KINT 8150 - Financial skills for project managers

As a project manager, understanding financial concepts is crucial to making informed decisions and driving project success. This course is designed for non-financial professionals who want to develop the financial skills necessary to effectively manage projects and communicate with stakeholders.

In this course, you will learn the fundamentals of finance and how to apply them to project management.

No prior financial knowledge required.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of the course, students will be able to:

• analyse and discuss the financial performance and health of companies
• identify and discuss the links of a given project with the cash cycle of the company
• transform project business assumptions into a financial plan
• calculate project selection criteria and evaluate their feasability
• build and monitor budgets and forecasts for their projects

Professional Skills

You will develop basic financial skills applied to project management. While working on real case studies you will develop those skills in a professional way, including Excel skills, written and oral communication skills.

No pre-requisites

Financial information is usually produced and processed using IT systems, namely ERPs, CRMs, BI, spreadsheets. Actually, most managers will be required to master (at least) the use of the spreadsheet at some stage in their careers, regardless of their functional specialism. So it can be a bright idea to get to know and use Excel before and during the semester.

Feedback will be given back to students maximum 2 weeks after submissions. They will receive back their submitted work corrected + comments. Also some oral feedback might be provided (for the presentation). As the course will be online, students will receive help during sessions when practicing applications or case studies (flipped classroom).

The assessment will be based on an oral presentation (in group) for 40%, a case study in group (40%) and an individual paper for 20%.

• Attendance: 2 hours a week / 24 hours a semester
• Online learning activities: 2 hours a week / 24 hours a semester
• Reading and Preparation for Class: 6 hours a week / 72 hours a semester
• Research and Preparation for Group Work: 24 hours a semester
• Research and Writing for Individual Assessments: 6 hours a semester