Let’s face it—collaboration has become a mission. But we are bringing back the joy of working together, as we announce our new collaboration with one of Brazil’s top universities and symbol of Curitiba, Federal University of Technology - Paraná (UTFPR).

Dating back to the modernization efforts in the early Twentieth Century, UTFPR became the Federal Center of Technological Education in 1978. In 2005, it became the first Brazilian University of Technology and embraced a national leadership in scientific and technical education that remains its main trademark.

Leading this initiative is Professor Roberto Candido, an active member of the UTFPR community with interests in technological innovation, entrepreneurship, project management and regional development. Based at the department of Electrotechnical studies, he has pursued the collaboration to ITM Platform with the aim of fostering the employability of his students with real world software.

This collaboration will grant access to ITM Platform for undergraduate students in the degrees of Electric Engineering, and Control and Automatization Engineering, as well as graduate students for advanced projects. As an excellent project, program and portfolio management tool designed to facilitate collaborative work and practical learning from any device, ITM Platform will be used for group work and simulations of a Project Management Office – an activity to which it has been carefully tailored.

The tools and technology driving this collaboration allow students to adopt a Professional Project management software with no installations, and combine theoretical education with the insight that is only gained through practice with a real-world tool; while professors gain control and visibility of student’s work, basing evaluations on the objective indicators that are tracked by ITM Platform. This allows to better manage daily activities, spend less time in evaluation and administration, and have perfect visibility of how students are progressing. In the experience of ITM Platform academic partnerships, group simulations that allow to treat students’ efforts under the technical lens of project resource allocation have an increased impact on educational outcomes: students acquire a skillset to manage complex team-based work, while higher education experts can rely on an external structure to power and facilitate the group dynamics.

With a shared environment for each class, student work can simulate a company or project team. ITM Platform will provide all training resources to UTFPR to get started, from video tutorials to user guides etc. Ultimately, educators are independent and autonomous in their use of ITM Platform: they should forget about the tool and focus on the learning mission.

In order to get there, it’s important to decide for a learning formula that best adapts to the subject at hand and the working schedule. ITM Platform is suited to support Online, blended and traditional education formulas. Additionally, coursework can take the form of practical homework, but has also been used to strengthen or test the methodological aspects of Technical Thesis and Capstone Projects.

Course impact enhancement is possible through joint webinars with ITM Platform, in which the students get to present and broadcast their results to a global audience.

Other Advantages include:

  • Practical learning from any device
  • ITM Platform follows PMI and Prince2 recommendations
  • Teamwork is shaped thanks to the different roles within the platform: PMO manager, Project Manager, Team Member and Customer
  • Students are connected to the real world

The practical side of the tool and its broad scope, that goes well beyond simple project management, makes it a great fit for interdisciplinary learning and to bring students from different backgrounds into a same project. In fact, ITM Platform quickly makes a case for the economic and organisational advantages of planning and controlling projects.

While massive in aggregate, the planning of projects in the Engineering faculty, or any other field of study for that matter, is highly fragmented and desynchronised. As a result, timely completion and realisation of projects seem almost impossible. However, big institutions and technology companies are increasingly realising the importance of Project and Portfolio Management as a tool for success.

Today’s alignment between ITM Platform and UTFPR exemplifies how PMOs and educational institutions can collaborate so the scholar wins… and future generations have a quick start ahead, adopting today’s best organizational practices.

Growing our relationship to help build PMOs

UTFPR joins the ranks of many of the institutions and companies around the world who have integrated with ITM Platform to create a PMO that salvages the realisation of projects in a timely fashion.

Roberto Candido, professor at UTFPR explains how ITM Platform will aid the university put its students in direct contact with a tool that facilitates project management jobs, giving them better conditions to enter the job market.

Through collaboration with top tier Educational institutions, ITM Platform continues to blow the flame under the engine room of Project Management Offices.

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