Overview:
The Challenge
Management teams commission projects to answer business needs and fulfill strategy. Put simply: successful projects are crucial to an organization’s growth and financial well-being. But projects can be difficult, with project failure an all too common occurrence. For example, Information Technology project failure rates approach 30% (Standish Group). This is simply unacceptable. We need a robust project management approach that will ensure successful delivery and provide the long-term project value that we need.
The Solution
Project Management Fundamentals builds on our one-day PM course with additional hands-on training in core project management concepts and techniques. The course extends PMBOK® concepts with supplemental, field-proven best practices that are designed to overcome common sources of project failure. Participants are shown how to write a convincing project charter, establish project control through careful scope definition and management, develop a comprehensive schedule and budget, report project status, minimize issues through proactive risk management, control costs and more. The importance of planning for post-project value (Project Value Management) is emphasized throughout this course.
The format includes a mixture of lecture, numerous exercises, and group discussions. All participants return to their workplace better equipped to bring their projects to a successful conclusion. Course topics include:
Sources of project success an
- Sources of project success and failure
- Product and project lifecycles
- Purpose of every project: Realization of Business Value
- Identifying, analyzing and managing stakeholders
- Providing estimates that work for you
- Project Charter: Building a strong project foundation
- Defining scope, schedule and budget
- Resource planning
- Planning for procurement
- Establishing effective communication
- Planning for long-term project value
- Building quality into deliverables
- Containing scope creep with effective change control
- Minimizing issues through proactive risk management
- Keeping management informed: status reports and forecasts
- Delivering the goods: Planning and executing an effective Transition
- Administrative and contract closure
- Lessons Learned
Audience:
This course is ideal for new project managers, functional managers, project team members and key project stakeholders. It can also provide a quick but in-depth look at project management practice for anyone with project responsibility.
Prerequisites:
This course assumes minimal experience with project work.
Related Courses
For a more in-depth study of critical Project Management concepts see:
Course duration:
2 days
Course Outline:
I. Introduction
- Sources of project success and failure
- The project environment
- Essential PM Concepts
- Project and product lifecycles
- Creating value after the project: Project Value Management
- PM Methodologies
II. Project Initiation
- Use and benefits of the Project Charter
- Identifying, analyzing and managing stakeholders
- Project constraints: keeping scope, time and cost in balance
- Creating useful estimates of time and cost
- Building a strong project foundation
III. Project Planning
- Defining Scope: Requirements and the WBS
- Scheduling and the Critical Path
- Resource planning: choosing the right team
- Budgeting and procurement
- Using deliverables quality to drive Business Value
- Strategies for effective project communication
- Minimizing issues with proactive risk management
- Setting project baselines
- Planning for long-term project value
IV. Execution and Control
- Building deliverables
- Status reports and forecasts
- Preventing scope creep: Tools and methods of change control
- Controlling cost and schedule
- Managing project baselines
- Transition: deployment to the customer
V. Successful Conclusion
- Executing the Business Value plan
- Contract and administrative closure
- Lessons Learned and continual improvement
Learning Approach:
- A highly experienced instructor will use interactive lecture format, hands-on exercises, group discussions, individual discovery and other techniques to drive home the essential points of this material
- We will build on your project experience while providing you with a structure and vocabulary to use in future projects.
- If you have modest project management knowledge, you will find that the clarity of the material and direct presentation style of the instructor will make the subject matter easy to understand.
- You will receive a Student Guide which will help you follow the material, take notes and retain what you learned so that you can apply it on your job.
Why should I take this course?:
- This course establishes the importance of keeping realization of Business Value as a primary focus of the project.
- New project managers will discover a vocabulary and framework that lends structure and perspective to the experience they already have.
- Project team members will find that the exercises in this course provide hands on experience with the primary techniques required to manage a project.
- All participants take home a set of tools and techniques to help them deal with all aspects of project planning and execution.
- Take this course and learn how to avoid many of the problems that project teams most often encounter.
Customize it!
- Are you new to project management? Would you like to put the experience you have in the perspective of a formal PM approach? Project Management Fundamentals presents a practical approach to defining projects and then taking them through the entire project lifecycle to a successful finish. Take home a whole new set of tools and techniques.
- Have you identified specific problems with project delivery in your organization? The content of this class can be delivered with special emphasis on those topics of greatest concern.
- Are you a manager, executive, or sales person whose work includes responsibility for project success? Take this course and learn what you can do to ensure that your projects get off to a strong start and complete with the delivery you need.
