Project Management

Explore the five phases of the project management lifecycle—initiation, planning, execution, monitor and control, and closing—covering project charter, feasibility, WBS, schedule, procurement, risks, and lessons learned.

Master the iron triangle of project management by balancing scope, cost, time, and quality to deliver successful projects within budget and schedule.

Create the project charter during initiation to define business needs, purpose, scope, objectives, stakeholders, duration, costs, risks, assumptions, and milestones, establishing decisions and responsibilities before planning.

Conduct a feasibility study during initiation to evaluate viability, identify opportunities, and decide whether to proceed, using product or service description, market analysis, operations, and financial data.

Use SWOT analysis to help project managers analyze internal strengths and weaknesses and external opportunities and threats, guiding feasibility assessment and decision making.

Identify internal and external stakeholders with a stakeholder register and contact information, map power and interest via a stakeholder analysis matrix, and engage accordingly to meet requirements and prevent disputes.

Define the project scope by identifying included work, objectives, deliverables, milestones, and constraints, then collect requirements from stakeholders and develop a work breakdown structure.

Explore how to break a project into a work breakdown structure (wbs), then into work packages, activities, and steps, using a house example with construction, interior, and landscape.

Explore how to sequence activities using finish-to-start, start-to-start, finish-to-finish, and start-to-finish relationships, and distinguish predecessors and successors to construct a bar chart for the project schedule.

Milestones act as pins on the project timeline, marking zero-duration reference points such as project start date, project end date, budget checks, design stages, and client approvals to guide execution.

Calculate activity durations using the duration formula: quantity divided by crew, times productivity rate. Use historical data to guide estimates and adjust crew size to meet client timelines, balancing cost.

Visualize a gantt chart that links tasks, durations, and finish-to-start and start-to-start relationships to show a project timeline and support monitoring and controlling the schedule.

Use the precedence diagram method to sequence activities, identify durations, and compute the project's total duration with early and late start and finish for tasks A, B, C, D, E.

Learn to perform forward calculation in a precedence diagram to determine earliest starts and finishes, using the A, B, C, and D example that ends on day 14.

Start from the project end date and work backward with backward calculation, subtracting task durations to determine late finishes and starts, selecting the smallest values at each step.

Analyze the precedence diagram for a small project's timeline: start day zero; B and C start day five; C ends day eight; D ends day eleven; project ends day fourteen.

Learn how total float measures slack in project activities using late finish minus early finish, and how a simple example shows float enabling schedule flexibility during delays.

Identify the critical path as the longest sequence A, B, D, E that must finish on time; any one-day delay delays the project, zero total float marks the critical path.

Identify activities and the work breakdown structure, determine required resources (labor, materials, and equipment), and build a resource histogram to visualize daily labor and project completion for clear team understanding.

Resource smoothing redistributes labor within a daily limit to keep the end date fixed, moving workers from peak days to underused days to avoid jumps and create a realistic plan.

In project management, procurement management coordinates external purchases by identifying needed materials and services, selecting vendors, negotiating terms, issuing purchase orders, inspecting deliveries, paying invoices, and keeping records.

Plan, monitor, and control project costs with cost budgeting, establish a cost baseline, and differentiate cost, price, direct costs, and indirect costs to manage budgets across project stages.

Use the s-curve to monitor and control project costs by distinguishing direct and indirect labor, materials, facilities, and risk contingencies, and tracking daily spending across the project timeline.