Scrum Master's Guide to Project Management Basics

Define a project as a temporary endeavor with a start date and an end date to deliver one or more business products; examples include building, a website, or an application.

Identify project deliverable as the output produced by a project, such as working software, and begin each project by defining expected deliverables like exe files, guides, notes, and unit-tested code.

Understand how project management plans, delegates, monitors, and controls to achieve objectives within time, cost, quality, scope, benefits, and risks, while providing information to the right people for decisions.

Explore operations as the ongoing production and distribution after a product is made, sustaining the product life cycle and delivering repetitive services to generate profit.

The PMO defines and maintains standards for project management, provides templates and governance for projects, and outlines roles from analyst to lead, noting organization varies.

Explore the software development life cycle (SDLC) from requirements to maintenance, including waterfall and agile models, to produce high quality software on time and budget.

Explain the agile model's iterative and incremental approach, its adaptive development, and how requirements are analyzed, designs created, and development delivered in iterations with demos, QA, and deployment.

Compare waterfall and agile models across testing timing, iterations, communication, and responding to change; learn how project structure, requirements, and focus shift from processes to individuals and customer collaboration.

Learn how Scrum, an agile framework, guides a Scrum team—Scrum Master, Product Owner, and development team—to deliver a usable increment each sprint through backlog management, time-boxing, and defined artifacts.

Learn how project status reporting provides a regular, standardized evaluation of progress against the plan to improve effective communication with team members and stakeholders.

A project plan is a formal, approved document guiding execution and control, documenting assumptions, decisions, scope, cost, and baseline; the schedule outlines milestones, tasks, resources, and dependencies.

Master RAID concepts by identifying risks, issues, assumptions, and dependencies to keep projects on time, within scope, and within budget.

Explore the structured approach of change management that guides individuals, teams, and organizations from current to desired states, addressing resistance to technology and easing the transition.

Learn how a time sheet records a worker's time on each job. It helps monitor the budget through resource allocation, manage time on schedule, and measure employee performance.

Explore popular project management tools like Jira and Confluence by Atlassian, with Jira supporting project management frameworks and Confluence storing and documenting all project documents.

Explore popular agile certifications, including Scrum Alliance, Scrum.org, PMI ACP, ECC Agile, and SAFe, and decide which path fits you as a Scrum Master or product owner.

Explore the project initiation phase, including developing the project charter and identifying stakeholders, and learn what is required to kick off a project.

Clarify project purpose and feasibility, plus key deliverables during initiation. Identify stakeholders, partners, scope boundaries, project type (r&d, prototype, or proof of concept), needed resources, and assemble the ideal team.

Create a project charter that authorizes the project, empowering management with resources and money. Include objectives, success criteria, high-level requirements, constraints, risks, and assumptions, signed by the sponsor.

Identify and classify project stakeholders, from sponsor and customer to experts and business partners, using the influence or impact grid and salience model to tailor management and communication.

Explore the salience model for stakeholder analysis, focusing on power, legitimacy, and urgency, and learn how A through G classifications guide engagement and prioritization.

Identify and document all project stakeholders in a stakeholder register, review it regularly to add or reassess overlooked stakeholders, and clarify contact details, influence, interdependencies, and communication and frequency preferences.

Identify key stakeholders and project goals during the kickoff, define team roles and communication tools, outline the tech stack, requirements tracking, cadence, and the project schedule.

Celebrate the completion of foundational scrum project management concepts and reinforce essential practices for scrum teams.

Finbank replaces its aging core with a real-time platform built by a cross-functional scrum team using agile and devops, featuring definition of ready and definition of done and no downtime.

Scale agile across teams by comparing frameworks, from less and scrum at scale to Safe, Dia, Nexus, and the Spotify model, and learn to select, start small experiments, and adapt.