Day 1
1. Introduction
§ Review of your project management challenges
§ Organizational Competence in Project Management™ (OCiPM)
§ Identifying the project’s stakeholders and their interests
§ Scope vs. work: what they are, how they are related
2. The Project Planning Process
§ Why so many project teams are reluctant to plan appropriately
§ Dealing with the “fuzzy-front end”
§ Project management processes and product-oriented processes
§ A non-traditional view of the triple constraint
3. Project Definition Document
§ Writing a powerful project justification
§ Understanding what your real deliverables are
§ Constraints, assumptions, and exclusions
4. Project Success Criteria
§ Two major dimensions of project success
§ Getting the stakeholders involved
§ Influencing success criteria that are beyond your control
5. Developing a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS)
§ Purpose of the WBS
§ Using your WBS to discover missing work items
§ Integrating the WBS with the project life cycle
6. Estimating
§ Funding estimates vs. control estimates
§ Using range estimates to deal with uncertainty
§ Converting estimates into budgets
§ Calculating an appropriate cost reserve
§ Getting your budget approved
Day 32
7. Project Scheduling
§ Duration estimating and sequencing
§ Critical path and merge bias
§ Preliminary schedules vs. schedule baselines
§ Estimating an appropriate schedule reserve
8. Project Risk Management
§ Basic philosophy: fire-fighting vs. fire prevention
§ Risks, problems, and responses to each
§ Project risk management throughout the project life cycle
9. Very High Probability Risks (and responses to each)
§ Lack of stakeholder agreement about outputs and outcomes
§ Scope creep
§ Unreasonable effort, cost, and schedule targets
10. Identifying Project-Specific Risks
§ Checklists and taxonomies
§ Stakeholder interviews and success criteria
§ Writing clear and useful risk statements
Day 4
11. Prioritizing Project-Specific Risks
§ Assessment bias: “last night, they got the elephant”
§ Expected monetary value
§ Weighted extremes
§ Probability-impact matrix
12. Developing Risk Responses
§ Accept, mitigate, or avoid
§ Characteristics of an effective response
§ Mitigation options
§ Understanding and using reserves and contingencies
§ Using decision trees to help evaluate responses
13. Risk Interactions
§ Multiple impacts
§ Stakeholder differences
§ How to use a risk response interaction matrix
Day 5
14. Risk Case Study
§ Developed by participants
§ Measuring Project Progress
§ Change management and corrective action
§ Objectives of progress measurement
§ Different approaches to progress measurement
§ Milestones: the Game of Projects
15. Recap and Review
§ Getting the most from what you’ve learned: less is more
§ Mapping the tools and techniques to your project challenges
