Project Management Essentials

Complexity is the challenge in project management.  Therefore, simplicity and practicality must be the solution.   

Based on more than 25 years of experience with practical implementation of the formal Project Management Institute (PMI) process, this course gives you the essential information you need to understand what project management does, how it flows across the life-cycle, and the key steps you need to take to make your project successful.

     1.  Overview:   What project management fundamentally does.  The five stages of the formal process.  The most important concept in PM – the triple constraint.  The role of the Project Manager.

     2.  Initiation:  The purpose of initiation.  Baselining the first definition of your project’s scope – the Objective.

     3.  Planning:  A one page flowchart of the whole planning process.  The project scope baseline – the work breakdown structure.  The logic of the project – the precedence diagram.  The schedule baseline – the Gantt chart.  The cost breakdown.  Risk management.  Documentation of the Project Management Plan.

     4.  Execution:  The purpose of execution.  The essentials of building the best project team.

     5.  Monitoring & Control:  The purpose of monitoring and control.  Managing scope, schedule, cost, and risk.  The monthly project status review.

     6.  Closing.  The purpose of closing.  Wrapping up the project with a targeted final report.

If after taking this crash course you wish to dig deeper, feel free to check out my comprehensive course "Deeply Practical Project Management", which goes into much more detail on *how* to implement the PM processes in-depth.  Enjoy!

Instructor

William Stewart is a Project Management Institute certified Project Management Professional (PMP), has managed projects from $250K to $55M using the PMI processes, and served in senior management roles on projects up to $3B.  He has worked for large corporations, government, academia, and founded a software startup. He has hands-on experience with project management, risk management, systems integration, and software engineering.  He earned a Ph.D. in computer science for discovery of an algorithm that creates geodesic domes in multiple dimensions in optimum space and time.  He lives in Ottawa, Canada with his wife and two children.