1: Introduction

Overview

CIS 79 Managing Technology Projects is a course in the Computer Science and Information Systems department at De Anza College in Cupertino, California in the heart of Silicon Valley. It is an elective course in the Project Management curriculum for the Certificate of Achievement, Certificate of Achievement-Advanced, and AA degree.

Case Study Approach

The course has utilized a case study approach since the Fall of 2020. The case studies are used for weekly assignments to reinforce and apply principles covered in course lectures.

One of the key pedagogical principles of CIS 79 is to prepare students to be industry-ready. This includes preparing some of the key phase exit presentations used for the project life cycle employed by many Silicon Valley technology companies. This includes Phase 0 exit (Concept), Phase 1 exit (Specifications; Project plan: schedule, budget, resources), and Phase 4 exit (readiness to ship to customers). In order to do this, some representative projects that technology companies have dealt with or will deal with need to be made available to students. Our preference is to use real projects rather than fictitious projects as they have more of a tendency to hold the interests of students.

Many of the case studies were developed based on the authors’ direct experience. However, some of the case studies cover topics outside of the authors’ direct experience, but which were current and relevant at the time they were developed and used in the course. For example, Operation Warp Speed that managed the creation and mass production of the initial COVID-19 vaccines was occurring in real time in the Fall of 2020 as the course was in progress. This was also the case with projects to develop COVID-19 vaccines within pharmaceutical companies. This provided students with exposure to important technology projects while they were actually happening, with outcomes far from certain. This helped simulate the uncertainties faced by real project managers when they are managing their projects. Even as new vaccines are being developed to address evolving mutated strains of the virus, the original projects remain of high interest due to how a project addressing a worldwide emergency was handled from a project management perspective to aggressively accelerate schedules from normal 5-10 year pharmaceutical development timeframes to something on the order of one year.

Project Types

The case studies cover a range of project types:

• Product development
• Computer networking technology (Ethernet switch development)
• COVID-19 vaccines and contact tracing apps
• Compliance
• Quality improvement (e.g., Boeing 737 Max 8 recertification effort because air transportation safety is paramount)
• Public utilities use of artificial intelligence technology

Compliance projects include implementation work to be in conformance with environmental initiatives as well as data privacy initiatives such as:

• EU Restriction of Hazardous substances (RoHS) and
• EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

The European Union (EU) has been in the forefront of these initiatives. Many US companies may have disregarded these initiatives initially, only to discover later that they are applicable when they realize that 25-30% of their revenues are derived from the EU or that many of their customers reside in the EU.

Both authors have worked on the EU Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) directive. One author did so in the role of project manager in two companies and as a consultant for several others. The other author ran a compliance checker tool against the Bill of Materials (BOMs) for each SKU (Stock Keeping Unit) that needed to achieve compliance. RoHS compliance required a cross-functional team effort with a massive amount of data collection, detailed technical analysis, engineering development and testing effort, home-grown tool creation, and laborious repeated compliance attainment checking.

Our intent is to continuously add additional case studies as interesting technology projects address problems of interest to students. For example, the case study on artificial intelligence is new for the fall of 2026. Artificial intelligence tools are becoming pervasive and colleges such as De Anza College are adding certificates and degree programs in artificial intelligence to stay at the forefront of this technology. Specifically, the case study builds on a paper whose lead author is one of the authors of this textbook. It addresses public utilities and their current and planned usage of artificial intelligence for a variety of applications. Since public utilities are considered risk averse, the use of emerging technology may seem unusual. Usually there is oversight in the use of new technologies by bodies such as the California Public Utilities Commission. The most interesting usage of artificial intelligence to many who reside in California is its use in detecting and monitoring the spread of wildfires which have been quite destructive in recent years.

Case Study Structure

The structure of each case study is roughly as follows:

• Introduction/Overview
• Learning objectives
• Body of the case study
• Project Management considerations, reinforcing concepts covered in lectures. This includes basic project management concepts (e.g., task scheduling), special considerations in accelerating schedules, risk management, and team management.
• Legal Considerations: Legal considerations for each case study are discussed. This may include intellectual property considerations related to a development project (such as patents and trademarks) or special contractual requirements. A project manager may need to consult the organization’s legal staff, so this material will help provide a working vocabulary for those discussions. Caveat: This is not a “case law” textbook (also known as a "casebook") that covers excerpts from legal cases, and nothing in this textbook should be taken as legal advice (for that, consult an attorney). The European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is covered in greater depth in LAW 73132 - Data Privacy Law at the Law School at the University of Notre Dame.
• Glossary/Lexicon (Technology-specific vocabulary) for each case study. This will help the project manager speak the language of each technical realm.

A question is often asked as to whether a project manager can be successful if he or she is unfamiliar with the technology, technical vocabulary, and technical processes associated with the project. One may not need to be an expert in a project’s technology, but a familiarity with the technology, technical vocabulary, and technical processes will help the project manager gain the respect of the project teams, or not. This is the primary reason why the Glossary/Lexicon is included.

An important consideration is that not all companies are the same. There may be differences in the following areas, to name a few:

• Priorities. For some companies, time to market may be the most important element. This can be viewed in conjunction with the project management triangle (more on this later).
• Risk appetite. Some companies are risk averse (e.g., public utilities) whereas other companies are more willing to take risks.
• Budget management.
  • Some companies take a dim view of project managers padding their budgets. This is based on the concept of opportunity cost. The money tied up unused in a project could have been invested elsewhere by the company for a higher return.
  • Some projects, particularly those with the Unites States government, may require the use of Earned Value Management (EVM). Most private sector projects do not.

OER

De Anza College has many initiatives to produce Open Education Resources (OER), including an initiative to provide OER textbooks for all of the courses in the project management curriculum. This textbook is part of that initiative. Goals include improving learning outcomes and helping to ensure that the cost of a textbook is not a barrier to learning.

This is the first OER effort by both of the authors, requiring some new learning. It has involved both standing on the shoulders of prior authors and making use of their OER open licensed material or public domain material as well as creating our own material. We have made use of CC BY 4.0 academic papers (hopefully getting the attributions totally correct as required) and government material in the public domain, such as that from the United States Centers for Disease Control on vaccines. As appropriate, sections of certain regulations, laws, and directives have been extracted verbatim to give the reader the feel for what it takes to understand the requirements to be successful in a compliance project. Since some of the regulations are from the EU, the European spellings of words are retained (and hopefully unchanged by editors trying to be helpful). Additionally, the section numbers and letters in laws is carried forward as it appears in the laws, even though it may seem odd in some cases.

Some of the work of prior OER authors that was "remixed" into this textbook needed to be altered in order to meet evolving accessibility requirements. The accessibility work for new material and remixed material required some effort and we hope we did it all correctly.

Acknowledgements

• Shagun Kaur of De Anza College, for her project management of the Project Management OER textbook project.
• Felix Amoruwa, Adjunct Faculty at De Anza College, for reviewing the entire content of the textbook and providing feedback.

Chapter thumbnail image: File:Project Management - Project Planning Process Flowchart.svg - Wikimedia Commons. The SVG file was converted to JPG to be acceptable to the Libretexts system for inclusion as a thumbnail. Author: IFPPM.org (practicalpm in the Wikimedia citation). March 28, 2026. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.