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Post-graduate education is now a part of Alaska's exports

Article by Richard Richtmyer, Anchorage Daily News, 11/27/2006


 

Alaska is well-known for exporting oil, fish, zinc and other natural resources. But exporting post-graduate education?

A three-year-old University of Alaska Anchorage program is doing just that.
Jang Ra, chairman of UAA's engineering, science and project management department, has exported his project management master's program to Seattle, where a group of 10 Alaska Airlines employees recently completed course work for their degrees.
Ra and other UAA professors traveled to the airline's Seattle headquarters every other week, where they taught the 10 courses included in the program in an accelerated schedule that allowed the students to finish the work in about 18 months rather than the two years it typically takes to earn a master's degree.
 

The program, which started in 2003, is geared toward working professionals, with regularly scheduled evening classes that also are available to students outside of Anchorage via UAA's distance learning videoconferencing systems, Ra said.
Since its start, the project management course has attracted more than 100 master's candidates, and by the end of this year Ra expects to have graduated about 20. He's proud of that record and expects the program to continue gaining traction as demand for project management skills grows.
Ra describes what he sees as a paradigm shift in business where companies are beginning to put more emphasis on process-oriented management, focusing on specific tasks rather than ongoing operations.

"We are in the beginning of a management revolution, and project management is a very young discipline," he said.
His students work in a wide range of industries, including oil and gas, construction, transportation, information technology and government. More than 20 distance learning students sit in on classes from as far away as Seoul, South Korea, Ra said.
The Alaska Airlines class was different because it was the first time faculty actually traveled out of state to teach.

Angela Ursino, Alaska Airlines' director of training and development, said UAA's project management degree program fit well with the company's approach to running its business, and a wide range of employees from all over the company participated.
The company selected long-time employees with jobs such as director of site safety and director of stations operation control who could benefit from an advanced degree in project management, Ursino said.

Much of the course work also focuses on topics that are part of master's in business administration programs -- such as finance, marketing, human resources -- which made the UAA program even more appealing, she said.
Alaska Airlines covered all the costs, including the cost of travel, lodging and meals for the university professors who traveled to its headquarters to teach the classes, which was logistically easier and more cost-effective than flying the class to Anchorage, Ursino said.
"It created a very flexible scenario for them to earn an advance degree," she said.

 

Task Master's

Article by Sarana Schell, Anchorage Daily News, 2/16/2004


A company's project started with enthusiasm but inexplicably ground to a halt, University of Alaska Anchorage professor Jang Ra told his students.
Why? Ra put up a diagram. Arrows showing mutual employee trust created a mesh around certain names; other names looked like Hawaii next to the Lower 48. The project stalled because of a typical workplace reality: The official go-to person was not the real go-to person, Ra said.
The arrows made it clear. When polled, employees said the senior manager chosen to lead the project was not someone they trusted or felt comfortable approaching for help or information.
What to do? Boot the manager? No, Ra said, make a trusted junior employee the co-leader. Who? Just look at the arrows.
Once the change was made, Ra related, the project moved ahead again.
Ra's 25 students are the first enrolled in UAA's new project management master's program.

Project management organizes tasks in start-to-finish terms and can be applied at any scale, from setting up the Fort Knox gold mine near Fairbanks to installing a new computer system in an office.
Basic principles include clearly defining a project's objective.
"It seems simple, but in business that one principle is broken more than any other," said Pete Leathard, president of the Anchorage-based global construction and project services corporation Veco. He gave the example of a customer taking a car in to a garage and not clarifying what a mechanic is to fix. "That person won't be very happy when they get their car back and the bill."
Other principles include clear accountability and matching authority.

Some Alaska professionals see the new degree as way to boost their careers, as demand for project management skills grows. Some senior professionals in the state see it as more: a way to ease the state's budget problems by making government more efficient, and a key to winning some of the state's best and biggest jobs away from Outside firms.
UAA has offered graduate degrees in science and engineering management for decades, Ra said. When he arrived at the university 16 years ago, he thought project management deserved its own track too.
The department added courses in the subject, but Ra always thought it was worth a degree.
"Anchorage does not have enough professional graduate programs," Ra said. "It's the bottleneck in growth in Anchorage."

A GROWING FIELD

The concept of project management dates from the 1950s. Project Management Institute, a 35-year-old Philadelphia-based nonprofit that has developed principles, training programs and materials, now has more than 100,000 members worldwide.
"The growth of project management is huge," Ra said, and UAA needed a degree to tap into the worldwide movement. When he became chairman of UAA's Engineering and Science Management Graduate Department five years ago, he set to work on his dream.
A $50,000 jump-start from the University of Alaska helped the degree program through a two-year process culminating with accreditation from the Northwest Commission of Colleges and Universities. Ra's ambitions include a doctoral degree and a wireless computer lab model that could be exported to industry and bring in students from around the world.
For now, since the university says it can't afford to start a new degree, Ra said, the program is working on being self-supporting.
"The university asked us to charge supertuition," Ra said, so students pay twice the regular graduate tuition. And it's working, he said; the program now has more than its original grant and is saving for equipment and future faculty members. Ra anchors the faculty now, working with several adjunct professors, including Paula Donson, corporate education manager at Alaska USA Federal Credit Union.

Dori Czerski, 24, and Aaron Mc-Ewen, 34, are among the 25 students who choked down the super-sized cost.
"It's all out of pocket for me," Czerski said, so it was hard to swallow. But she hopes the degree will help her move from a really technical position with her project-oriented employer, Communications Software Inc., to a more managerial position. "I was looking at it as an investment in my future."
McEwen said Ra's trust-arrow diagram and other charts resonated with what he'd learned on the job as a project engineer with Veco.
There was nary a "trust matrix" to be seen in courses for his aeronautical engineering degree, McEwen said, so he got all his project management experience at work.
"Veco is specifically making a big transition to being project oriented," McEwen said, so he enrolled to fill the gap between his on-the-job learning and the corporate vision in company newsletters.
Alaska companies will catch on eventually, McEwen said, but he doesn't want to wait. "I want to do a better job now," he said.

CAREER BOOSTER

Since projects are usually too fast-paced to allow time for study on the side, getting an education ahead of time makes sense, said Dave Haugen, vice president at Lynden Inc. and a member of the degree program's advisory board.
Dora Gropp, director of transmission and special projects for Chugach Electric Association, is another advisory board member who knows the difference that project management skills can make.

"Project management definitely makes things go smoothly and faster," Gropp said. "And if something goes smoothly and faster, guess what, you save money."
The first time she was on a project laying electric cables under Knik Arm for Chugach Electric, it was very expensive, she said, and took a long time.
After Gropp went Outside for project management training a week here and a week there, the utility laid more cable underwater between Mat-Su's Point MacKenzie and Anchorage's Point Woronzof.
"The second time was under-budget and on time," Gropp said. "Those are the magic words in project management."
The field is developing so fast, formal training is key, she said. "It's no longer learn it as I go," Gropp said. "More and more companies are really looking at your credentials."
And more and more professionals are seeking those credentials.
"Project management has grown to encompass every field managing projects of any nature," said Bronwen Sheffield, distance education director for Western Carolina University. "Medical fields is the largest growing group that we're serving."
Western Carolina put its master's in project management exclusively online in 1998, targeting middle managers.

Students span the globe, from South Africa to the Netherlands to the United States, she said, and may have backgrounds in art or psychology, not just business or information technology, and be interested in managing a museum or clinic.
"We had one woman with the American Kennel Club who manages big shows around country," Sheffield said.

ALASKA GROWN

Alaska needs project managers, said Aves Thompson, director of the state Department of Transportation Measurement Standards and Commercial Vehicle Enforcement Division.
"Think about the big oil projects; think about how complex they are and the kabillions of dollars that go into them," Thompson said. "You need a trained professional to keep track of them. We've sort of looked Outside for that sort of thing in the past. Now hopefully we can grow our own."
Thompson said his division collaborated with Ra and his students to develop new ways to support commercial vehicle inspectors and streamline department business for customers.
A system to let users get permits online for oversize and overweight vehicles is in the works, Thompson said. The division also compiled its commercial vehicle safety information and made it searchable.

Now an inspector can search records to see if he's dealing with a safe, reliable carrier or a scofflaw trying to get away with everything, Thompson said.
"We need to be able to leverage our resources as best we can" in a time of shrinking budgets, Thompson said, who sent two people on his staff for project management training with Ra.
"The university's on the right track," Veco's Leathard said. "If government and private industry hire some of these people, I think that will definitely bring projects in on schedule and within budget in the future."

About two years ago, Veco formed a task force to build a streamlined project management approach for the company, Leathard said, to iron out differences after acquiring a number of other companies.
"We weren't managing projects as well as we needed" to be one of the best in the business, Leathard said. And everything the company does is a project, he said. "We needed to get to a Veco way of doing things so all our people could be focused in one direction."
Now everyone from secretaries to accountants to engineers is getting training in project management.
"If they understand it, they can help the project manager," Leathard said.
He said he sees plenty of talent in state and plenty of opportunities for well-trained locals. If Alaska companies bolster their project management staff, he said, maybe they can shift from nuts-and-bolts contracts to overseeing big jobs.
"Look at missile defense. We got shut out of that work," he said of the $400 million federal job concentrated near Delta. "A lot of these projects, done by government especially, are being managed by Outside companies."
Taking on a new tier of work might keep talented Alaskans home too, Leathard said.
"Then people getting these degrees can get jobs with Alaska companies instead of going Outside."