Hello, you have come to the "even more detail" project management course contents page. To go to the first page please
select Project Management Course.
Before we look at a granular breakdown of the course contents it is worth saying that this is a rather
unusual I.T. project management course. First, it runs as a public scheduled course that you can book onto with certainty
and without hassle and secondly it is suitable both for complete PM virgins and for relatively experienced project
managers who want to formalise and hone their project management skills. The course is usually attended by a mix
of novices and relatively old hands. Ideas are exchanged amongst those who have been
there, seen it and done it and of course the novices learn from those who have been annealed in the heat of the
project management furnace.
Those new to project management will find that this project management course is very
content-rich and a lot to absorb in 3 days but we know from experience that you will manage it. We provide very
comprehensive notes - indeed we have heard from course attendees many years on who are still using their well-thumbed
copy of the project management course notes as a reference guide.
Project Management Course Contents Detail:
Introduction and project principles
Project vs operational company structures
Project vs operational management styles
Project management standards
Avoiding bureaucracy
Software development: releases or big bang?
Software development lifecycle
Waterfall or RAD, DSDM, JAD?
Package implementation projects
Key user and IT tasks in software projects
How to define requirements properly
Non-functional requirements
Maintenance: ad hoc or releases?
Organisation-wide user resource planning
"Manageable Chunks"
Project organisation options
Identifying stakeholders
Getting buy in
Roles and responsibilities
Sponsor role
Project Manager role
Key user role
Team Leader role
Many other roles
Managing the user/customer
Team building, team morale
Management not administration
The need for leadership
Effective communication
Project initiation
Producing a Project Definition Document (aka PID)
Developing the Business Case
Getting resource commitments
Formal project authorisation and accountability
Estimating total project cost top down
Estimating a Stage bottom up
Estimating cost and duration
Estimating hours and costing in money
Estimating resource requirements
Estimating techniques: rules of thumb
Estimating: effective use of past actuals
The need for planning
Outline project planning
Detailed project planning
Identifying products, work breakdown
Task size
Step by step guide to producing a plan
Building in contingency - and selling it
Planning in holidays, sickness, training
How many hours are there in a week?
How to build in time for change requests
Getting team buy in to the plan
Critical path - applicability to IT projects
Planning tools: pros and cons
Gantt charts, other plan representations
Valuable data tools can provide
Time recording: what to record, how, and its value
Selling time recording to the team
Risk management
Risk assessment
Which risks to manage
Risk reduction and elimination
Risk ownership, risk sharing
Presenting risks to the sponsor
Risk register, risk monitoring
Risk reporting
Comprehensive risk checklist
Ensuring resource availability
Resource commitment monitoring
Getting formal authorisation to proceed
Role of independent project assurance
Independent project health checks
Compliance monitoring
Value-add reviewing vs box ticking
Support vs policing
Managing issues that arise during projects
Change management strategies
Change management procedures
Managing changing requirements
Accountability for change authorisation
Mechanics of change management process
Progress tracking at team level
Weekly team meetings
Weekly status meetings
Milestones and checkpoints
Progress monitoring
Tolerance levels, plan change authorities
Replanning: when, who, why, how
Rescheduling: revising sponsor commitments
Reporting to the project manager
Reporting to the sponsor
Using planning tool information
Analysing project status data
Taking corrective action
Project reporting templates
Sponsor control of budget
Quality management principles
Quality accountabilities
Quality: the sponsor's role
Building the quality plan
Team quality incentives
Prototyping
Formal quality inspections
Quality reviews
Techniques for ensuring design correctness
Error cause analysis & removal
Quality circles
Quality metrics
Measuring team's quality effectiveness
Quality specialist role
Responsibility for quality processes
System testing
User acceptance testing
Managing project closure
Gaining formal approval to go live
Selling success
Team lessons learned reviews
Collecting and sharing lessons and metrics
Post implementation review
Implementing the lessons of the course
And if you want more detail than that you'll have to come along to this excellent course and find out!
We regret this course is not running at the moment.
However, a version of the course is available free in the form of this
free online project management course