My first university lecturer and first exposure to projects and project management as a discipline

My eldest had his "A" level results this week and is off to read Politics at university next month.

This has caused me to reminisce about my own transition from "A" levels at school to studying for a degree at university.

I have summarised my educational and learning background elsewhere but I want to elaborate on some specifics about my transition in this post.

It is fair to say that I was not a passionate learner at school. The school aimed primarily at getting pupils into Oxbridge so was almost exclusively academic rather than vocational qualifications. 
When it came to filling in the then UCCA University selection form in 1979/80, I put my home (Loughborough) university down as first choice because at the time it's Banking and Finance course was the best in the country as I recall. Of the other choices, I put Stirling University down as number 4 to do Business Studies and Management Science. This was my backstop insurance policy if I failed to get the results that Loughborough needed. As it turned out, I needed that policy!

I vividly recall how I felt as early as the very first Management Science lecture that I attended in the Logie Lecture Theatre at Stirling. The lecturer was John F Woodward. The course textbook for the first semester's Management Science unit was his "Science in Industry, Science of Industry". It was not a hardbook, rather it was an A5-size bound collection of folded A4 sheets but the content enthralled me. It applied quantitative methods to real-life issues such as stock control and, most importantly, with hindsight, projects. From that very first lecture I knew that I was in the right place doing the right course. As it turned out, I did significantly better at university than school and my passion for learning increased significantly from then on.





John, again as I recall, was only at Stirling for the first of my 4 very happy years at Stirling. I did not realise this at the time but as I look back, his lectures and book were foundational to my understanding of organisations, how they work and the mechanics of how things get done via ongoing operations and specific one-off projects.

It was good finding John's summary profile (linked to above).

It was even better finding a Google Books entry for his "Construction Project Management: Getting it Right First Time" (1997) book. As I read those first few pages (and I encourage you to), his teaching and his philosophy of projects that I concur with totally came flooding back .

While hunting down links for this post, I also found this Google Books entry for his "Quantitative Methods in Construction Management and Design" (1975) book. I have vivid memories of manually doing critical path analysis for a case study project in an exam!

Even more spookily, I find myself currently building a MOOC on project management as a learning exercise on MOOC platforms. John's content is a good reminder in another voice of what I believe and hold true about projects and project management.