Project Planning in Practice : Advance Your Planning Skills

• The section covers the basics around planning.

• It explains what planning is and how it is used in projects.

• It gives the essences to proceed with learning about planning.

• The section also highlights the benefits of planning and how it helps in project management.

The lecture explains what are all necessary requisites before planning is actually performed.

It covers the importance and role of:

• Project Goal

• Objectives

• Stakeholders

• Requirements

• Scope

• Budget

The lecture explains the limitations around any project which impact the planning phase.

It provides a deep overview of how the foundation of the project plan is shaped via specific limitations and the important role they play.

The lecture covers:

• Project Scope

• Risks

• Budget

• Costs

• Resources

• Timelines

The lecture explains basic definitions of key elements in planning. The following are reviewed  and needed for the example lecture later on:

• Risks

• Issues

• Assumptions

• Dependencies

The lecture focuses on how the structure of the work is built to then feed it into a project pplan.

It explains key terms such as:

• Workstreams

• Deliverables

• Milestones

and how they relate to planning.

This lecture explains a method to estimate time for different tasks in projects.

You will learn the steps you need to follow to create a plan and the way to go about estimating time when you determine timelines.

The lecture introduces the key format in project management for a project plan - the Gantt Chart.

It shows an example of how a plan should look and what should be included in it.

It explains the different elements and rules of of the Gantt Chart.

This tool is essential for any project plan creation and needed for the example plan lecture.

This lecture puts theory into practice.

It takes the theory you saw so far in the course and marries it with an example to see how the techniques can be used in real context.

This is the preparation work before creating a plan in this course.

In this section we will look into a real example and put the theory into practice.

This section covers what it means to manage a plan after it is created.

We will cover:

• Key activities to perform on regular basis

• How to provide transparency to stakeholders

• Progress tracking

In this lecture we will look into change management process and how it relates to planning.

We will explain the types of changes that can trigger a major change in a plan and what are the steps in change management process to follow to adopt the change.

We will take the original plan and examine how it will change and what will be the impact due to the different types of changes described in lecture 12.

You will have the opportunity to see how timelines shift and cause delays.

Lecture 14 focuses on summarizing how the project plan can be used as a tool to evidence events in the course of the project and help project managers be successful.