Project Management: Schedules and Budgets

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Course Overview

A key component of business success is delivering projects rapidly and cost effectively. Project managers must balance resources, budget and schedule constraints, and ever-increasing customer expectations.

Working in a simulated project environment, you gain solid budget and schedule management skills. You build and manage realistic project schedules and budgets, identify resource needs, build detailed WBSs and network diagrams, and report project status to stakeholders using EVA. At the end of the course, you take away templates and worksheets for use back at the office.

Audience

• This course is for those responsible for managing project time and cost and those who wish to enhance their scheduling and budgeting skills
• Project management knowledge at the level of Course 296
• Project Management: Skills for Success, or Course 340
• Project Management for Software Development is strongly recommended.

Skills Gained

• Build schedules and budgets that transform project constraints into project success
• Construct Work Breakdown Structures (WBS) and network diagrams and estimate task durations
• Calculate Critical Path and optimise your project plan
• Allocate costs and chart expected cash flow
• Assign resources effectively and respond to end-date changes
• Perform Earned Value Analysis (EVA) to keep the project on track

Course Outline

Introduction

• Defining schedule and costs
• Building a plan from earliest completion date
• Comparing estimates to actuals and revising your plan

Best Practices for Project Planning

Building the foundation

• Generating your WBS
• Developing a goal-oriented focus
• Identifying the appropriate level of detail

Diagramming network relationships

• Reviewing network diagrams: CPM, PERT and PDM
• Establishing dependencies
• Determining lead and lag times
• Constructing PERT diagrams

Developing Realistic Estimates

Choosing the right estimating model

• Engaging subject-matter experts: the Delphi technique
• Preparing analogous and parametric estimates
• Contrasting bottom-up and top-down methods
• Applying Rough Order of Magnitude (ROM)

Dealing with uncertainty

• Formulating three-point estimates
• Factoring in contingency

Integrating the Schedule and Critical Path

Computing the Critical Path

• Adding task durations to determine path lengths
• Identifying critical, near-critical and non-critical paths
• Prioritising your management time

Creating Gantt charts

• Building Gantt charts following industry standards
• Representing the relative durations of tasks graphically

Fine-tuning your plan

• Deriving and utilising float
• Planning delivery by applying earliest start times
• Optimising the plan using latest start times
• Adapting to sudden change

Building a Budget

Categorising project costs

• Identifying direct and indirect cost elements
• Itemising capital expenses

• Costing based on WBS tasks

Graphical modelling of costs

• Adding costs to the Gantt chart
• Determining expected cash flow

Realistic Resourcing

Schedules that make sense

• Factoring in productivity
• Allocating resources effectively
• Baselining your plan

Responding to delivery-date changes

• Crashing the Critical Path
• Leveraging Goldratt's Critical Chain

Measuring and Improving Performance

Monitoring your plan

• Recording actual durations
• Tracking cash flow
• Assessing and summarising project status

Performing EVA

• Calculating schedule and budget efficiency
• Quantifying cost and schedule variance
• Projecting impact on project outcomes
• Mapping EVA to cost accounting
• Reconciling and addressing project issues

Communicating with Stakeholders

• Incorporating inbound information into outbound reports
• Applying the right level of precision

Project Management: Schedules and Budgets / 248