Individuals who undergo the training are equipped with the practical skills and applicable tools to lead projects from ideation stage, through planning, execution, monitoring and control and closure to achieve the project objectives and create value for organizations. It also covers the agile methodology – introducing participants to developing product roadmaps, prioritization methods for a product backlog, managing/executing work through SCRUM and kanban practices, and measuring value delivery through agile reporting.

Fundamentals of project management is a practical course conducted over a period of 4 weeks either as in person classes or in a virtual mode.

Training Methodology: Participants are provided with training materials including instructional slides, workbooks and templates.  Case studies and role playing are used to simulate real workplace situations.

Course Coverage:

Topic 1. The Project Management Framework

This topic provides a detailed introduction to project management, the roles and responsibilities of the project team and project methodologies, including Traditional/Waterfall, Agile, and hybrid methodologies. Participants will practically explore what happens at each stage of the project life cycle as well as the importance of tailoring processes to fit their own project context.

Sub-topics:

  • Defining a project and understanding why projects are initiated.
  • Understanding the different roles on a project team.
  • The project life cycle.
  • Developing a Project Charter – a formal project initiating document (PID).
  • What constitutes project planning documentation.
  • Agile project management – product vision, product roadmap, release planning, sprint planning and daily planning.

This topic provides the information needed to start a project. Some critical elements to establish at the beginning of any project include creating a business case to justify the project for your organization, identifying your stakeholders and a plan to manage them, defining the project requirements that must be accounted for, and setting up a project team with the characteristics needed to support and complete this specific project.

This topic covers key components of project planning and documentation. Participants will learn the process of defining the scope of a project and creating work packages for waterfall and hybrid methods as well as backlog refinement and prioritization for agile.

Sub-topics:

  • Collecting and documenting product and project requirements. 
  • Defining the project scope. 
  • Creating a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS).
  • Agile planning stages – developing user stories, the product backlog, the sprint backlog and increments.

To meet stakeholder requirements and successfully complete a project, project managers need to be mindful of the schedule – activity timelines. In this topic, participants will learn how to estimate a timeline and develop integrated schedules and milestones, calculate critical path, and track project performance and value delivery for benefit realization.

Sub-topics:

  • Define Activities – identifying all project activities from the WBS/scope baseline.
  • Sequence Activities – developing a logical order of performing project activities.
  • Estimate Activity Duration – applying different techniques to estimate activity durations.
  • Develop Schedule – using dependencies to effectively develop a project schedule.
  • Control Schedule – tracking and managing schedule changes against the baseline.
  • Agile – Kanban chart, Burndown/Burnup charts, Sprint velocity.

In this topic, participants will learn how plan and manage project resources – physical and human resources. Techniques for conflict management and problem solving, virtual team management, and team empowerment and motivation skills in order to serve as effective project leaders.

Sub-topics:    

  • Defining team roles and responsibilities – project organizational chart and resource assignments.
  • Estimating types and quantities of the human and physical.
  • Defining the appropriate mode of resource acquisition.
  • Building and supporting project teams.
  • Agile – scrum roles and ceremonies.
  • Agile – team collaboration, agile work spaces and decision-making techniques.

In this topic, participants will learn how to estimate activity costs, calculate approximate costs for work packages, establish a project budget, and track project cost performance and value for money.

Sub-topics:    

  • Estimating Costs – applying different techniques to estimate project activity costs.
  • Determining Budget – aggregating cost estimates/reserves to determine project budget/cost baseline.
  • Controlling Costs – tracking and managing scope changes against the baseline.
  • Agile estimating – T shirt sizing and story point sizing.

In this topic, participants get involved in designing quality management processes and exploring how quality audits and quality control are performed. 

Sub-topics:

  • Setting quality goals – putting project quality objectives and requirements in place – understanding and documenting the customer’s expectations of product quality; developing a description of how quality is handled at project level based on customer requirements. 
  • Controlling Quality – carrying out activities such as inspection, testing and verification as a means of ensuring that the specified quality criteria is met.
  • Agile – Sprint review; the definition of ready and definition of done.

In this topic, participants will learn how to deal with uncertainty in project activities. All project management activities can be considered as managing risk, but the risk management process is a specific set of activities performed consciously to identify and manage risks on the project.

Sub-topics: 

  • Identifying Risks – determining which risks may affect the project activities and documenting their characteristics.
  • Analyzing Risk – determining what impact the identified risks will have on the project objectives such as time, budget and quality and the probability that they will occur.
  • Implementing Risk Responses – proactively implementing actions in response to risks.
  • Agile – Impediment detection and removal in daily stand-ups and sprint reviews.

Projects involve multiple stakeholders.  This topic introduces participants on how to iteratively identify and assess stakeholders, and developed appropriate stakeholder engagement plans.

Sub-topics: 

  • Identifying project stakeholders and documenting their expectations.
  • Developing a stakeholder engagement plan – continuous and effective communication.
  • The roles of product owner and customers in giving frequent feedback as well as making changes.

Sub-topics:

  • Developing a procedure for managing changes – change requests, assessment of changes and approvals or rejection.
  • Reasons why projects may come to a closure – successful completion or premature closure.
  • The key processes during project closure – formal acceptance of deliverable and releasing the project team.

This course introduces participants in a practical way to the Microsoft Project scheduling tool in planning and controlling projects

The participants are introduced to:

  • Using the software to plan, schedule, assign project resources and costs, and employ MS Project to manage and control resources. During this course, participants will follow a hands-on instructor led demo.
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