Practical Project Management - 2 Hours

Define a project as a temporary, unique endeavor with a start and end, not repeated, constrained by budget and requirements, delivering agreed deliverables within a specific time frame.

Explore the difference between a program and a portfolio, and learn how portfolio analysis uses criteria, indicators, and measures to select and approve programs and projects with financial justification.

Define the three core project constraints—scope, budget, and timeline—and gather requirements, estimate costs, and align schedules for projects from villas to large facilities.

Identify the five phases of project management—initiation, planning, executing, monitoring and controlling, and closing—and how tools, methodologies, and stakeholder analysis influence feasibility and requirements.

Draft a one-page, formally approved project charter that provides written authority to start, and builds a shared understanding of the problem, goal, business case, timeline, and scope.

Explore the ten knowledge areas of project management, including scope, time, cost, quality, resources, communication, stakeholders, risk, procurement, and integration, enabling customer satisfaction and certification readiness.

Identify and categorize stakeholders by interest and power, including owners, customers, employees, government bodies, and lenders, into promoters, defenders, latents, and apathetic. Create a management table with requirements and KPIs.

Define risk as any uncertain event that can affect objectives, using ISO 31000 and a 1–5 severity-probability scale to assess impact and treatment options.

Master SWOT analysis by evaluating strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats to craft a business case. Present the benefits and risks to management to support project approval, using PowerPoint or Excel.

Learn how to build a project budget from activity estimation through work packages and control accounts to the cost baseline and final budget, including contingency and management reserves for risks.

Learn six project management tools to turn scope and requirements into plan, including work breakdown structure, Rocky Matrix, Gantt chart, critical path method (CPM), activity network diagram, slack, and PERT.

End of section 2 wraps up the 2-hour practical project management course, signaling the completion of hands-on guidance for managing projects.

Explore practical project management through a case study introduction, outlining the step-by-step implementation approach to manage projects effectively.

Explore the millennium dome mega project from design symbolism and timeline to budget and stakeholder lessons, highlighting on-time delivery, cost management, and risk-conscious planning.

Explore the financial measures used to assess project feasibility before starting the project and progress indicators, including cost performance index and schedule performance index, used during execution as a dashboard.

Explain return on investment, payback period, and break-even point, then assess net present value and IRR, factoring inflation and the discount rate to measure project profitability.

Monitor project indicators by tracking earned value, planned value, and actual cost to assess budget and timeline, and use CPI and SPI to drive corrective actions in the control phase.