| Over the past century, great technological advances have enabled high-speed communication and
transportation across the globe. This technology trend combined with the needs of continuous
expansion of market place has motivated major corporations not to restrict their business activities to
within a single principality. Engineering design activities can take place across the globe, while projects
themselves tend heavily towards larger and international scope, affecting greater numbers of diverse
populations within numerous principalities. The social, cultural, political, and economical differences
have inevitably raised tremendous challenges for coordinating widely spread, yet inter-connected
collaboration project activities among the various stakeholders.
This establishes the need for effective project management to ensure that the stakeholders, all with
diverse backgrounds, cooperate to effectively progress to the project's completion for the corporate
sector, governmental organizations, and non-profit groups. Though extensive project management
literature exists, little has been done on addressing the challenges faced by new managers in a global
economy. In addition, in the current engineering curriculum, scant attention has ever been put on
teaching such knowledge. This has left those inexperienced young engineers with frustration when
beginning a prominent project management position. It is therefore crucial to develop innovative ways
of acquiring such knowledge, and this thesis will address some of the major project management
challenges in a global economy and share case studies on experiential-based learning.
| 
