Through case studies and hands-on practice, examine each step involved in estimating time, resources and costs for budgeting and project scheduling.
The elements of the planning phase of a project are critical to its execution and control. Learn how to accurately track performance throughout the project’s life cycle using valuable metrics.
The PMI Authorized Training Partner logo is a registered mark of the Project Management Institute, Inc.
This course can be applied to the following certificate:
Project Management Certificate
Benefits and Learning Outcomes
- 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.
Course Outline/Topics
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
Instructor
Jackie Ramin is a program manager at CDW in Madison, Wisconsin. In her 19 years at CDW, she has managed information technology projects including Cisco IP telephony, network engineering, servers and storage, data center co-location, e-commerce web site development and… read more