At the start of your engineering project management education, you will need to learn some basic fundamental principles that have driven engineering project management over the years. In these types of courses, you will cover the common management methodologies used today, how to best communicate the project plan, and how to lead a cross-disciplinary team to reach the end-goal of the project.
As a project manager, it's important that you stay within the project's budget. While unexpected costs can occur, the project manager is largely responsible for making sure that production and research costs are kept at a reasonable level. This will require the project manager to work with his team to define the goods, services and raw materials needed to complete the project.
Creating a technical product road map is an important step to define how a specific project fits into the big picture of an engineering project. These plans can help keep the team's perspective on how close they are to completion, as well as allow the team to identify issues early on that may hinder the accomplishment of future tasks in another iteration of the product.
Courses in manufacturing methodologies, such as Six Sigma, as well as different quality control methods, can round out an engineering project management program. Depending on the product being developed, the manufacturing process will vary greatly, but regardless, you will need to learn how to create the most cost-effective manufacturing method. Finally, you'll have to determine the tests the engineered product will undergo to define the quality control parameters of the engineering project, ultimately defining its success.