The Project Handbook

Current version available here (Sep 2022)

Engineers work on projects. Some projects are small and others large, but they all share some common characteristics, which are explored in this handbook.

Engineers work with people. Engineering work requires teams of people to make it happen. So, it makes sense for projects at university to be done in teams.

Engineers communicate. Although we often think that engineers “build stuff”, what they really do is convince others to build the stuff according to their designs and directions. Hence, it’s incredibly important that engineers be persuasive communicators. Engineers spend 60% of their time communicating. (See James Trevelyan's excellent "The Making of an Expert Engineer" and "Learning Engineering Practice").

Learning engineering through project work allows you to develop the full range of skills that an engineer needs in the workplace: project management, team skills, communication, and problem solving. Since many of these take years to fully develop, project work is included throughout your engineering program.

The key skills in engineering projects are:

• The process of engineering design (research and define the problem and the requirements, generate alternatives, evaluate them, make a recommendation, check the results)
• Problem solving (knowing how to deal with incomplete and conflicting information)
• Project management (planning activities and making sure that they happen)
• Keeping adequate personal documentation (a logbook and design file)
• Preparing public documentation (a whole range of documents for various audiences)
• Presenting information to others (and persuading them)
• Working as a cohesive team
• Reflecting on your work to learn and improve for future advantage.

All of these matters are the subjects of this handbook.

The sidebar on the right shows individual chapters, which can be downloaded and printed. The full handbook is here (with additional material available in the sidebar on the right).

This is a shared resource for engineering educators, initiated within the School of Engineering at RMIT University in Melbourne Australia. Some materials were original developed within the Department of Civil Engineering at Monash University. Development is coordinated by Roger Hadgraft in the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology at the University of Technology Sydney.

This is a public resource and editable by registered users in the spirit of wiki contributions. Please contact Roger to modify any of the chapters and to make additional contributions to the Handbook. These are most welcome. Also, if you use any of these resources in your teaching or learning, leave a contribution below, just so that we know how the handbook is being used.

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