Advanced Project Management (2/4): Project Planning

Define and manage project scope by emphasizing requirements elicitation and stakeholder involvement, producing clear requirements documents, and aligning SME input with the project manager.

Explore how to elicit and analyze requirements early to protect schedule and budget, avoid vague specifications, and reduce change costs by prioritizing must, should, and nice-to-have features.

Run regular peer reviews and technical reviews during requirements gathering to catch mistakes early, discuss what-if scenarios, and confirm feasibility, traceability, and prioritization with customers and technical teams.

Explore how creativity and innovation shape modern product management, focusing on defining problems, generating multiple solutions in initiation, and using portfolio management to select winning ideas.

Learn to create a software requirements specification for an airport check-in kiosk, covering revision history, sign-off, scope, user classes, and key features like traveler identification and boarding pass printing.

Map the 0.3 mobile number portability specification to requirements across IT, networks, value-added services, and customer care for tariff changes, risk analysis, SOP-driven processes, and call center capacity expansion.

Design a West Coast style Energy Star certified home by translating energy efficiency into 13 design attributes, from insulation and vapor barriers to HRV and energy-saving windows.

Recap module on project planning and the cost of early mistakes, highlighting the PMA's role in requirements and the value of elicitation, reviews, and creativity.

Delve into project time management concepts like work breakdown structure, network diagrams, wideband Delphi estimates, and resource leveling, with PMI phase guidance and practical work elements and work packages.

Explore a real-world work breakdown structure for mobile number portability, detailing stakeholder meetings, requirements elicitation, peer reviews, sign-offs, and the creation of a full project plan.

Explore network diagrams and Gantt chart basics, defining predecessors, successors, and independent tasks; learn to identify the critical path and compute float using early and late times.

Learn network diagrams and Gantt chart methods to compute early and late start/finish times, identify the critical path and floats, and map tasks to resources with a simple RAM.

Discover how resource leveling smooths resource usage by adjusting activity timing or delaying work, reducing costs and improving planning and cash flow through the critical path and float insights.

Explore schedule constrained leveling, enforcing rules that prevent delaying critical activities and permit only slack-tolerated non-critical tasks. Use early-start baselines and iterative delays of largest float to smooth resource usage.

Apply resource constrained leveling to smooth workloads within a fixed headcount, moving slack to early start, analyzing high resource usage, and delaying tasks to meet a 10-person limit.

Explore how Wideband Delphi drives collaborative task estimation in project planning. Apply three-point estimates and mean and standard deviation to quantify duration and cost.

Identify common estimation oversights and apply checks like buffers, vacation planning, and overhead, then engage the team to refine estimates using ranges and confidence factors.

Explore project cost management planning, establishing cost baselines and budgets, and applying bottom-up and parametric estimation, expert judgment, and engineering economics to compare alternatives and contingencies.

Explore time cost trade-offs and crashing to minimize total project costs, balancing variable and overhead costs, with practical examples and how to present a project budget and plan.