The objectives of this 3-day project management training course are:

• to understand how projects should be managed
• to determine how participants might improve the management of their own projects

Audience

This project management training course is suitable for IT and non-IT people who are involved in IT projects - managing projects or playing leadership roles within them. The training focuses on IT projects but not on IT people: it shows business and IT people how to work together and how to manage projects successfully. Most of the disciplines apply equally to non-IT projects such as business process re-engineering projects.

This project management training course teaches the principles and techniques that underlie project management methodologies and so the course will be appropriate whatever PM method your organisation uses. Another feature of this project management training course is that it teaches how to manage projects as opposed to how to use a tool, administer a methodology or pass an examination. There is a difference.

Contents

• PROJECT MANAGEMENT PRINCIPLES
  • Difference between project and operational management
  • Why projects are becoming more important to companies
  • What a project actually is!
  • Factors that contribute to project success and failure
  
  
• PROJECTS AND STAGES
  • Benefits of dividing large IT software developments into Release projects
  • Grouping business enhancements into Releases
  • Business user activities in each step of a software project
  • Getting the requirements and design right
  • Dividing projects into "Manageable Chunks"
  • Rapid Application Development (RAD) projects
  
  
• PROJECT ORGANISATION
  • Project roles from Board of Directors to team members
  • Role of project manager, project leader, team leaders and many others
  • Role of Project Sponsor and other business participants
  • How to get roles clearly defined, assigned and agreed
  
  
• PROJECT DEFINITION
  • Business and IT activities which must be undertaken before a project starts
  • Importance of clear project definition, defined scope
  • Business Case
  • Project Definition Workshops
  • Project Definition Document/Project Initiation Document
  
  
• ESTIMATING
  • Importance of accurate and consistent estimates
  • Difference between top down and bottom up estimating
  • Rules of Thumb for AD projects
  • Process for producing estimates
  • Estimating user effort for IT projects
  
  
• PLANNING
  • Different types of plans, their purpose and relationship
  • How to plan large and small projects
  • Including Business and IT participants in the plan
  
  
• RISK MANAGEMENT
  • Joint Business and IT assessment of project risk
  • Reducing Risk
  • Managing Risk
  
  
• STAGE AGREEMENT
  • How to get User and IT resources properly committed
  • Why and how to produce a Stage Agreement
  • Relationship to Project Definition Report
  
  
• CHANGE MANAGEMENT AND ISSUE MANAGEMENT
  • The need for control of change to requirements
  • How to manage Changes and Issues
  • Business control of project changes
  
  
• TRACKING, CONTROLLING AND REPORTING
  • Managing a project when it is underway
  • Tracking projects, Actuals vs Plan including Quality
  • Controlling the team
  • Reporting status up the management line including to the Sponsor
  
  
• PROJECT SUPPORT AND ASSURANCE
  • The role of Project Support/Assurance
  • Independent Reviews of management and technical health
  • How to ensure projects comply with Project Management standards
  
  
• QUALITY MANAGEMENT
  • Business role in ensuring project delivers what business needs
  • Inspections, Simulations, Testing, Causal Analysis, Metrics
  • Active management of Quality during application development
  
  
• PROJECT COMPLETION
  • Importance of analysing project experience
  • Documenting and reporting Project Completion
  • Feeding forward to improve future projects
  • Post implementation reviews
  
  
• IMPLEMENTATION PLANNING
  • Participants determine how to apply the techniques to their own projects