SBIR Phase II: Accelerating Project Management Skills Development through "Experience"; Realistic Rehearsal for Project Teams in 3-Dimensional Immersive Virtual Environments.

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project accelerates the development of project management expertise by enabling users to rehearse tough, real-world challenges in an immersive, Virtual World environment. Studies of expert project managers indicate that their skill was acquired over many years and as a result of learning by failure. Accelerating this process would have a huge impact on the costs of real world failure. Some studies have estimated the organizational losses to upwards of $82 billion annually. These losses are thought to be largely preventable with better approaches to project management education. The broader/commercial impact of project lies in its ability to 1) lower the risk of learning through failure, 2) accelerate the time it takes to effectively train novices, and 3) alleviate some of the costs associated with unanticipated mistakes made in the real world. Using an immersive, simulation-based, outcomes driven rehearsal methodology, this product has the potential to 1) increase the success rate of projects for those with limited real-world experience, 2) by allowing users to rehearse and test deployment plans without risk and 3) by providing participants new to project management an opportunity to encounter tough problems and develop solutions under pressure. This company's rehearsal method enables teams of participants to interact with virtual replicas of actual processes and products in the context of an ongoing business with complex goals. The primary innovation will be the use of Virtual Worlds to provide rich interactive environments to accelerate expertise development among novice project managers. The Virtual Worlds environments are enriched with embedded behavior and decision monitoring software designed to automate the tracking of progress and provide feedback. Early pilots with experts indicate that the method may accelerate expertise development by as much as two years. The objective for this project is to refine the approach for use with novices by targeting key skills of project management that are normally learned through years of experience, and specifically, learning from failure. Virtual Worlds also provide an ideal platform to test hypotheses regarding the technical implementation, individual engagement and team outcomes in a novice population. As such, the project will also resolve a number of questions about the key features at play within emerging Virtual Worlds platforms.