Development Of Engineering Management Course At Southern University

The Master of Engineering degree curriculum at Southern University, Baton Rouge (SUBR) includes a required core course titled “Engineering Management”. The course material was planned and developed for a period of over a year before the first offering in spring 2002 semester. The engineering management course covers the management principles and applications specifically useful to engineering and technical graduates. The main topics in the course are planning, forecasting, decision making, project management, time management, quality control, optimization, reliability and risk analysis, and scheduling. The engineering management course offers students with ample opportunity to demonstrate their mastery of course materials and related ideas through guided class discussions, open ended projects, assignments, research reports, and tests. The main distinction of this course when compared to a traditional management course is less emphasis on non-technical topics such as accounting and business management. The observations and experiences learnt from the development and teaching of the engineering management course will be described in this paper. The future plan of utilizing SAP software modules 1 in the graduate level engineering management course and in the selected undergraduate level engineering courses will be described. This plan is based on collaboration between the college of engineering and the college of business at Southern University in association with the SAP university alliance program.