Project Management in Practice – a 2-day course

• People who wish to learn or refresh the basic knowledge and skills related to project management
• People who are about to begin their adventure with project management

The method:

Real projects submitted by the participants form the basis of the workshop. 2-3 projects are selected and exercises are formed in relation to those projects. All exercises are completed in groups of 3-6 persons. Participants perform them, drawing up a case study of a historical project, which demonstrated the rules for implementing the individual steps. 50% of the time can be devoted to working on your own projects.

After completing the workshop the participant is able to:

• Determine when one should use the design approach
• Assess which project management tools should be used in a given context
• Use various tools for planning and supervising the project
• Compose an isolated plan and order the execution of a small project

As a result:

• Improved communication between team members
• People are clearly assigned to the tasks, roles and responsibilities in the project
• Improved teamwork
• A lower amount of stress when planning the project

• What is a project and what makes it different from the other ways of work?
• Why can a project plan be only “good enough”, but never “perfect” and what are the consequences? How to formulate a project mission statement?
• What are the phases of planning a project? Which of them is the most difficult and which one is the most important?

Defining the project

• Why is project defining the most difficult area in project planning?
• What are project goals? What kinds of goals should be considered? Why is the discussion about defining targets one of the most difficult discussions while planning a project?
• What are project products and how do they differ from project goals? Why does it take place?
• How to set priorities in a project? Why is it necessary to set them before commencing the detailed planning of a project, whereas later it will be practically impossible to set them?
• Why mustn’t the WBS be first prepared with a computer?
• Why, when working on the WBS, is the process more important than the result?
• What is a project network and what is it created for?
• How to verify the accuracy of the project network?
• What does the stage project planning consist in? What are the advantages?
• What does the model structure of project management look like? What roles does it include?

Estimating resources

• What are the methods of estimating resources and when should they be applied?
• How to define who is needed for realisation and managing work in a project?
• How to establish the accountability for realisation and managing work? How to write down the accountability?

Preparing a schedule

• What is a schedule and what is it used for?
• What does the standard approach to preparing a schedule consist in and why doesn’t it work in practice?
• How to enhance the critical path method to ensure it helps and does not hinder in everyday project management?

Supervision of project realisation

• What methods of monitoring progress of work in the project can be applied and what negative consequences will it entail? What does practical experience show?
• Why does every experienced project manager intuitively adapt a number of good practice behaviours, which, at first, may appear to be inconsistent with the art of project management?
• What rules and code of conduct does a project manager have to establish and implement to make sure that they do control the progress of work?
• What early “warning system” should be implemented in the scope of these rules to ensure practical risk management in projects?