Guest lecturers

During the three years the course has been held, apart from regular professors (dr. Ivica Crnković, MdH, and dr. Mario Žagar, FER), there have been several guest lecturers. The objective of such lectures was to provide the students with an insight into how things are done in the business world, as well as into real problems which they might face in program engineering, particularly distributed program engineering. In addition a lot of time is dedicated to project management experience in order to provide support for the students chosen to act as project team leaders. The students are also given information about cultural differences between different countries, which is of particular importance, as for most of the students in this course this was the first time that they had to work with people from different countries.

Our guests were:

Stig Larsson, ABB: Experiences in Distributed Development
In these lectures the students could hear about experience of a renowned Swedish company ABB. Mr Larsson presented sixteen very useful advice for working on distributed projects, each supported by a real-life example. Organisation of an existing ABB project was given as an example. It is interesting that some groups of students have followed the advice literally and were very successful in the realisation of their projects.

Igor Borojević, IBM: Selected Chapters from Project Environment
Mr Borojević showed experience gathered on some of the leading IBM projects. The students had an opportunity to hear about how IBM projects are managed (IBM Worldwide Project Management Method, IBM Global Services Method) and learn more about the role of the project manager and IT architect.

Claes Berlin, SAAB: To make business with foreign customers
In this very useful lecture the students were provided with information about cultural differences between nations, with particular emphasis on specific characteristics of Croats and Swedes. Mr Berlin talked about ways of communication in different countries, employer-employee relationship, expectations from project presentations, some issues of business ethics and non-verbal communication.

Anders Berglund, Uppsala University: Distributed course Sweden – USA
In this lecture students were presented with experiences gathered in a similar project and course held between the University of Uppsala and Grand Valley State University from Michigan. With all the common difficulties, that particular project had another one – different time zones!