• Start projects on an optimistic note, with better estimates, and keep them on schedule
• Develop earned-value management metrics to measure performance
• Have your projects finish on schedule
• Gain immediate results to take back to your daily applications
• Collaborate with others on real-world situations and gain immediate solutions to take back to your workplace.

Seminar Outline

Estimating

• Assessing a project charter prior to creating estimates
• What’s involved in estimating time
• Scheduled and unscheduled duration
• Effort
• Defining the role of the work breakdown structure in estimating
• Estimating duration using weighted average estimating
• Estimating and calculating effort
• Linking a work breakdown structure to resources and costs
• Connecting a work breakdown structure to estimated duration, scheduled duration and effort
• Customizing Microsoft Project^® to ensure estimates are accurate
• Estimating non-HR costs

Scheduling

• Creating a project roadmap (the schedule)
• Types of dependencies when ordering tasks
• Scheduling reality check
• Types of dependencies between tasks
• Constraints on the schedule
• Types of constraints on start and finish dates
• Selecting the type of constraint to use on the schedule
• Using scheduling diagrams: Activity on Node Network Diagram, Gantt Chart, PERT Chart
• Identifying predecessor and successor tasks for a project
• Understanding critical path: What it is, where it is, why should I bother and how will I know it is calculated correctly
• Scheduling resources
• Resource leveling
• How to calculate a productive day
• Eight types of resource loading on the task
• Determining if resources are over-committed and what to do about it
• Baselining the schedule to measure progress

Performance To Date

• Determining the types of performance to track at the beginning of a project: Actuals, progress to date, stoplight reports and summary reports
• Tracking and reconciling actuals against the estimates and the schedule
• Interpreting a schedule stoplight report
• What to do when the project is in trouble
• Fast tracking a project
• Crashing a project
• How to decide which course of action to take
• Interpreting and taking action on a project summary report