

1 product (SimulTrain) teaches daily decision making in the busy life of a project manager
 1 product (Virtual Leader) covers aspects of leading business meetings.
!!!Hallo Tsuy: Deine Inhalte zu User contributed content, Editoren usw. würden hier gut in den
Argumentationspfad des Papers passen: Denn genau dadurch kann das PM Game etwas leisten was
diese obigen Spiele allesamt nicht haben: Das Potential eines Tages nicht nur einen kleinen Ausschnitt,
sondern richtig viel des Kompetenzgebietes abzudecken. (Das soll natürlich nicht meinen, dass das jetzt
hier in diesem Abschnitt stehen sollte. Im Gegenteil, es sollte sicher anderswo stehen.)
Key ideas of the game
For covering the learning goal introduced in the beginning of this paper, a computer game has been developed at the Educational Engineering Lab. While playing this game, the player leads team members
and communicates with customers and other stakeholders in order to achieve project goals. The key ideas of the game are:
- An interface allowing wide freedom in communication. As listed above, there are very few games on
the market teaching parts of the competencies mentioned here. In the even fewer games involving
human communication, the player chooses from a few predefined set of sentences to say or has a
few simple steering methods (as e.g. a steering bar to what extent another person opinion shall be
supported). In the PM Game, the player can say up to 1000 different meaningful sentences in one
situation by doing only 2-4 clicks.
- Every of these sentences carries computer understandable semantics. E.g. the computer indeed
understands that a delegation is something where the player wants another person to do something.
- In terms of computer linguistics, each sentence is a speech act. Theoretical frameworks for categorizing these speech acts have been developed in philosophy, linguistics, and semantics for nearly 40
years (Austin 1962, Searle 1969). Continuing the above example, the speech act of a delegation may
lead to the other person executing the task (or to failure or to refusal)
- All parts of the game, including virtual persons (so called non-player characters) with their pictures,
emotions, abilities, etc. are customizable. In the same way are the objects and their attributes customizable as well as the speech acts and the rules.
Is it IT-specific?
As a summary, the intention of the game is to provide a playground in which the player can show his or
her abilities in various types of communication in a project. While these projects do not need to belong to
the domain of IT, yet core attributes of IT projects are present in the game:
- Projects are not thought of arranging tasks to be carried out by “nameless” people as e.g. in a logistics/transportation project but thought of as getting tasks done by communication to persons to which
an individual work relationship exists
- Projects are to be carried out by a small or not too large team of people. Communication capabilities
within the game are not suitable to address more than six persons in one single moment. Thus e.g.
communication to a whole enterprise or holding a talk for a large hall filled with soldiers carrying out a
military project are not possible
- Although project goals, project problems as well as actions can be visualized, yet there is no 3d visualization or movement that would make the game more suitable for representing e.g. professional
construction, logistic or artistic projects.
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-
The project goals have (with some variations) the structure of a tree, i.e. are intended to model e.g. a
typical IT project rather than a series of adventures that follow upon each other.
All in all, the game is concepted with IT projects in mind but that context can be stretched about as far as
the abilities that are typically used for IT projects are transferable to other project context.
E-coaching as an addition to e-assessment
The game described so far provides only the environment in which the player has the opportunity to show
behaviour (“playground”). While doing so, the rules of the game do not only provide for the reactions of
the environment (e.g. the behaviour of the non-player-characters) but they will also monitor the actions of
the player. Patterns of proven effective or ineffective behaviour are identified. When an observation is
sure enough (in some cases only after repeated evidence), thus it is proven that a specific pattern is part
or is not part of the action repertoire of the player, coaching upon this will be provided in the affirmative or
corrective way.
Thus, the patterns are the constraints upon which the judgement (the score) upon the player’s abilities is
determined and the appropriate coaching is issued. This will be enhanced by a “movie” function: Accompanying the wise words of a coach character, a movie of the player action series will be shown that led or
may lead to consequences mentioned in the coaching advice. Once a series of several constraints is
fulfilled or violated, thus some information on the abilities of the player exists, the player will be offered an
individual learning path to make further learning experience adapted to his or her needs.
Scope, Limitations and Conclusion
Obviously no one will improve in gesticulation or voice from playing a click-point game. Also sensitivity to
emotions shown in face or body by a conversation partner is not likely to increase by this approach. Yet
the game is intended to cover an large part of the communicative abilities that are needed by IT professionals (and other professions having a similar understanding of projects) to successfully complete projects. We locate this possible learning effect in the area of sequence and contents of communications,
while the final coverage could be the full of the abilities considered in this paper, i.e. leadership of the
team, and communication to customers and further stakeholders of a project.
Typical learning contents will be e.g. that in a meeting with a project customer, it is a good idea to make
sure that the customer knows not only one’s name, but also has an idea of the company or division one
comes from. Or, at the end of a meeting, it is a sign of effective and professional behaviour to provide a
summary. Or (in our experience so far a very frequent error of people both in the game as in reality) a
team leader conducting a feedback talk should definitively tell a team member what exactly the problem
is, but not start with this, but first recognize good deed. As limited the possibilities of a click-point game
are, yet these examples show, that it will be able to cover important learning of communicative behaviour
that are done wrong frequently and are typical part of expensive business courses.
References
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Austin, J. L., 1962: How to Do Things With Words. Cambridge (Mass.) 1962 - Paperback: Harvard University Press, 2nd edition, 2005, ISBN 0-674-41152-8.
Corbett, A.T. 2001. Cognitive computer tutors: Solving the two-sigma problem. User Modeling: Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference, UM 2001, 137-147
German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (1999): New Approaches to the Education and
Qualification of Engineers: Challenges and Solutions from a Transatlantic Perspective.
Keller, M. (2008); Konkurrenzanalyse für Projektmanagement Games; diploma-thesis, University of
Zurich
Ohlsson, S. 1994. Constraint-based Student Modeling. Student Modeling: the Key to Individualized
Knowledge--based Instruction. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 167-189.
Searle, J. (1969) Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language, Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge
University Press.
Standish Group (2003): Chaos Chronicles III.
Stoyan, R. (2008): PM for all - Intensive small group teaching in PM, for many students at low cost. International Journal of Project Management 26, 297–303
Stoyan, R. (2007) More successful IT projects by low-cost high-interactivity project management education. IFIP-ITLLL-iTET Joint Working Conference. September.2007, Prague, Czech Republic.
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