PROJECT MANAGEMENT

Course Overview

The course covers key components of project management including project integration, project scope management, project time and cost management, quality management, human resource considerations, communications, risk management, and procurement management. Students will gain a thorough grounding in project management principles and techniques, including project life cycle, chartering, stakeholder management, work/task breakdown, network diagram, critical path, contingency planning, resource allocation, project monitoring, and reporting.

Learning Objectives:

1. identify common phases in the project life cycle (initiating, planning, executing, and closing) and list activities critical to each;
2. analyze new project constraints (time, resources, performance) and identify trade-offs between them (for example, if a timely project completion date is critical, a company may expend more resources and perhaps reduce quality expectations if a deadline is at risk);
3. identify project stakeholders and their needs and prioritize stakeholders’ impacts on the project by the following criteria: proximity to the project, power, and urgency (time-sensitivity);
4. create a project work breakdown structure that accurately reflects a given project’s scope and includes individual work packages, each scaled for a single owner;
5. employ a work breakdown structure to develop a network diagram that accurately reflects the duration and sequencing of project activities, Major Topic Outline:
6. identify a project’s critical path and compute a project’s earliest possible finish date using the two-pass method,
7. name the four methods for responding to project risks (avoid, transfer, mitigate, and accept) and the three methods for responding to project opportunities (exploit, share, and enhance) and identify their differences;
8. summarize the differences between analogous, parametric, and bottom-up cost estimating and describe when it’s appropriate to use each;
9. define “planned value”, “earned value”, “actual costs”, “schedule variance”, and “cost variance” within the context of Earned Value Management; demonstrate how this system may be used to manage project cost and
schedule.