The Complete Project Management Course - 20 PDUs

A project, per the PMBoK definition, is a temporary endeavor that produces a unique product, service, or result, with a defined start and end date, distinct from operations.

Define project management as the application of knowledge, skills, tools and techniques to satisfy project requirements, where project is a temporary endeavor to create a unique product, service, or result.

Discover what operations management is and how it differs from projects, focusing on the ongoing production of goods and services, resource acquisition, development, and utilization in a company.

Explore program management, where a large project is broken into sub projects with assigned managers, coordinated by a program manager to deliver interdependent benefits.

Understand how a portfolio unites projects and programs with operations to achieve long-term strategic goals, guided by a portfolio manager working with senior management and the CEO.

Learn to justify a project's initiation by showing its value to the company, whether through higher revenue, lower costs, better brand reputation, improved customer service, or new and improved products.

Projects enable changes by moving an organization from its current state to a desired state, driving product evolution, revenue growth, and improvements in personal life through targeted initiatives.

Learn how phases bundle related project activities to produce deliverables, the outputs of phases, which are unique products or results accepted by customers or sponsors.

Explore the project life cycle from initiation to closure, covering phases like initiation, design, code, test, and install, and how project managers tailor plan-driven, agile, or hybrid approaches.

Project governance provides a framework for project decisions through structure, people, and information. It is unique to organizations and guides decisions to initiate, speed up, terminate, or reallocate resources.

Identify stakeholders as individuals, groups, or organizations that may be affected or perceived to be affected by the project, positive or negative, including project manager, customer, sponsor, and project team.

Learn how a project manager alternates daily among initiator, negotiator, listener, coach, working member, and facilitator to drive planning, execution, and team collaboration.

Identify milestones and task duration to schedule projects; learn that milestones are zero-duration, significant events like permit approval or passing a test, while tasks have defined durations.

Explore organizational structures from functional to project-oriented and matrix, including weak and strong matrix and hybrids, and understand how structure shapes project manager power, resources, and budgets.

Traditional project sponsors act as the boss, funding the project and deciding on changes and budget; Program managers oversee multiple projects, with project managers reporting to them.

Learn how to define scope, set schedule and budget, ensure quality, manage people and material resources, and integrate communications, engagement, risk, and procurement to deliver a successful project.

Understand how a project management office standardizes processes and shares knowledge across projects in large organizations. Discover PMO types—supportive, controller, and directive—and how they guide project managers.

Product management governs the product life cycle from conception to retirement, including market needs and requirements, design, development, launch, and updates. Project management delivers defined projects within scope and budget.

Identify risk, issues, assumptions, and constraints; maintain a risk register and an issue log to plan responses and keep project delivery on track.

Identify and manage the six project constraints—scope, schedule, cost, risks, quality, and resources—to protect customer satisfaction and keep projects on track.

Master emotional intelligence to recognize, understand, and manage emotions in yourself and others, enabling effective people management, relationship building, and conflict resolution in project management.

Compare leadership and management, and learn to apply the right approach in projects, with leadership for evolving scopes and management for defined goals.

Explore traditional project management, also known as waterfall or predictive. Define scope upfront, plan completely before execution, and minimize changes to avoid scope creep.

Explore predictive project management, using 49 processes across five process groups from PMI's Process Group or Practice Guide, and learn when to apply predictive versus adaptive approaches as best practices.

Discover the 49 processes of traditional predictive project management across five process groups. Learn to identify and apply these good practices—tailored for exams and real-life projects—emphasizing understanding over memorization.

Explore the five process groups—initiating, planning, executing, monitoring and controlling, and closing—and how they flow from authorizing the project to delivering the deliverable and closing the project.

Explore the inputs, tools and techniques, and outputs that drive the 49 project management processes, with emphasis on common ITTO patterns, templates, and expert judgment.

Enterprise environmental factors, internal and external, influence project plans and outcomes, not part of the project itself, as inputs to many processes and shaping governance, culture, and regulations.

Explore organization process assets (OPA) as templates and inputs provided by the business, including software, knowledge bases, and lessons learned, stored in a central repository and updated with project insights.

Discover project documents and the project management plan across 49 processes, learn about 33 document types and 18 plan components, and see how outputs become inputs.

Explore how the project management plan defines how to execute, monitor, control, and close a project, detailing quality, people, vendors, and risk, with 18 components and 49 processes.

Expert judgment serves as a common tool across the 49 project management processes, relying on subject matter experts to help plan, estimate timelines, and execute, monitor, and close tasks.

Master data gathering, analysis, representation, and decision making to manage projects using charts, trends, variances, and multi-criteria analysis.

Develop strong interpersonal and team skills to manage people across all 49 project processes, mastering active listening, conflict management, facilitation, and effective meetings.

Facilitate meetings with stakeholders, plan agendas, time topics, gather input, keep discussions on topic, and publish detailed minutes to produce useful outputs.

PMIs, or project management information systems, are the automated tools you use to manage schedules, documents, and deliverables, with work authorization and configuration management. They vary by organization.

Discover how change requests drive updates to the project management plan, baselines, and deliverables, and learn to apply corrective actions, preventive actions, and defect repair when needed.

Analyze work performance data from project execution, convert it into information by comparing with the plan, and compile a comprehensive work performance report for monitoring and controlling.

Learn how updates serve as a catch-all output across processes, guiding the revision of organization process assets, enterprise environmental factors, project documents, and the project management plan.

Develop the project charter to formally authorize a project, empower the project manager, and define high-level scope, budget, and schedule using business documents, agreements, and an assumption log.

Identify and map project stakeholders using stakeholder analysis, power–interest grids, and salience models to build a comprehensive stakeholder register for engagement and communication.

Develop a comprehensive project management plan by integrating the 23 planning processes, defining baselines and 14 subsidiary plans, and treating management plans as how-to documents for execution, monitoring, and closing.

Plan scope management teaches how to define, validate, and control product and project scope, and to create a scope management plan that prevents scope creep and gold plating.

Collect and document stakeholder requirements before planning. Use brainstorming, prototyping, mind maps, and traceability matrices to define scope, budget, and schedule, ensuring project success.

Define scope by creating a detailed scope statement that outlines project deliverables, what work is included or excluded, and constraints, reducing scope creep.

Explore the work breakdown structure (WBS) and how it decomposes deliverables from the scope statement into work packages and control accounts, aided by the WBS dictionary and scope baseline.

Define the schedule management plan by establishing policies and procedures to plan, develop, manage, execute, and control the schedule, including agile iterations, tailored to each organization and project type.

Define activities by decomposing deliverables from the scope into work packages and then into detailed activities, producing an activity list, attributes, and milestones to build the schedule.

Learn how to sequence project activities by arranging an activity list into a logical order using relationships, dependencies, and leads or lags, illustrated with a network diagram.

Estimate activity durations for project scheduling using expert judgment and work period definitions, applying analogous, bottom-up, parametric, and three-point (PERT) techniques to determine duration and basis of the estimate.

Learn the PERT formula, a three-point estimate using optimistic, realistic, and pessimistic values. Use it to estimate activity duration and cost in project management.

Create the full project schedule by sequencing activities, assigning durations, applying the critical path method and resource leveling, and using what-if scenarios to generate plan dates and baselines.

Learn the critical path method (CPM) to build schedules, compute the critical path and float, and identify high-risk activities, with notes on manual versus software calculations like Microsoft Project.

Learn the critical path method within schedule management by building network diagrams of activities. Draw diagrams, identify parallel tasks, and connect start to finish to reinforce planning concepts.

Identify the critical path by evaluating all start-to-finish paths and durations; the longest path—A, B, C, and E at 11 days—has no float, while the other path lasts 10 days.

Learn to calculate float and slack using early and late start/finish in project networks, identify critical path, and perform forward and backward passes.

Execute the forward pass by applying the easy formulas to determine early start and early finish, and identify the critical path in the diagram.

Master the backward pass in project scheduling by calculating late starts and finishes, identifying the critical path, and assessing float or slack, using the same formula as the forward pass.

Learn the difference between total float and free float in project diagrams, and master calculating free float with early start and finish, using examples from activities a through d.

practice drawing a CPM diagram with activities A through E, perform forward and backward passes, identify the critical path (A-B-C-E), and calculate total and free floats for activity D.

In this CPM practice video, learn to tackle a complex project diagram by identifying the critical path and performing forward and backward passes to compute the float of activity G.

Master the critical path by performing forward and backward passes to reveal the path with zero slack, compute float, and navigate diagrams with multiple paths.

Plan cost management by creating a tailored cost management plan that guides how to estimate, budget, and control project costs, including value engineering and fixed, variable, direct, indirect, sunk costs.

Develop cost estimates for project activities by applying the cost management plan and estimating labor, materials, equipment, facilities, and financing, with progressive elaboration increasing accuracy.

Aggregate activity costs to form the cost baseline from work packages, including contingency and management reserves, then monitor performance by comparing actual costs against the budget.

Plan quality management to identify quality requirements, set standards, and define how to meet and measure them with quality metrics, balancing prevention, inspection, and cost considerations.

Plan resource management by defining how to estimate, acquire, and use team and physical resources. Use a resource management plan, RACI charts, and team charter to clarify roles and ramp-up.

Estimate activity resources to determine what and how many resources are needed to complete each activity, using bottom-up, analogous, or parametric methods.

Develop a stakeholder-focused communication management plan by analyzing needs, channels, and formats. Learn to select technologies, methods, and roles to ensure timely, effective project communications.

Explore how to plan and manage risk in projects by identifying, assessing, and responding to individual and overall risks, including risk appetite, categories, and monitoring.

Identify and document project risks using a risk register and risk report, employing tools like prompt lists, risk breakdown structures, and SWOT analyses to capture negative and positive risks.

Identify and prioritize project risks with qualitative risk analysis by evaluating probability and impact, then update the risk register and project documents using a risk matrix and ensuring data quality.

Perform quantitative risk analysis assigns monetary value to ranked risks using EMV and probability distributions, guiding budget impact assessments and decision-making with tornado charts.

Plan risk response by reviewing the risk management plan, identifying and ranking risks, and updating the risk register while selecting strategies such as avoid, mitigate, transfer, accept, or exploit.

Learn plan procurement management by defining written vendor agreements, deciding what to procure and when, choosing contract types, and using market research, make-or-buy analysis, and bid documents.

Develop a stakeholder engagement plan to keep all stakeholders engaged, using a stakeholder engagement assessment matrix and a communication management plan with methods like product demos and weekly meetings.

Review the 24 planning processes and 18 components of the project management plan, including scope, schedule, and cost baselines, and prepare for execution with monitoring and control.

In the executing phase, start the work using ten processes such as direct and manage project work, manage knowledge and quality, and handle communications, risk, procurement, and stakeholders.

Direct and manage project work executes the project per the management plan, manages people, and implements approved changes, delivering deliverables and capturing work performance data.

Capture lessons learned throughout the project to transform explicit and tacit knowledge into actionable insights, and share and store them using the lesson learned register and knowledge management.

Manage quality translates the quality management plan into executable activities, ensuring teams follow processes to meet quality objectives, identify ineffective processes and causes of poor quality, and produce quality reports.

Acquire resources emphasizes continuous selection and allocation of physical and team resources, including virtual teams, using multi-criteria analysis to choose vendors or staff, and maintaining resource calendars and assignments.

Develop your team through Tuckman's five stages—forming, storming, norming, performing, adjourning—using co-location or virtual settings to build a high-performing project team. Master motivation theories and team assessments to optimize outcomes.

Manage a high-performance team by tracing performance, giving feedback, and resolving issues amid conflicts through strong communication and leadership. Apply conflict management and problem solving with Ishikawa diagrams.

Execute the project communications plan by delivering timely information through established channels, monitor communications, and manage storage and retrieval while applying soft skills for clear stakeholder updates.

Implement risk responses during project execution by applying preplanned responses to identified risks, updating the risk register and issue log to minimize threats and maximize opportunities.

Select a qualified seller and award the contract after evaluating proposals, bids, and independent cost estimates, using procurement documentation and bid documents to guide the process.

Execute the stakeholder engagement plan by communicating with stakeholders through demos, meetings, and direct conversations to meet expectations. Adjust methods via the team charter or ground rules if engagement wanes.

Review the executing processes, including integration, managing project knowledge, quality, acquiring resources, developing the team, resolving conflicts, communications, risk response, procurement, and stakeholder engagement, to prepare for monitoring and controlling.

learn how to monitor and control a project in parallel with execution, checking scope, schedule, budget, quality, resources, communications, risks, and vendor engagement to keep work on plan.

Track and review project work within the integration process to keep scope, schedule, budget, and quality on plan, using work performance data to produce reports and trigger change requests.

Master integrated change control by submitting and assessing change requests from stakeholders, updating the project management plan and documents, and obtaining approval from the change control board.

Explore the validate scope process, where sponsors and customers test deliverables, grant formal acceptance, and guide change requests after quality checks and verification.

Keep a project on scope, schedule, and budget by comparing plan work to actual work, managing scope creep with change requests, and applying variance analysis for corrective actions.

Master earned value management with cost and scheduling formulas that show over or under budget, behind schedule, and forecast final costs, preparing you for PMP and CAPM exams.

Learn earned value management through formulas that measure cost and schedule progress by comparing planned work to actual work, with exam-focused practice scenarios.

Explore earned value management formulas including PV, EV, AC, CV, CPI, SV, SPI, EAC, ETC, VAC, TCPI, and BAC, with scenarios to compute and interpret progress, cost, and schedule.

Explore earned value management concepts in a practical scenario, calculating pv, ev, ac, cv, cpi, sv, and spi to forecast eac, etc., and tcpi for budget and schedule insight.

Explore earned value management in scenario 2: a four-year, $4,000 network upgrade with 17 months elapsed, 35% complete, $1,500 spent; calculate EV, PV, AC, EAC, ETC, and TCPI.

Apply earned value management formulas to assess budget and schedule: EV, AC, PV, CPI, SV, SPI, EAC, ETC, VAC, and TCPI, then forecast completion and variances.

Discover easy memorization tips for earned value management formulas, covering PV, EV, BAC, AC, CV, CPI, SPI, SV, VAC, EAC, ETC, TCPI, and how to apply them in project forecasting.

Control quality inspects deliverables from execution to verify they meet quality requirements and stakeholder needs, producing verified deliverables; use inspections, tests, and charts to fix any nonconformities.

Control resources by managing physical resources—materials, equipment, facilities, and tools—through planning, monitoring work performance data, and data analysis to maximize efficiency, since the process concerns physical resources, not people.

Monitor communications compares planned communications against what actually happened, ensuring stakeholder needs are met and guiding changes to the communication management plan for project success.

Monitor risk continuously, 24/7, to identify new and changing threats. Update the risk register, reassess responses for seasonal changes, and apply change requests for new risks.

Learn to manage vendor performance through controlled procurements by inspecting work, auditing contract compliance, resolving claims via negotiation, and closing procurements with formal sign-offs.

Monitor stakeholder engagement by comparing the engagement plan with actual activities, assess plan adequacy, and implement change requests to improve engagement through product reviews, walkthroughs, meetings, and one-on-one discussions.

Close the project or phase by formalizing activities, securing acceptance of deliverables, transferring them to operations, documenting lessons learned, and reassigning personnel, closing contracts, and archiving records.