Center for Global Business Awards 2023 #KeepGlobalSmith Grant

The Center for Global Business (CGB) at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business announces that Paul Shapiro, PhD, a senior lecturer in information systems, systems analysis and design, and project management, has been awarded the #KeepGlobalSmith grant for his proposed Global Project Management Simulation.

The #KeepGlobalSmith grant, a CBG initiative introduced in 2020, is designed to support and encourage innovation in global teaching and programming that offers students the opportunity to engage with peers, companies, content and cultures around the world through online learning.  Funded by CIBE, a Title VI grant from the U.S. Department of Education, the grant can be used to support and encourage teaching innovations in global learning that leverage now ubiquitous communication technologies to enrich student experiences.

Shapiro proposed the Global Project Management (PM) Simulation as an “innovative and experiential learning tool” with the purpose of enriching the instruction of both undergraduate and graduate project management courses at Smith. It “reinforces the current learning outcomes related to planning and managing projects by enabling the hands-on execution of a realistic project,” he says, with an additional goal of incorporating international features throughout the program.

This aspect of the simulation allows students the chance to interact with business from a new, global perspective through experiential learning. Shapiro says the simulation is “strategically placed in the second half of PM courses” so that it puts all of the “fundamental knowledge learned in the course into action” — where he says the “rubber meets the road.”

Since its development in Summer 2020, “the PM simulation has been used by 900-plus students across 24 course offerings and six semesters,” Shapiro says. It measures student achievement and is “directly assessed via a performance-based ranking system of project management constraints.” With the grant award, Shapiro adds that the simulation has plans in store to develop a global version that is “an exciting opportunity to further challenge students.”

With a strong consideration for students’ success and the expansion of global business mindsets, Shapiro emphasizes that by constructing the simulation as a “PM competition with a leaderboard, students are so deeply engaged in managing their projects that their appreciation for the PM profession is fully realized.” The ultimate goal of PM Simulation Global, he says,  is to not only challenge students with managing projects, but to incorporate international features with workforces distributed across multiple regions of the world.

Shapiro says he “believes introducing the ability to manage a globally dispersed team will take the game play to a whole new level of complexity and realism,” and as the awardee of the #KeepGlobalSmith grant, the proposed programming has a lot in store for the future of Smith.