Many project and program managers try to educate themselves on scheduling and, for years, remain beginners, unable to implement the inputs and outputs of a schedule. It results in poor predictability.

This course introduces the fundamental concepts of time management and scheduling as gleaned from the Program Management Book of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide), the field of Agile project management, and common practices in industry.

It is a tool-agnostic course geared for hands-on project managers, project management office leads, and middle managers, who crave early warnings and predictable project outcomes.

Learning Outcomes

At the conclusion of this course, you should be able to

• Define what makes up a schedule (inputs and outputs) and convert a past schedule into a project template
• Learn how to tie the three legs of the iron triangle—scope, time and cost
• Set expectations with executives and teammates about what is needed from them to run a successful project and what the project managers owes each of them
• Refine existing project estimates by incorporating lessons learned, estimating errors and risk
• Correlate dependencies and shared resources between projects managed by different project managers
• Transition generic resource assignments into persons, set their average daily effort allocation, level their workload
• Correlate top down and bottoms up schedules, set the project baseline and deadline
• Identify risk points
• Track task progress correctly and recover from delays
• Use Microsoft Project at an intermediate level, if you’re using it in your organization (Supplemental material)

Topics Include

• What belongs in a schedule vs. a to-do or action item list. To-do list implementation in Excel
• Optimum visibility: schedule detail and granularity
• Iron triangle—how to represent scope time and cost mathematically
• Task types and resource types—what is pre-defined, what needs estimation and what should be calculated by a tool
• Milestones and recurring activities
• Dates: dynamic or dependent dates and constrained dates; encoding holidays and vacations
• Workload leveling
• Critical path, slack, reconciling top-down/bottoms up mismatch
• Estimating uncertainty (independent of estimating method), risk and unknown events and how to manage them
• Scaling of estimating data according to specific project size, complexity, and resource productivity
• Dependencies among tasks and resources across projects
• Schedule templates
• Project priorities
• Correct updating techniques
• Recovery techniques: fast-tracking, crashing, and crunching
• Reporting. Escalating with options