Course Description
Applied Project Management
Master both the art and the science of project management to produce reliable project plans, schedules, and cost estimates - With content aligned with both the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide) - Fourth Edition and the IIBA BABOK® v2.0
This applied project management training course will teach you how to:
- Take the methods, approaches, and theory and apply them to run real-world projects successfully
- Understand how to effectively establish stakeholder expectations
- Utilize exterior estimating models
- Incorporate analysis tools in the development of Use Cases and the Project Scope Baseline
- Pull consensus numbers from differing experts
- Extract risk estimates from SME time estimates
- Estimate contingencies for individual tasks or activities, and for your project as a whole
- Apply resources to your schedule, and understand their cost and time ramifications
- Proactively identify estimating risks
- Use real-world results to your budget in order to reliably estimate future costs
- Build critical metrics and use them to manage your projects
The ability to effectively and reliably plan your project is one of the key elements needed for project success.
A recent survey of over 8,300 IT projects that were undertaken by 365 different companies makes the problem clear - only 16% of these projects were completed on-time and on-budget. An earlier survey of over 1,000 general projects found only slightly more than 12% were considered successful.
Projects don't fail at the end, they fail at the beginning.
Projects often fail because the key stakeholders (customers, project managers, and sponsors) are unable to translate their expectations into usable project requirements. As a result, this effectively prevents the production of usable time and cost estimates. Fixing issues arising from planning shortfalls is expensive, but preventing them with proven scope, cost, time, and risk estimating and management techniques isn't. By learning and implementing the key skills taught in this course, you can significantly increase your project's chances of meeting scope, finishing on time, and controlling costs within budget.
Theory and methods are good, but proven and practical tools and techniques equate to success.
In Applied Project Management you will learn real-world tools and techniques and put them to immediate use. This course will give you practical experience with proven tools and techniques for reliably estimating your next project's scope, costs, schedule, and risk.
There is both an art and a science to managing a project. The BA owns the art: eliciting and defining the need. The PM owns the science: cost, schedule, and risk estimates of meeting the need. Achieving success requires effective planning and working together. This class will teach you how to do both successfully AND efficiently.
Immediate Benefits of Taking Applied Project Management:
- Use Function Point Analysis to measure the size and complexity of your project
- Develop Use Cases that can be used to identify project requirements and time and cost estimates
- Calculate the duration of your project using empirically proven estimation methods
- Establish baseline staffing requirements for your project
- Analyze Project Risks both qualitatively and quantitatively
- Factor Risk Analysis into your project estimations of time and cost in terms of person-days and dollars
- Create a Network Dependency Diagram to identify the Critical Path and the Critical Chain
- Create and utilize a time-phased budget (Cost Baseline) for your project
- Use Earned Value Technique (EVT) to track your project's progress and identify specific trouble areas
- Revise budget-at-completion numbers to reflect the to-date efficiencies (or inefficiencies) of your project
- Use decision analysis to determine proper strategies while at the same time using sensitivity analysis to judge the quality of your decision
- Create strategies to effectively deal with both positive and negative risks to the project
- Effectively establish expectations - what your customer expects from you and what you expect from your sponsor
- Apply Monte Carlo analysis methods to your project’s estimates to significantly increase the reliability of those estimates
- Identify those risks which are most common to your type of project
- Present time and cost estimates to the customer, to upper-level management, and to your project sponsor that accurately represent the level of risk for the project
- Manage your project's critical path in order to ensure proper resource allocation throughout the project
- Use linear programming to determine which activities may be crashed for maximum cost effectiveness
- Utilize the critical chain method to eliminate common estimating problems and produce a more reliable estimate
- Understand how to manage project constraints in order to meet the customer's expectations
In-Class Workshops and Group Exercises - Applied Project Management:
Draw from the best practices of PMI® and the IIBA® — Harness this combined experience in just three days.
You'll gain a practical understanding of how project requirements and estimation fit within the project management processes. Lively lectures are interspersed with insightful exercises that will immediately add important project estimation and management tools to your skill set. You'll also gain the ability to add value to your planning process through the proactive use of Project Risk Management Planning. Create the reliable scope, cost performance, and schedule baselines (the first time) that your project needs in order to maximize its chances for success. Regardless of your organization's environment, you can't afford to miss this course! Specifically, you will learn:
Stakeholder Analysis Techniques
Exterior Estimating for Determining Resource Requirements & Project Duration
Function-Point Analysis with Use Cases
Employing Use Cases in Requirements Gathering and Estimating
Delphi Analysis
Determining Critical Path & Critical Chain
Qualitative & Quantitative Risk Analysis
Sensitivity Analysis
The Time-Phased Cost Budgeting
Earned-Value Analysis
Be prepared to crunch the numbers!
Substitution & Cancellation Policy:
You may cancel or reschedule up to 21 days prior to the start date of the class at no penalty. For any cancellation or reschedule requests within 21 days, the full course tuition is still due and not eligible for refund. Any paid tuition will be credited towards a future class and must be used within 12 months.
*Partner delivered courses may be subject to different cancellation terms