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Many engineering projects fail to meet their planned completion dates in real practice. This is a recurrent topic in the project management literature, with poor planning and controlling practices frequently cited among the most significant causes of delays. Unfortunately, hardly any attention has been paid to the fact that the classical scheduling techniques--Gantt chart, Critical Path Method (CPM), and Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT)--may not be as fit for purpose as they seem. Arguably, because of their relative simplicity, these techniques are still almost the only ones taught nowadays in most introductory courses to scheduling in many engineering and management degrees. However, by utterly ignoring or inappropriately dealing with activity duration variability, these techniques provide optimistic completion dates, while suffering from other shortcomings. Through a series of simple case studies that can be developed with a few participants and common dice, a systematic critique of the classical scheduling techniques is offered. Discussion of the case studies results illustrate why limiting the contents of scheduling education and teaching can be detrimental, as the aforementioned classical scheduling techniques cannot not provide project managers with sufficient resources to effectively plan and control real projects.

Science and Technology Innovation Communities (STICs) are student-led partnerships that bring together businesses, research centres, and university staff. They constitute an effective way of promoting student innovation ability. However, the students' position within the STICs organisation network may condition how their innovation ability is effectively acquired. Using Social Network Analysis (SNA), this study measures how the STICs organisation network promotes the innovation ability of its actors. The paper finds that network centrality and structural holes of the STICs organisation network are positively correlated with student innovation ability. The results are validated through robustness tests in three different STICs, involving engineering students from China's Chang'an University. Semi-structured interviews are also conducted with 20 relevant actors of STICs. The conclusion suggests that a higher involvement of core actors, more support from schools, and more restrictive entry requirements are necessary to improve the organisation management and training level of engineering students in STICs.