Project Management Masterclass: Agile & Predictive

Compare the business case and benefits management plan to show why a project is worth doing and how benefits are tracked to prove return on investment.

Learn how a PMBOK-aligned project charter authorizes resources, defines scope, objectives, risks, milestones, and stakeholder roles to establish a baseline and shared understanding for project success.

Produce a project management plan that integrates baselines, subsidiary plans, the performance measurement baseline, and an agile release plan to ensure quality, compliance, and controlled change.

Explore how requirements describe customer needs and how scope defines the total work, using a house-building analogy to show that requirements plus an execution plan equal scope, with Moscow prioritization.

Explore brainstorming as an idea factory to generate lots of creative ideas with no bad ideas, focus groups to learn feelings and preferences, and facilitated workshops to reach clear agreements.

Learn to build a requirement traceability matrix from business need to testing, linking the why, what, and how to ensure forward and backward traceability.

Define the project scope statement aligned with PMBOK, detailing included and excluded work and six components: product scope description, deliverables, acceptance criteria, exclusions, constraints, and assumptions.

Explore the basics of the work breakdown structure and how it links to the WBS Dictionary, Work Packages, Planning Packages, and Control Accounts in project management.

Explain the difference between work packages and planning packages in a work breakdown structure; work packages are fully defined and trackable, while planning packages act as future-oriented placeholders.

See how a control account in a work breakdown structure integrates scope, budget, and schedule using a Lego-style example, with deliverables above and two work packages below the control account.

Validate scope is user acceptance testing that yields accepted deliverables after internal verification and control quality testing, with input from stakeholders and options for rejection or conditional acceptance.

Control project scope by preventing scope creep and gold plating with a clear scope statement, a change control process, and refusal of nonessential enhancements.

Master the concept of scope creep, learn to spot early indicators, and apply a simple five-step change control process to balance scope, time, and cost.

Explore the differences between MVP, MMP, and a pilot with a food delivery app example, highlighting learning with minimal features, earning with real value, and real-world testing.

Learn how product owner, Scrum master, and dev team drive value in Scrum. The product owner sets vision and priorities, the Scrum master clears roadblocks, and the dev team delivers.

Explore Scrum artifacts: product backlog, sprint backlog, and increment. The product backlog is an evolving to-do list, the sprint backlog guides next sprint work, and the increment is completed work.

Define the definition of done (DoD) as a shared team standard that goes beyond a checklist. It ensures work is reviewed, tested, documented, and released, preventing chaos and building trust.

Prioritize agile projects with Moscow to classify must have, should have, could have, and won't have, then apply Kano to balance basic, performance, and excitement features to delight customers.

Use the 100-point method, also known as the $100 method or cumulative voting, to prioritize features in agile projects by allocating 100 points and ranking by totals.

Cost of delay is value lost per unit time, including revenue, costs, opportunity, and market share erosion. Use WSJF by dividing cost of delay by job size to prioritize work.

Explore how epics define big goals and how user stories break them into sprint-sized steps for user-focused value.

Master relative estimation techniques in agile by comparing tasks using fibonacci-based planning poker, t-shirt sizing, dot voting, the bucket system, and affinity mapping for quick, consistent effort estimates.

Learn velocity in agile by measuring only finished story points per sprint, like a speedometer. Use multi-sprint data (20, 25, 15) to predict backlog completion and promote stability.

Learn t-shirt sizing to estimate effort using small to extra large, and apply affinity estimation by grouping similar work and assigning sizes, enabling fast, visual, and collaborative planning.

Learn fast, test ideas quickly, and use data to guide decisions through a build-measure-learn cycle, starting with a minimum viable product and pivoting or persevering toward product-market fit.

Learn how Scrum and Kanban merge into Scrumdan, combining Scrum's sprint planning and roles with Kanban's continuous flow and pull, to enable flexible, faster work with work and progress limits.

Explore extreme programming, its five core values of communication, simplicity, feedback, courage, and respect, and its twelve practices, emphasizing small-step delivery, pair programming, test-first development, and refactoring.

Apply feature driven development, agile, iterative method delivering small, client-valued features in two weeks or less through five steps: feature list, plan by feature, design by feature, build by feature.

Explore the four dependency relationships in project management: finish to start, start to start, finish to finish, and start to finish, using practical examples that illustrate scheduling rules.

Compare a similar past project to make quick, high level estimates using analogous estimation; apply a unit rate formula for parametric estimates, using reliable data for accuracy.

Break a project into tiny tasks, estimate each piece, and add them up to form a reliable total, illustrating bottom-up estimation with a bake sale example.

Mastering project management lecture explains the Delphi technique for anonymous expert consensus and the Wideband Delphi technique for software estimation, using PERT formula (a+4m+b)/6 to combine A, M, B estimates.

Use Monte Carlo estimation to convert uncertain backlog sizes into a probability distribution. Learn to set risk buffers with percentiles and commit to P80 for an 80% completion chance.

Reserve analysis identifies risks, estimates impact, and uses expected monetary value to set contingency and management reserves, shaping the cost baseline and total budget.

Apply the critical path method (CPM) to a project network, compute path times, and identify the critical path A–C–E that determines the 10 time unit project duration.

Master the critical path method by practicing five network diagrams, identifying paths, and highlighting the critical path and total project duration (in days) across A-B-D, A-C-D, and other routes.

Explore how the critical path dictates project duration and timelines. Compare crashing and fast tracking as schedule compression methods, recognizing cost and quality risks from overlapping activities.

Define the cost baseline and project budget, explain how time-phased spending and management reserve form the total budget, and show how to track cost performance against plan.

Learn earned value management as a project health check by comparing planned value, actual cost, and earned value to reveal cost variance, schedule variance, and their CPI and SPI.

Learn earned value management with five clear examples, computing planned value, earned value, and actual cost, and deriving cost variance, schedule variance, cost performance index, and schedule performance index.