TAMU Certificate Program Details

[00:00:00] Ivan Damnjanovic: Well, thank you, Gary. And I’ll start again, like we, we people, Texas A& M, howdy! And it helps wake up in the this, this time of the day. Anyways so I’ll talk a little bit about talk about the Texas A& M and the partnership we have with the Project Action Institute. To start with, I’ll just kind of give you an idea of Texas A& M.

[00:00:31] Ivan Damnjanovic: Engineering at Texas A& M has about 20, 000 students, so we’re talking just about engineering. I can give you a kind of number of the departments, so civil engineering is about 800 students. We have first year kind of first year teaching really common curricula for all engineers. These days, all students want to have a computer science major, like you can’t do that, so we are kind of struggling with that a little bit, but, I can tell you something about project management, and more specifically about engineering project management.

[00:01:09] Ivan Damnjanovic: That’s a program we started about 20 years ago, and, Some of you may know Corky Frank, he was the CEO of Heisman, I know we had we had people from Chevron, Mark Blackett, Gregory, and, and Don Denman for that article. We are also other industries such as Lockheed Martin was another one. They thought that we should really improve our engineering project management.

[00:01:35] Ivan Damnjanovic: So we did that. Right now we have somewhat in around 400 students in our program. It’s kind of like a size of, the department in other universities like Nstitute. And we also have a graduate student program as well that just provides a minority in this. So any engineering disciplines should be able to should be able to take this.

[00:02:01] Ivan Damnjanovic: What I, what is exciting part about all of this is that we teach some project production management. So, you know, when these students graduate and become project managers, that When you go and try to explain them about project management and product production management, they’ll say, yes, I ain’t going like that.

[00:02:23] Ivan Damnjanovic: I, I, I want to implement that. So, so what we are trying to do is have a form up approach, sort of disseminating this knowledge to undergraduate and graduate curriculum such that the people you hire. We’ll have that back it up. And as I said, we implement the project production management in our classes and we have these two companies.

[00:02:48] Ivan Damnjanovic: This is just an example of what we have done in that. So we did this game at the Chevron Atwater. So we brought about 120 Aggies in a bus and we actually took the buses. So we, we kind of blocked downtown Houston. So yeah, all these. On all sides, making sure that we all safely come out of the bus all, like, dead feet from the street.

[00:03:15] Ivan Damnjanovic: And and then we, they shepherded us around around the company. So we do this type of business for companies. We bring a lot of this project production management curricula to our undergrads and that stuff. So that’s kind of the good news. And when Gary Approached us and talked about how do we move forward in terms of, can we, can we start also professional training in all this industry that was really good news for us because, over the last 20 years, I was hired essentially because I felt like many other people here would like to admit it.

[00:03:53] Ivan Damnjanovic: So I was the one that admitted it. The ability guy with a possible last name to collapse. So I, I, I came there and so we’d start looking at different. So develop how degraded for the Chris man. It was one aspect of dealing with the variability of the second one, which we talked a little much about here, but product finance, product finance, you want to minimize the variability because you want to leverage that coach.

[00:04:19] Ivan Damnjanovic: So I feel like some of us seemingly getting produce up. I, so when. This kind of topic came very natural to me and we have started a partnership about I would say three years ago or something like that with ACK years ago, since we started discussing this and we formed series of courses that are focusing on Quoted Production Methods.

[00:04:42] Ivan Damnjanovic: We wanted to emphasize on industrial sector, mainly industrial and process industry, although we are looking at a construction. Well basically, we looked at the different ways of how to deliver this, and we came up with really interesting concept where we looked at three different tracks here.

[00:05:05] Ivan Damnjanovic: So the first course we offered, so it’s a generic course, it’s kind of a two years introductory course on the basic principles that some of you have attended this course already. James and Roberto and I kind of work on this course and I’m the main instructors here. So this The introductory course can be followed by two, well actually three specialty area courses where we have a look into deeper into individual of these fields, whether it’s an engineering, computer, whether it’s a computer, whether it’s anything about supply chains, or feeding the project, where we look at the construction as well.

[00:05:47] Ivan Damnjanovic: So these are the courses that are built up on this introductory course. And what’s really cool about after those or in depth courses, we have an opportunity for the for students to gain a certificate by doing a CAFSCOM project. So CAFSCOM project is direct implementation of the, the materials you actually cover in our course.

[00:06:11] Ivan Damnjanovic: Okay. And it’s between 6 and 12 months we are monthly meeting. We are currently doing this with one defense contractor, international defense contractor. So anyways this is this is a path towards level two certificate. And if you go all to three different paths, you get a master’s degree.

[00:06:32] Ivan Damnjanovic: And so this is the roadmap to certification within the project production Project Production Manager for QuakeCorp, EPI, Dange, Texas A& M, and Develop. So, we, for Intellectually Class, we typically meet in this building at 17th floor. This is where you actually add your, lunch. So it’s a nice CU so, and then it’s a lot of space, so we do a lot of interesting things there.

[00:07:03] Ivan Damnjanovic: And kind of just to get point out how, how it looks like when we actually linked up there rather than eating. We, this, we had some and I’ll talk a little bit about it. We had some requests to do this type of training. In house, so meaning that we will go to a location of the company that will kind of, so it came, came from this from the following.

[00:07:31] Ivan Damnjanovic: It’s kind of a challenge because if you want to send 10 of your folks these classes, it’s going to cost a lot and doesn’t make any sense to just send 10 people here. It was rather, can you guys come there? Okay, we, we gave it, we were teaching also courses. So it is feasible for us that we have flexibility to offer these courses at the company locations.

[00:07:54] Ivan Damnjanovic: If we have enough of the students we are currently looking into a different way of how do we how do we, Scale out this in context of Synod Synod is a remote delivery of these courses. We are working with an organization called T’s Edge, which is our kind of Texas A& M Keynes Busquee relationship art.

[00:08:18] Ivan Damnjanovic: And again, we will continue offering these courses in person here in Texas. Or the, we’ll see, I think what we are trying to look at now is the 2024 schedule. And we’ll have that schedule sometimes by the end of the year in terms of what are the possible queries, any level one versus like a two or so.