Project Management

Advanced Project Planning and Control

• Traditional Classroom: 3-day
• Virtual Instructor-led: Six 3-hour sessions

This course adds to your fundamental knowledge of project management by teaching you the details of the major contemporary tools and techniques that are used in planning, monitoring, and controlling projects. The appropriate technologies are used to give the participant a “best practices” approach to the effective and efficient management of projects. Your learning is reinforced through a number of practical exercises using case studies and real projects.

Target Audience

This course is designed for professionals who now, or in the future, will be leading or be a part of a project team. This includes project managers, team leaders, persons whose principal responsibility is as a technology contributor but who will be part of project teams, and anyone needing an in-depth knowledge of how to plan and control a project.

Learning Objectives

• Gain the skill and confidence to use a practical project planning technique.
• Determine if a project can truly be delivered on time and in budget.
• Understand how to discover the risks necessary to meet a constrained delivery date.
• Develop the confidence to communicate project “tradeoffs” clearly and set attainable goals with clients, managers, and project team members.
• Learn how to record actual project progress and then use the project baseline to spot and manage variance.
• Develop ability to “frame” your questions when analyzing the project plan to spot hidden variances.

Key Takeaways

• Best practices in project planning and control.
• Best practices in managing resources that are matrixed to the project manager.
• Risk-based estimating — the manner in which durations, person effort, and percent-per-day resource availability affect each other.
• Task scheduling — an understanding of what critical path (CPM) scheduling is and a simple method for creating and using it.
• Resource scheduling — how to solve resource over allocation and task schedule conflicts through resource leveling.
• Recording project progress — why the conventional methods don’t work and how it can be done in a simple but accurate manner.
• The project plan as a model — how to use the project plan to run “what if” scenarios.
• Microsoft^® Project — how to best use a popular software tool for planning, monitoring, and reporting the project (Note: This is not a Microsoft^® Project course. The instructor will demonstrate the use of the tool.)

Course Outline

Project and Portfolio Management

• Portfolio, program, and project management overview
• Planning and control using appropriate life cycle
• Using gate reviews to manage project risk
• Managing matrix resources
• The role of the project manager and skills required
• A framework for planning and control
• Exercise: Plan PMBOK^® deliverables

Project Initiation and Planning

• Planning and control starts with the project charter
• Exercise: Rank project using constraints flexibility assessment
• Roles and responsibility
• Exercise: Develop a RASCI chart
• Risk assessment and mitigation

Organizing and Conducting the Joint Project Planning Session

• Define the project scope
• Design the work breakdown structure
• Identify project activities
• Exercise: Build a WBS for the case study

Estimating Activity Duration, Resource Requirements and Cost

• Estimating techniques
• Reserve management
• Balance effort/duration and allocation
• Exercise: Determine approach for managing cost and schedule reserves

Constructing and Analyzing the Project Network

• Scheduling techniques
• Milestones and Gantt charts
• Network diagrams
• Exercise: Build a network diagram and use Microsoft^® Project to calculate critical path

Constructing and Analyzing the Project Network (cont.)

• Applying accelerating techniques
• Exercise: Compress a project schedule to meet a required completion date

Resource Leveling/Scheduling

• Using Microsoft^® Project for finding your schedule bottlenecks
• Resource scheduling and availability conflict management techniques
• Exercise: Resolve an over allocation problem using the least risk option

Monitor and Control Progress

• Measuring and reporting progress (project governance)
• Establishing a project dashboard
• Exercise: Design a dashboard report
• Earned value for tracking and forecasting time/cost
• Closing Exercise: How techniques learned can be applied upon return to the workplace

MDP515a Course Code