Risks in Student Projects

Anecdotally, tertiary educators in software related topics experience challenges during project-based group assessments. To address the range of issues experienced, some educators have introduced aspects of project management (PM) into their course. However, the key focus for software courses is not project management and time spent teaching PM techniques means less time is available for addressing course objectives. In this paper, we describe a study to investigate the use of PM reference models to identify the main areas of risk for student projects. We evaluated some common reference models and selected the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK®) as being the most suitable. We mapped the issues as reported in the computer science education (CSE) literature on group projects to the PMBOK® Knowledge Areas (KAs) and found that only a subset of the KAs was relevant. We used these KAs to categorise the key risks for student projects. Our contributions are the exposure of a gap in the literature on student project risk and the identification of the main sources of risk. There is a need for researchers to further investigate project risk in tertiary group projects in order to help instructors introduce appropriate PM concepts to support their projects.