Advanced Project Management (1/4): Project Initiation

Discover the history and core concepts of project management, from ancient pyramids to modern techniques like program evaluation and review technique (pert) and the product management body of knowledge.

Explore the current state of project management through real-case failures and Standish group data, highlighting how executive support, defined requirements, planning, and user involvement drive success.

Advanced project management (1/4): project initiation shows that projects are highly complex, with evolving requirements and high costs of mistakes, demanding cross-department collaboration.

Invest in project management when projects significantly impact the business. Use the project triangle—scope, time, cost—to balance delivery across functional and productized structures and guide portfolio decisions.

explores the responsibilities of the project manager from scope management, time management, budget, risk, and quality management to stakeholder and communications management planning.

During initiation, craft a concise project charter outlining scope, quality, time, and cost, apply smart methods, assess risks and feasibility, and map stakeholders and sponsors.

Define the project charter by identifying the problem or opportunity and setting clear objectives. Smart criteria—specific, measurable, assignable, realistic, time-related—to write precise, achievable, and time-bound goals.

Explore rough order of magnitude budgeting and scheduling for project initiation, including headcount by discipline, total cost, and project duration, with real-world examples and uncertainty ranges.

Explore estimates and probabilities in project initiation, including a nine-month fair estimate, a 50 percent on-time likelihood, optimism bias, and using ranges to communicate risk and priorities to stakeholders.

Explore how to build a comprehensive stakeholder register to capture impacts and ensure feasibility analysis using financial methods like NPV, IRR, and payback, with practical examples.

Explore why purely financial models are unreliable and apply a five-criterion PPM scoring model—strategic fit, resources, technical feasibility, financial value, and risk.

Identify and assess project risks and apply response strategies such as mitigation, avoidance, acceptance, and transfer. Explore how assumptions, constraints, and project portfolio management influence feasibility and decision making.

Review real-life project charters for a bank crm implementation, detailing problem opportunities, high-level scope, data clean-up, data warehouse integration, key modules, sop updates, training, budget and timeline, and stakeholder roles.

Examine how a government-mandated mobile number portability project expands from a basic scope to a full charter, detailing features, budget, timeline, risk, and stakeholder roles.

Wrap up this module by guiding you to write a project charter with problem statements, objectives, scope, stakeholder register, feasibility, risk management, and scoring models for project portfolios.