MDP453 - Project Planning and Control
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Course description
In today’s business environment, where projects are constrained by aggressive deadlines and limited resource availability, project managers need practical, “best practices” skills and tools. This course adds to your skill set by teaching you the methods, tools and techniques that are used in planning, monitoring and controlling projects. The appropriate educational techniques are used to provide the participant with simple, logical approaches to the effective and efficient management of projects. Your learning is reinforced through a number of “hands-on” exercises using case studies and real project examples. MS Project is used throughout the course to facilitate learning and to illustrate the integration of concepts and tools. A FREE CD containing custom MS Project views, tables, filters and reports is included as part of this program.

Who should attend
Professionals who now or in the future, will be leading or be a part of a project team. This includes project managers, team leaders, individuals whose principal responsibilities are as technology contributors but who will be part of project teams, and anyone needing an in-depth knowledge of how to plan and control a project.

Prerequisites
To obtain the full benefit of this course, attendees should have either completed the “Principals and Techniques of Project Management” or have a thorough background in the fundamentals of project management as a discipline.

What you will achieve

• The skill and confidence to use a practical project planning technique


• The ability to determine if a project can truly be delivered on time, within budget and with limited resources


• An understanding of how to discover the risks necessary to meet a constrained delivery date


• The confidence to communicate project trade-offs clearly and to set attainable goals with clients, managers and project team members


• The knowledge of how to record actual project progress and then use the project baseline to spot and manage variance


• The ability to frame your questions when analyzing the project plan to spot hidden variances

What you will learn

• The Project Planning Process - a simple and practical process for planning


• Estimating - the manner in which durations, total person effort and percent-per-day resource assignment impact one another


• Task Scheduling - an understanding of what dependency network (CPM) scheduling is and a simple method for creating and using it


• Resource Scheduling - how to solve resource over allocation and task schedule conflicts through resource leveling


• Recording Project Progress - why the conventional methods don’t work and how it can be done in a simple but accurate manner


• The Project Plan As a Model - how to use the project plan to run "what-if" scenarios


• MS Project - how to best use a popular software tool for planning, monitoring and reporting the project. (Note: Although MS Project is used to facilitate the exercises, this is principally a concepts and practical techniques course, not a specific MS Project course.)
  
  Course Outline
  
  Day One
  • What is a Project?
  • Why Plan?
  • Project Initiation
  • Organizing and Conducting the Joint Project Planning Session
  • Creating the Work Breakdown Structure
  • Design and Create a Work Breakdown Structure
  • Identify Project Activities
  • Identify Project Resources
  • Estimating Activity Duration and Resource Requirements
  • Use Software to Record Project Activities and Resource Assignments
  
  
  Day Two
  • Project Costing
  • Evaluate the Cost for the Class Project
  • Dependency Network Based Scheduling
  • Construct the Initial Project Dependency Network
  
  
  Day Three
  • Schedule Compression Techniques
  • Use Software to Analyze Project Dependency Based Network Schedule for the Class Project
  • Refine the Project Schedule Using Compression Techniques
  • Inserting Milestone tasks
  • Resource Leveling/Scheduling Techniques
  • Use Software to Address Resource Over Allocation for the Class Project
  • Monitoring and Controlling Progress Techniques
  • Recording Project Progress
  • Use software to Record Typical Progress for the Class Project
  • Analyzing Variance From the Baseline
  • Review of Best Practices for Planning and Controlling Projects
  • Course Wrap-up