COURSE 4300 | 3-DAY SESSION
Rapid Project Planning

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Learn the best methods for applying real-world scenario models to all your projects — reduce surprise, and increase on-time delivery.

In-Class Workshops and Group Exercises:

Draw from the best practices of PMI® and the IIBA® — Harness this combined experience in just three days The ability to effectively and reliably plan your project is one of the key elements needed for project success.

A recent survey of over 8,300 IT projects that were undertaken by 365 different companies makes the problem clear - only 16% of these projects were completed on-time and on-budget. An earlier survey of over 1,000 general projects found only slightly more than 12% were considered successful.

If you are an IT manager, a software development project manager, or a team member responsible for project estimation, Rapid Project Planning will provide you with the tools and understanding to produce
the scope, cost, and time estimates your project needs to succeed. Projects don't fail at the end, they fail at the beginning.

Projects often fail because the key stakeholders (customers, project managers, and sponsors) are unable to translate their expectations into usable project requirements. As a result, this effectively prevents the producing of usable time and cost estimates. Fixing issues arising from planning shortfalls is expensive, but preventing them with proven scope, cost, and time estimating techniques isn't. By learning and implementing the key skills taught in this course, you can significantly increase your project's chances of falling within proper scope — on time, and under budget. And the more your projects succeed, the better your organization's bottom line. Learn real-world tools and techniques and put them to immediate use. This course will give you practical experience with proven tools and techniques for reliably estimating your next project's scope, costs, and schedule.

You'll gain a practical understanding of how project requirements and estimation fit within the project management processes. Lively lectures are interspersed with insightful exercises that will immediately add important project estimation and management tools to your skill-set. You'll also gain the ability to add value to your planning process through the proactive use of Project Risk Management Planning. Create the reliable scope, cost, and time estimates (the first time) that your project needs in order to maximize its chances for success. Regardless of your organization's environment, you can't afford to miss this course!

Specifically you will:

1. Function-Point Analysis
2. Exterior Estimating for Determining Resource Requirements & Project Duration
3. Employing Use Cases in Requirements Gathering and Estimating
4. Delphi Weightings
5. Determining Critical Path & Critical Chain
6. Qualitative & Quantitative Risk Analysis
7. The Time-Phased Cost Budget
8. Earned-Value Analysis
   

Immediate Benefits of Taking This Class:

1. Use Function Point Analysis to measure the size and complexity of your project
2. Develop Use-Cases that can be used to identify project requirements and time/cost estimates
3. Calculate the duration of your project using empirically proven estimation methods
4. Establish baseline staffing requirements for your project
5. Analyze Project Risks both qualitatively and quantitatively
6. Factor Risk Analysis into your project estimations of time/cost in terms of person-days and dollars
7. Create a Network Dependency Diagram to identify the Critical Path and the Critical Chain
8. Apply resources to your Network Diagram using resource leveling and the realities of project staffing
9. Create a Staffing Management Plan that fully assigns each project activity to each individual team member
10. Create a time-phased budget (Cost Baseline) for your project
11. Utilize Earned Value Technique (EVT) to track your project's progress and identify specific trouble areas
12. Revise budget-at-completion numbers to reflect the to-date efficiencies (or inefficiencies) of your project
13. Understand how to treat fixed, variable, direct, indirect, and sunk costs both during project estimation and as the project proceeds.
14. Create strategies to effectively deal with both positive and negative risks to the project
15. Effectively establish expectations - what your customer expects from you and what you expect from your sponsor
16. Identify those risks which are most common to your type of project
17. Present time and cost estimates to the customer, to upper-level management, and to your project sponsor that accurately represent the level of risk for the project
18. Manage your project's critical path in order to ensure proper resource allocation throughout the project
19. Utilize the critical chain method to eliminate common estimating problems and produce a more reliable estimate
20. Understand how to manage project constraints in order to meet the customer's expectations

Who Should Attend:

If you are involved at all in defining, leading, or developing
systems development projects, this workshop is an invaluable
asset to tune up your current capabilities and take your career
to the next level. This course is perfect for you if you are a:

• Project Managers
• IT Managers/Directors
• Business Analysts
• Outsourcing Professionals
• QA Managers/Directors
• Software Architects
• Systems Analysts
• Team Leaders
• Software Managers
• Developers