The Effect of Prior Exposure to Project Management Techniques in Project-Based Courses

Project Management (PM) is an important component of baccalaureate programs in both Information Systems (IS) and Information Technology (IT). Many institutions offer a PM course in the curriculum, which students typically take in their last semester. However, other courses in IS and IT are often taught with a heavy emphasis on individual and group projects, and therefore it seems reasonable to expect that students would perform better in such courses if they had received formal instruction in PM earlier in their program of study. This paper is a pilot study to determine whether this is indeed the case. It compares the performance of students who had previously completed a PM course and students who had not in a heavily project-based database course.