INTRODUCTION

• Introduction to project management. What is a project? What makes a project successful?
• Definition of project planning and project management
• Managing different types of application development projects
• Introduce the 9 industry standard knowledge areas for project management

PROJECT PARTICIPANTS AND THEIR ROLES

• Identify project stakeholders and their roles
• Discuss how the project manager interacts with these participants

SCOPING THE PROJECT

• Understand why the project is being done. Without this understanding it will be difficult to plan the project and execute against the objectives. Verify the business case is sound
• Understand the organizational environment. Identify the business stakeholders who will be involved in the project and how they will impact the project
• Learn to ask probing questions about the requirements scope and facilitate a discussion with project stakeholders using visual representations of the requirements boundaries
• Learn the context level dataflow diagram technique to identify and scope “what is” and, more importantly, “what is not” to be analyzed. Analyze interfaces with people, other organizations, existing systems, and other software applications.
• Develop a change control process to assess change impacts and get approval
• Workshop – Scope the class case study project
• Optional Workshop – Reinforce the analysis techniques on a current project. Students will leave class with a draft visual representation of their current business area along with a list of follow up questions.

PROJECT PLANNING

• What is a project plan?
• Learn the steps in the planning process
  • Define work breakdown structure (WBS)
    • Define tasks
    • Estimate effort required
  • Define task dependencies and use them to find the critical path of the project
  • Define resources and understand how assignments affect the critical path and project timeline
  • Develop an initial project schedule
• Workshop – create a draft project plan for the class case study
• Optional Workshop – create a draft project plan for a current project

FINALIZING THE PLAN

• Include quality assurance tasks and project milestones
• Analyze the schedule to determine the length of the project
• Analyze the resource and cost allocation
• Make adjustments based on sponsor feedback
  • Understand the relationship of time, resources, scope and quality when making changes to the project plan
  • Get approval of the plan from the project sponsor
  • Baselining the plan

TRACKING THE PROJECT PROGRESS AND MANAGING CHANGE

• Conducting a project kickoff meeting
• Managing team member status reporting
• Updating task and project progress
• Manage changes to the project through the change control process
• Reviewing and adjusting resource assignments
• Monitoring project quality, risk, and scope changes

COMMUNICATION PLANNING AND MANAGEMENT

• Stakeholder analysis
  • Assess the project sponsor
  • Identify both primary and secondary stakeholders
  • Understand stakeholder area of interest, expertise, and communication styles
  • Determine effective communication practices for each stakeholder group
• Create a project communications plan
• Management reporting
• Team building tip and techniques

PROJECT CLOSING

• Conduct a post implementation assessment with project sponsor and business stakeholders
• Conduct a project team debrief and record lessons learned