
What a project is, and the four stages it goes through
Project management as a way of delivering a result
The role of the project manager and the main difficulties
The PMBOK 7 principles and performance domains
Collecting ideas and turning one into a business case
Developing the charter
Cost-benefit analysis, which is where prioritisation actually happens
Selecting which project gets implemented
Who your stakeholders are, including the ones nobody listed
Compiling and prioritising the list
Ways of engaging them
Assessing influence and interest when their priorities conflict
Establishing the project is needed at all
Defining the start and end points
Defining boundaries, and writing down what is explicitly excluded
The development approach and life cycle domain
Breaking the project into parts and labelling them
Describing the plan as a diagram
Identifying risks while it is still cheap
Time planning and the network diagram
Methods for estimating duration
Displaying the schedule, including the Gantt chart
Identifying who is involved
The human resources matrix, which shows the collision before it happens
Project cost and the types of it
The three stages of a project budget
Identifying and assessing risk factors
Managing risk under the uncertainty domain
Building the structure for the project
Working in a matrix, where the person you need has another manager
Defining roles and responsibilities
Kicking off and running the team
What project control actually consists of
Reporting progress and monitoring spend against the plan
Handling deviations before they become announcements
Project meetings and the communications plan
Planning the closure rather than letting it trail off
Administrative matters, including releasing people properly
Surveying the results
Bringing the principles and domains together
What OKR is and the principles underneath it
The adoption stories at Google, Intel and others
How it connects strategy to what people do this week
The manager's role, and wording objectives that are genuinely critical
Preparing managers and teams for the launch
Running the first objective-setting meeting
The "from X to Y by Z" format in practice
Selling it internally, and rolling it out with Kotter's accelerators
The cycle: planning, monitoring, evaluation
Regular meetings that track progress and surface blockers
Adjusting objectives without abandoning them
Real company cases, and why leading indicators decide the outcome
Scoring delivery honestly and setting the next objectives
Running the wrap-up meeting
Recognising achievement and planning development through OKR
Drawing the lessons and feeding them back into strategy
The four types of performance indicator and why the difference matters
The characteristics of one that works
How indicators support a strategy rather than describe activity
The 10-80-10 rule, and knowing your critical success factors
Case studies of indicator systems in companies
The four stages of the process
Running a two-day workshop on success factors
Impact mapping to find the factors with the largest effect
The three laws of productivity
The emotional factors that sell a change to people
Preparing an elevator pitch
A proposal for executives, and Kotter's eight steps applied to the rollout
The common measurement traps
Deciding what actually needs measuring
Formulating the metric
Eliminating measures that cost more than they return
Deriving indicators from success factors rather than from data availability
Calculating them
Practice across several factors
Improving reporting using Stephen Few's principles
Graphic display and management practice
Getting more from the software you already have
The reporting hierarchy for staff, managers and executives
The seven fundamental building blocks
Bringing agile methods in to raise the odds of success
Scrum meetings and Kanban applied to the rollout
The next steps over the following five weeks
Tying indicators to pay does not raise productivity
More indicators do not mean better performance
Not every performance indicator is a KPI
Why monthly monitoring alone changes nothing
What capacity planning is and which problems it solves
Headcount as both the biggest cost and the source of what you can attempt
Employee types, segmentation and the concept of FTE
Gap analysis between what you need and what you have, and reading the external market
Analysing turnover and departures
Career transition analysis
Extrapolation, interpolation, Delphi and nominal group methods
Collecting requirements, and the team competency matrix
Position design
Job analysis
Analysing actual workload rather than assumed workload
Segmentation and calculating the value of a role
This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.
Almost no project is late because the plan was wrong. It is late because the person it depended on was also on two other projects, and nobody was looking at all three at once.
Resource management is the discipline of looking at all three.
Where the capacity disappears
Every project was approved on its own merits by someone reasonable, and the total was never added up. The schedule assumes people are available full time, which none of them are. Priorities exist but they are not ordered, so the sequencing gets decided by whoever follows up most persistently. The indicators were chosen because they were easy to pull rather than because anyone would act on them. And your own week went first, which is why you are reading a plan at eleven at night.
Three levels of the same problem
Thirty-eight lessons across the three levels where capacity is actually decided. The portfolio level first: ten lessons on PMBOK 7, focused on the parts that determine demand — the business case and cost-benefit analysis that decide what gets funded at all, the work breakdown, the network diagram, the resource matrix that shows two projects needing the same person in the same week, the three-stage budget, and the matrix environment where the person you need has another manager with other priorities.
Then the mechanism for saying no. Four lessons on OKR as a prioritisation instrument rather than a goal-tracking one: the "from X to Y by Z" format, the quarterly cycle, and scoring it honestly at the end, which is the part most companies quietly skip.
Measurement, headcount and your own week
Then eight lessons on indicators, and specifically the honest version: critical success factors before measures, impact mapping, the traps, the reporting hierarchy, and the six myths that wreck most measurement systems, including the one about tying indicators to pay.
Then capacity in the literal sense. Six lessons on workforce planning: FTE, segmentation, gap analysis between demand and availability, forecasting through turnover analysis and Delphi, position design and real workload analysis, and the optimisation levers — combining roles, automation, internal part-time, outsourcing.
And finally your own capacity, which is the resource most people manage worst: the time audit, prioritisation, GTD and time-blocking, and delegation through RACI, task difficulty matched to skill, and the habit of not taking the work back.
Who is teaching this
Mike, the number one HR instructor on Udemy. More than 1.6 million course enrolments, over 150,000 professionals trained, PHRi and SHRM-CP certified, HRCI representative in more than 10 countries. I built the people function of the unicorn Preply and worked at Wargaming, Alfa-Bank and iDeals. Headcount planning against a delivery plan that assumed unlimited people is a conversation I have had more times than I can count, usually from the side holding the smaller number.
What is included
Lifetime access to all course materials
Active instructor support in the Q&A section
Udemy Certificate of Completion
Practical assignments and real business cases
A section with additional courses, tools and resources
The exercise that starts it
List everything your team is committed to this quarter and, next to each item, the name of the person it actually depends on. Then count how many times the same name appears. That number is your real constraint, and no plan changes it. Enrol now and start the first lesson today.