Project Management: Intermediate Skills (4 day)

Course Overview

As an effective project manager, you organise scarce resources, work under tight deadlines, control project change and generate maximum team performance. Through a simulated case study, you learn how to successfully plan, manage and deliver projects. You also learn how to implement project management processes, develop leadership skills and respond to real-world scenarios. At the end of the course, you take away templates and checklists for use back at the office.

Audience

Individuals who need to strengthen their project management skill sets, those new to project management, or project managers seeking a refresher on fundamental project management knowledge, skills and tools.

Skills Gained

You Will Learn How To

• Produce a project plan to ensure successful delivery and stakeholder satisfaction
• Plan and run projects using best practices in a 6-step project management process
• Implement risk management techniques and mitigation strategies
• Estimate and schedule task work and duration with confidence
• Implement monitoring tools and controls to keep you fully in command of the project
• Recognise and practise the leadership skills needed to run a motivated team

Course Outline

Introduction

• Managing the project processes
• Creating high-confidence plans
• Working within project constraints

Launching Your Project

Applying a project framework for success

• Identifying the project life cycle stages
• Working with the challenges of project management
• Selecting and applying best practices

Core project leadership skills

• Identifying stages of team development
• Building and managing team effectiveness

Building a project charter

• Defining clear project objectives
• Determining and clarifying the goals
• Defining key project deliverables
• Running the objective-setting meeting
• Gaining buy-in from stakeholders

The 6-Step Planning Method

Defining the project workload

• Determining project scope with work breakdown structures (WBSs)
• Driving the plan down to task level
• Calculating a first cut of project costs

Building high-confidence estimates

• Three ways to make better estimates
• Three-point estimating to refine accuracy
• Managing the estimating process

Scheduling the project

• Converting WBS to precedence networks
• Determining the critical path
• Calculating the project duration

Scheduling the project

• Converting WBS to precedence networks
• Determining the critical path tasks
• Creating dependency diagrams
• Calculating the project duration

Creating the project timeline

• Building Gantt charts
• Using slack effectively in the schedule
• Setting key milestones to track and control the project

Developing a risk management process

• Identifying the project risks and assumptions
• Evaluating risk impacts
• Strategies for managing risks
• Managing key risks with the Risk Register
• Reducing risks through contingency plans

Effectively matching resources to work

• Identifying resources
• Assigning resources to tasks
• Analysing resource use in the schedule
• Optimising the use of resources
• Preparing and agreeing on task contracts

Running the Project

Establishing an effective control process

• Establishing change control procedures
• Presenting the project plan for approval
• Setting the baseline schedule

Implementing the plan

• Monitoring actual task progress
• Analysing progress against the baseline
• Correcting the project plan to achieve the objectives
• Picking up warnings of trouble ahead
• Engaging team members to maximise productivity

Tracking and reporting progress

• Tracking planned vs. actual task performance
• Crashing the critical path tasks
• Analysing the impact of variation to the baseline plan
• Avoiding the 90-percent-complete trap
• Correcting the schedule

Leading throughout the project life cycle

• Communicating project status to stakeholders
• Coping with common project scenarios
• Building ownership, motivation and commitment across the team

Successful Project Closure

• Managing systematic project close down
• The payoff of post-implementation review
• Documenting project experience for process improvement

Project Management: Intermediate Skills (4 day) / PMIS3