Introduction to Project Management

Explore the realities of project management, where the manager bears ultimate responsibility despite limited authority, and learn practical tools to deliver business results in challenging environments.

Develop tools to manage small to medium projects under five million dollars with up to 100 resources, and master crucial communication to drive project success.

Explore how project success rates evolved from 1994 to 2012, defined by on-time, on-budget delivery with required features, and how Standish group data and agile prioritization of requirements shape outcomes.

Learn about PMI certifications such as CAPM, PMP, ACP, and PgMP, plus alternatives from APM and Scrum, and how to earn hours and prepare for 150-question exams.

The spontaneous approach champions freedom from constraints, multitasking across many tasks, and feelings driven decisions, aligning with fox-like quick insight and hedgehog-like deep dives when time allows.

The methodical approach emphasizes order and a step-by-step planning process, requiring pre-planning, tangible proof, and a puzzle-like fit of details before acting.

Explore how four approaches shape five roles in project management—from creator to advancer's to finers to executer—and how a project manager balances these roles and pipelines to deliver results.

Navigate the pep cycle of project work, moving ideas from creator to advancer to project manager, preventing paralysis by analysis and delivering the right business result.

Explore the five dysfunctions of a team—absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results—through a practical allegory for project teams.

Identify absence of trust in teams and gauge it with a 15-question live survey. Promote ownership, share mistakes, assume positive intent, know the numbers, and stay directionally correct.

Address absence of trust by using personal history exercises to reveal experiences, adopt team building routines, and leverage profiles and 360-degree feedback to improve understanding and collaboration.

Explore how the view of conflict evolved from a dysfunction to an inevitable part of organizational interaction, and how differences can drive beneficial outcomes when managed through problem solving.

Identify the five conflict resolution modes in project management—withdrawal, smoothing, compromise, forcing, and confrontation or problem solving—and note that confrontation is the preferred approach for finding the right answer.

Discover how inattention to results undermines team growth, alignment, and retention by ensuring individuals and the organization row in the same direction toward shared objectives.

Learn to improve listening in project management by setting ego aside and asking clarifying questions. Prove understanding, clarify acronyms and terms, and engage teams with games and constructive questioning.

Project managers must ensure message understanding, as words account for 7 percent while tone and nonverbal cues carry 93 percent; use communication methods beyond email to improve clarity.

Learn to craft professional emails and navigate design conversations by offering alternatives. Practice using substitution to vary vocabulary, reduce anger, and improve collaboration with designers.

Develop effective meeting discipline by using two 10-minute status models that require standing, no devices, and focus on hours completed, hours left, and impediments to ensure on-time, on-budget delivery.

Establish a concise communications plan for information-sharing and decision-making meetings, share agendas 24–48 hours ahead, and run focused sessions with executive summaries and actionable minutes.

Define a communications plan for stakeholders and sponsors, use a consistent template, and store progress data in a database to trend key measurements.

Explore collaboration tools for agile project management, visualizing the backlog and team board. Assess how sprint progress, burned down charts, and work breakdown structures track scope and features.

Explore modern collaboration tools like SharePoint as a centralized home for project information, with push and email notifications for new files, forms, and updates, enhancing project communication.

Address stakeholder concerns up front by evaluating changes, presenting counterbalancing benefits, and openly documenting risks in the risk register to turn adversaries into trusted allies.

Apply a stakeholder grid to map stakeholders by power and support, placing them into quadrants to guide prioritization and action: focus on high power and high support.

Explore the basics of the science of project management, learn rules and generalizations about the field, and preview the hard area to be described throughout the course.

Understand that there are no absolutes in project management; the Pinback guide defines generally accepted practices, not best practices, and emphasizes adapting to each situation for exam success.

Explore the iron triangle of time, cost, scope, and quality, where projects balance triple constraints, avoid flags, and follow PMI's five process groups.

Discover that a project management plan is a collection of documents from scope, schedule, cost, quality, staffing, risk, change management, and configuration management, used to guide project execution.

Identify elements to include in the project management plan, such as the scope baseline, milestone list, resource calendars, schedule and cost baselines, budget, and risk register.

Explore the regular status report, combining quantitative statistics with qualitative issues, key decisions, and comments, and learn to print a compact two-project portfolio on half a page in portrait mode.

Discover a portfolio dashboard that lets you track and compare many projects across your portfolio, using templates from Lookingglass dev dot com to support project communications.

Explore why scope and requirements define project success, debunking front-loaded planning and 30% padding, and show how managers handle uncertainty and change across methodologies.

Explore the PMI scope management framework for planning scope, defining requirements, and creating the work breakdown structure from inputs like the project charter, enterprise environmental factors, and organizational process assets.

Define and distinguish project scope and product scope to clarify what work is in or out of scope, and recognize the project manager's responsibility for both types and related tasks.

Define requirements as verifiable rules and characteristics of a finished system, and explain how validation, testing, and capability concepts ensure the right product scope.

Discover how the work breakdown structure creates a hierarchical, graphical map of a project by subdividing work into deliverables and work packages, independent of time or resources.

Define work breakdown structure as a components-based hierarchy of tangible deliverables rooted in product scope, break them down to project scope, and evaluate each box by a binary done-or-not criterion.

Clarify what a WB is not by showing it is not an organization chart, not about resources, and not a list of project tasks.

Answer four key questions to develop a work breakdown structure: estimate resources and skills, durations for costing, and ensure clear assignment with an imperative fourth question.

Divide posters into in scope and out of scope, resolve on the line items with quick debate, and organize in-scope items into a well-formed UBS with sponsor sign-off.

Facilitate a collaborative WBS session, manage participation, and capture a ranked backlog with terminating nodes to align deliverables with stakeholder expectations. Move to business and technical kickoff to refine deliverables.

Compare the three major families of methodologies—waterfall, spiral, and agile—highlighting waterfall's fit for legacy and safety contexts, spiral's prototyping, and agile's flexibility with experienced teams.

Examine the basic waterfall model, a four- to five-step process beginning with analysis and design, then build, test, and deploy, noting its downhill flow as a key disadvantage.

Spiral model emphasizes evolutionary development, using prototypes to learn from each loop and drive the next version. It prioritizes risk management, rapid evaluation, and integration of other models like waterfall.

Explore the spiral model's challenges, including the need for strong risk assessment and expert judgment on prototypes, plus cost and schedule overruns as iterations evolve.

Explore prototyping as building a simplified, throwaway version of a system that is not deployable to gather feedback from sponsors, communicate expectations, and reduce later redevelopment costs.

Explore why prototyping supports requirements analysis, gathers stakeholder feedback, accounts for design uncertainty, and enables experimentation to compare solutions and identify the best option.

Explore agile development values rooted in a 1999 Park City Utah conference, emphasizing individuals and interactions, customer collaboration, responding to change, and working software.

Explore the 12 agile principles from the manifesto, emphasizing early delivery of valuable software and welcoming changing requirements. Learn how teams collaborate daily and deliver working software frequently.

Explore Extreme Programming as a customer-focused agile method. Define features and scope as the customer drives value, while stakeholders set schedule and cost constraints, shaping project outcomes.

Explore how XP uses short time boxes called sprints to prioritize features via a customer-driven backlog, deliver real product versions for feedback every sprint, and leverage iteration zero.

Iteration zero in XP sets the foundation and core architecture, including security and database design, before delivering customer-defined features in fixed-length sprints, with early planning and a milestone plan.

Envision product vision and project team during initiation, then speculate with feature-based milestones and an iteration plan to deliver the vision while reducing risk through renaming five basic process groups.

Use feature cards, including three by five post-it cards, in agile development to capture business needs on the front and technical specs on the back, enabling clear team conversations.

Explore the basic steps of scheduling across methodologies: place deliverables in sequence, define dependencies, estimate resources and work (or story points), and negotiate time, cost, scope, and quality.

Explain the start to start relationship where A has begun and B cannot begin until A has begun, enabling start at the same time and introducing positive and negative implications.

Complete precedence and sequencing diagrams before estimating resources, then use expert judgment with alternatives analysis, published estimating data, and bottoms-up estimation to improve accuracy.

Explore the RAM and RACI diagram to visualize each deliverable’s owner and accountable roles, and learn to estimate how long each task will take.

Include availability as a key variable when estimating. Plan around efficiency, as availability determines actual output; about 15–20% of time is nonproductive, leaving 128 of 160 hours.

Explore how pert treats project management as a probability exercise, teaching mean, standard deviation, and the normal distribution to estimate ranges with two key formulas.

Calculate the PERT weighted average using optimistic, most likely, and pessimistic estimates to define the central line, then derive the standard deviation from pessimistic minus optimistic divided by six.

Explore two stages of budget development, from a ROM estimate with plus or minus 50 percent variance to a budget with plus or minus 10 percent, emphasizing probability over precision.

compare analogus (top down) estimates and parametric (mathematical) estimating using lane miles, noting bridges' impact, and apply bottoms up estimating from the lowest delivery unit to build the schedule.

explore the critical path method (CPM), the longest sequence of interconnected deliverables with zero slack that determines the project duration, and prepare to model it.

Define six project scheduling terms—early start, duration, late start, late finish, flow, and the critical path—and use the absolute value difference between late and early finishes to model a schedule.

Explain a precedence diagram with finish-to-start relationships, conduct a forward pass to compute early start and finish, then a backward pass to identify the critical path.

Identify ways to shorten a project schedule by focusing on the critical path. Use crashing or fast tracking to compress the schedule, while weighing cost, rework, and dependency changes.

Brooks's law argues that adding resources to a project often lowers productivity due to training needs. Start with existing staff and monitor resource use to avoid a death march.

Explore how unfocussed project management and task-focused work across multiple projects create delays; learn to focus on deliverables, manage dependencies, and apply probability-based thinking and Parkinson's law.

Apply measurement across the project triangle of time, cost, and scope. Use dollar days, gate milestones, and earned value to forecast outcomes in agile and other environments.

Earned value provides an objective measure of project performance by tracking cost spent, scope completed, and time to finish objectives.

Learn how earned value analysis uses E.V., actual cost, and planned value to compute cost and schedule variances and performance indexes (CPI, SPI) for project performance.

Compare cost analysis with schedule analysis to identify cost variance and cost performance index, and determine whether you are over budget, on target, or under budget.

Interpret the cost and schedule performance index to gauge budget and schedule, with CPI 0.96 indicating 4% over budget and SPI 1.06 indicating 6% ahead of schedule, forecast three numbers.

Learn to compute the estimate to complete (ETC) by comparing budget at completion (BAC) and earned value (EV), and apply variances and the CPI-based critical ratio to produce a range.

Explore spark lines and bullet graphs in Excel to quickly visualize trends, compare against targets, and convey performance using compact, dynamic charts.

Analyze budget and schedule variances, noting a cost range of 125 to 156 with a 25 to 56 percent variance and a shift from four to five quarters.

Overruns do not correct themselves; act quickly on small variances to prevent them from worsening and maintain effective project leadership through timely change management.