Deeply Practical Project Management (Earn 16 PDUs)
How to apply the PMI project management best practices in the simplest, most practical way, with a “magical” example!
What you’ll learn
- How to get stakeholder buy-in and senior management support at the beginning of your project, and maintain it throughout.
- The three fundamental messages of the PM triple constraint, how they inter-relate, and how they affect risk.
- How to plan your project VERY efficiently, so you know the scope, schedule, budget, and risks before you start.
- How to manage the top three drivers of project success to solve most of the problems on most projects.
- The critical importance of the project requirements, with best practices for documentation, review, and approval.
- How to build the work breakdown structure (WBS), your scope baseline, and when to break it down further.
- Why the precedence diagram is your most important tool for planning and managing your project.
- How to estimate the project resources, material, services, time, and cost, and handle estimating error.
- Why the critical path means schedule is more important than cost, with a step by step animated example.
- The key criteria for deciding whether to build or buy, and the best type of contract and award procedures.
- How to prepare and brief the project plan, provide options to meet the triple constraint, and stay truthful.
- How to build the project team, key hiring criteria, delegation, motivation, and resolution of personnel conflicts.
- How to manage scope so you find the things inevitably missed, but don’t make it so good that it just blows up.
- How to manage the critical path to focus on the most important items without getting bogged down in the weeds.
- How to manage the budget and its key drivers to obtain the best cost performance possible.
- How to identify the risks, mitigate them as early as possible, and stay within the risk budget.
- The two most effective things you can do to manage quality and ensure the customer is happy with the project result.
- How to use earned value management (EVM) to project cost and schedule performance objectively.
- How to communicate constructively with the stakeholders about the project status, and obtain their assistance when needed.
- How to use scenario based verification to ensure customer satisfaction with the project result.
- How to conduct lessons learned events to find out what did not go well and did go well, and easily gather them as you go.
- How to close your project team to ensure everyone is treated fairly and free to proceed to their next challenge.
- How to use the key software tools to support the project management life-cycle – WBS, precedence diagram, and Gantt chart.
- Six practice quizzes, get copies of nine key project management document templates and six summary checklists, and earn 16 PDU’s.
- Get recommendations for free open source software to support the project management process.
- Gain a deeply practical understanding of the PMI project management best practices for those that wish to obtain a PMP certification.
Requirements
- No prior knowledge needed – covers the project management process from end to end, while providing a wealth of practical tips for those already experienced in project management.
Description
“Finally, an online course that teaches the ‘how’ of project management from an experienced veteran.” – Karin Brame
“I have been a PMP since 2006, and learned so much from this course. Truly outstanding. Wish it was available years ago.” – Mark Thorogood, PMP
This course is the invaluable practical companion to the PMI PMBOK. Based on more than a quarter century of experience managing projects from $250K to $55M, the course cuts through the complexity to provide a deeply practical description of how to use the proven Project Management Institute (PMI) processes to manage your projects of any size, from any domain, to maximize their probability of success. At the end of the course, you will receive a special certificate that bestows on you the credential of Practical Project Manager, and the right to append PPM after your name!
The course is end-to-end, comprehensive, and divided into more than 200 easy to digest videos of just a few minutes long. First an overview is provided of all the key PM concepts. Then the critically important role of the Project Manager and the essentials of team management are described. The PM processes are then mapped across the project time-line, and the specific actions you need to take at each step are explained in an easy to follow thread. The use of software tools to support the PM process is described. And Microsoft Office templates are provided for all the key PM documents. At the end of the course, you will not only understand project management, you will be able to *implement* it.
The course also includes a complete set of professional documentation for the Magical Devices Version 3 project, including a Project Charter, Project Management Plan, Gantt Schedule, Risk Register, and much more, that you can reuse for your own projects. You will also receive the document “Project Planning With MS Office” that explains how to use Microsoft Office tools to prepare the work breakdown structure, precedence diagram, schedule, and budget for your project!
More than 30K students have taken the course from around the world, making it the leading *applied* PM course online. If you need to manage a project right now, are pursuing a PMI certification, or just wish to get a solid grounding in the PM best practices to enhance your career, this course will really help. You will also earn 16 Professional Development Units (PDU’s).
Instructor
William Stewart is a PMI certified Project Management Professional (PMP) who has managed projects for more than a quarter century in the domains of organizational improvement, business process, system integration, software, construction, real estate, research, and others. He has delivered more than 220 onsite PM courses to more than 2,200 people. He has worked for aerospace, government, academia, and founded a software startup. He has in-depth experience with project management, risk management, systems integration, and software engineering. He earned a Ph.D. in computer science for discovery of an algorithm that builds multi-dimensional geodesic domes in optimum space and time.
Who this course is for:
- Those that need to manage projects, and want a deeply practical description of how to use the project management best practices across the life-cycle.
- Anyone involved in projects that wants to understand the practical essentials of the project management process.
