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

这个小型企业创新研究（SBIR）第二阶段项目通过使用户能够在身临其境的虚拟世界环境中排练坚韧的现实世界挑战，加速了项目管理专业知识的发展。对专家项目管理人员的研究表明，他们的技能是经过多年的积累和从失败中学习的结果。加速这一进程将对真实的世界失败的代价产生巨大影响。一些研究估计，组织损失每年高达820亿美元。这些损失被认为在很大程度上是可以通过更好的项目管理教育方法来预防的。项目的更广泛/商业影响在于它能够1）降低通过失败学习的风险，2）加快有效培训新手的时间，3）减轻与真实的世界中意外错误相关的一些成本。使用沉浸式，基于模拟，结果驱动的排练方法，该产品有可能1）提高那些现实世界经验有限的项目的成功率，2）允许用户无风险地排练和测试部署计划，3）为项目管理新手提供遇到坚韧问题并在压力下开发解决方案的机会。该公司的排练方法使参与者团队能够在具有复杂目标的持续业务背景下与实际流程和产品的虚拟副本进行交互。主要的创新将是使用虚拟世界提供丰富的互动环境，以加速新手项目经理的专业知识发展。虚拟世界环境中包含嵌入式行为和决策监控软件，旨在自动跟踪进度并提供反馈。有专家参与的早期试点表明，该方法可将专门知识的发展速度加快多达两年。该项目的目标是通过针对项目管理的关键技能，特别是从失败中学习，来改进用于新手的方法。虚拟世界还提供了一个理想的平台，可以在新手人群中测试有关技术实施，个人参与和团队成果的假设。因此，该项目还将解决有关新兴虚拟世界平台中关键功能的一些问题。

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.