Engineering Business Management course curriculum

Build leadership skills to forge a successful career in engineering management, such as communication, networking, and adaptability, whilst addressing your own self-development needs.

You’ll learn to:

• Conduct a self-assessment and seek feedback on your leadership capabilities
• Create a personal development plan relevant to your career ambitions
• Give meaningful developmental feedback to others
• Present and communicate in a professional manner
• Reflect on individual performance, set appropriate objectives and evaluate progress against these objectives

Develop the necessary skills to make better managerial decisions utilising business data such as financial reports and market data. This unit covers data analysis and decision-making driven by data and problems often found in practice.

You’ll learn to:

• Recognise the difficulties and challenges of decision making
• Apply decision-making techniques to management problems
• Analyse decisions and the results of decision-making techniques
• Analyse key financial statements of business organisations
• Apply appraisal techniques to facilitate managerial decision making

Build the academic and research skills needed to support a successful career in engineering management, including academic writing, research methods, critical thinking, feedback and time management.

You’ll learn to:

• Plan and complete an academic or industrial study with appropriate referencing and critical thinking
• Know where to locate information for research and benchmarking purposes
• Recognise the difference between qualitative and quantitative methods and their application

Gain a solid grounding in key managerial disciplines in order to oversee the operational performance of complex, engineering-driven enterprises.

You’ll learn to:

• Evaluate the strategy of business organisations
• Assess the marketing techniques used by business organisations
• Analyse organisational structure and its effectiveness​
• Critically assess the contribution of HRM to organisational performance

Enhance your ability to manage projects in engineering organisations and deepen your appreciation of how project management fits into a wider context. Consider strategic management, contemporary engineering practice and organisational factors as you build project management skills to influence industrial competitiveness.

You’ll learn to:

• Explain what a project is
• Describe the importance of project management
• Apply the tools of project management to a given project, using an appropriate lifecycle approach
• Outline alternate models of project management
• Conduct research into an aspect of project management linking theory and practice

Learn and apply key skills that create lasting value in a holistic sense. You’ll show how engineering management can make a meaningful contribution to a contemporary business or societal issue and recognise the relationships between engineering management and wider considerations of strategy, policy and society.

You’ll learn to:

• Define sustainable value in holistic terms
• Define and critique appropriate techniques to assess sustainable value, including but not limited to those based on economic models, lifecycle thinking and systems analysis
• Evaluate organisations, products, services and activities in terms of sustainable value

Enhance your ability to manage organisational change by considering the wider strategic contexts, stakeholder management, communications strategies and sustainable outcomes.

You’ll learn to:

• Describe the importance of organisational change management
• Apply the tools of change management to a given project or context
• Outline alternate models of change management
• Conduct research into an aspect of change management linking theory and practice

Study the techniques and tools necessary to understand and analyse the different pathways that can be used for new technologies to be effectively commercialised.

You’ll learn to:

• Discuss the range of mechanisms through which different technologies can generate commercial value
• Describe the role of intellectual property in determining appropriate commercialisation strategies
• Compare and evaluate tools for understanding new markets and how to operate in markets for technology
• Develop and assess strategies to effectively bring new technologies to markets

Explore the core concepts and techniques in operations management, including process design and improvement, capacity management, inventory management and quality management.

You’ll learn to:

• Identify and analyse issues related to operations
• Apply operations concepts, theories and techniques in different contexts, including manufacturing, service and non-profit environments
• Develop capabilities to apply operations management knowledge into a range of complex situations, taking into account the business strategy and overall implications for other areas of business
• Appreciate the challenges of running, analysing and improving operations in real-time

Develop a solid grounding in the management of new products at the project level, including key business processes, management tools and techniques. Equip yourself with the key skills you need to succeed in any career that involves leading, working within or supporting new product development projects.

You’ll learn to:

• Outline contemporary challenges facing industry in relation to product development projects
• Apply suitable theoretical models of product development projects to a contemporary example and provide an appropriate critique
• Critically evaluate product development project approaches and be able to lead activities to improve process efficiency, cost, lead time or productivity
• Understand the criticality of design for manufacturing and the concurrent development of manufacturing strategies, systems and technologies in new products
• Apply current and emerging technologies, methodologies, processes and tools to achieve fast and effective product development

Build knowledge of concepts, techniques and key inter-organisational issues related to supply chain management.

You’ll learn to:

• Identify and analyse issues related to supply chains
• Apply models, tools and techniques that are relevant to supply chain management
• Establish a thorough understanding of the foundational and contemporary issues relating to supply chain management
• Appreciate the challenges of analysing and improving complex supply networks

Acquire a solid grounding in the management of new product and service development at the organisation or business entity level, including the key business processes, management tools and techniques.

You’ll learn to:

• Outline contemporary challenges facing industry in relation to product development at an organisation or business entity level
• Apply suitable theoretical models of product-innovation strategies, technology management or product-service systems to a contemporary example and provide appropriate critique
• Critically evaluate product development management challenges and be able to lead activities to improve product development effectiveness at the business unit level

The course culminates with you completing an Engineering Project. Here you can choose to focus on an area within your industry or company, perform research in an area that has been of particular interest to you, or you can choose from a set list of challenging and relevant project themes.

The project can be taken over 3 months, 6 months, or 12 months. Students choosing the shorter pathways may have a substantially higher workload per week.