Who Should Attend (Attendees in this course must be past participants of our Introduction to Project Management Skills seminar)

• Experienced Project Leaders, Program Managers, Product Managers and Executives from every industry, organization or government institution.

• Every Manager who is experienced in the ever changing role of the project and who wants to hone their professional skills.

 What will you cover

• Bringing organization to a project

• Planning a project and developing baselines

• Allocating resources across several projects

• Monitoring milestones and the earned value concept

• Creating Status reports and briefing all levels of management

• Project management support: Automated and administrative
  

1. Review of Project Management essentials

• Asses your knowledge of project management
• Essential management skills of Project management
• Problems and issues of project management

2. Characteristics of Successful Project Management

• Responsibilities of a Project Manager
• Leadership skills
• Skill requirements
• Personality and behavior
• Team Empowerment
• Balance and attitude

3. Human Factors Involved in Project Management

• Responsibility, authority and accountability
• Project management without using authority
• Organization and team building
• Performance appraisals of Project Managers and project team

4. Efficient Project Management Organization

• Project management and its role in an organization
• Developing a project organization
• An eternal conflict: functional vs. project
• Conflict resolution and evaluation
• Risk management

5. Defining a Project

• Defining the scope of a project
• The role of the client in project management
• Milestones in Project Performance
• Risk and contingency planning
• Legal and political issues

6. Planning a Project I: Determining a Task Baseline

• The role of a well developed Work Breakdown Structure (WBS)
• Approaches to estimating and developing WBS components
• Scheduling logic: Tradition vs. Innovation
• Planning task assignment
• Exercise: Task assignment

7. Planning a Project II: Determining the Cost Baseline

• Utilizing available resources
• Contingency resources
• Negotiating
• Cost Planning Principles
• Line item plan and responsibility
• Exercise: Resource Planning

8. Managing Limited Resources

• Resource requirements and availability
• Resource demands with multi-projects
• Resource loading and leveling
• Culture, politics and power in an organization
• Resolving resource conflicts

9. Project Control issues

• Types of information for project managers and senior management
• Managing timely, accurate and complete reports
• Different methods of reporting: Analysis vs. Status
• Work management systems
• Change management methods

10. The Concept of Earned Value

• The Earned Value Plan
• The value of well defined measure points
• Aligning earned value with schedule and cost status

11. Trend Analysis

• Why perform trend analysis
• Types of trend analysis
• Schedule, resources
• Cost and earned value data
• Risk and contingency planning
• Using trends to forecast performance

12. Controlling the scope of a project

• Elements of project control
• Monitoring task performance
• Project variance today vs. completion
• Preventive and corrective planning
• Reporting changes to senior management and clients

13. Support Structure of Project Management

• Hardware and software selections and issues
• Essential project management system functions
• Project management support alternatives