Project Management Bootcamp

The three approaches presented are three very different ways of managing a project.  Understanding the differences will enable a business to select the best approach for their projects.

The Agile/Scrum methodology is a structured project management methodology. It follows a prescribed process that includes Sprints and Scrums.

Understanding the domains found in the PMBOK^® Guide will prepare an individual to manage a project.  These domains are universally applicable across industries and project types and are essential aspects of project management throughout the project lifecycle.

Understand the difference between positive and negative risk. Learn the major steps of project risk management. 

The Risk Register is a table that tracks the project risk management activities.

Risk Identification is the practice of identifying positive and negative conditions that may occur within the project and impact project objectives.

All project risks are not equal in their effect on a project.  Project risks that have been identified are prioritized using qualitative techniques such as the Risk Matrix.

Negative Risk Response is determining what actions the project will take to address risk threats.

Positive Risk Response is determining what actions the project will take to address risk opportunities.

Contingencies are potential risk response actions that will only be implemented if some triggering event or condition has shown that the risk probability has gone from unlikely to likely.

Every project has a purpose. Determining that purpose, the benefits to the organization and how they will be measured is a fundamental principle for project success.

The business case provides the business rationale, normally in financial terms, of whether the project should be done.

The Project Charter is the document that approves the initiation of the project and identifies goals, objectives, boundaries, and constraints.

Project requirements are often vague, incomplete, or contradictory at the time of project initiation.  Normally, additional effort is required to collect and verify the true project requirements.

In-Frame/Out-of-Frame is a technique for clarifying project boundaries by listing both the activities and deliverables that are in scope for the project and listing the activities that are not required as part of the project.

The approach taken when planning a project should be based upon the primary project constraint.  Attributes of that constraint are planned first and then other aspects of the project are planned to support the primary constraint.

The organization needs to establish a management discipline for selecting and approving projects.

Project governance builds trust and confidence in project management. While there are many ways to approach governance, most organizations rely upon a Project Management Office to perform this function.

Project requirements encompass more than the functional requirements. There are government, industry, and organizational requirements with compliance attributes that must be managed.

An organization and project team can take several approaches for ensuring compliance. Regardless of the approach there are significant impacts of both compliance and non-compliance.

The PMBOK^® Guide is the reference document upon which much of the PMP^® exam is based.  The PMBOK^® Guide contains a description of project management domains, models, methods, tools, checklists, and templates.

A portion of the PMBOK^® Guide is a standard for project management. That portion is Part 1, The Standard for Project Management of a Project.

The Project Management Information System (PMIS) is the method that the project manager and core team use to share and disseminate project information.  It often is based upon the use of a project management software application.

The Project Stakeholders' support is essential for project success. Project Stakeholders set the goals for the project and will ultimately determine whether the project is considered a success or failure. 

Identifying stakeholders enables the project team to create a strategy for each that guides the communication and interaction with each stakeholder.

Many stakeholders have additional goals for a project beyond the primary business goal. Understanding those goals can help the team ensure project success and maintain stakeholder support.

Every stakeholder is unique and their influence and impact on the project is likely to be unique. Understanding their perspective assists the project manager and team in structuring the project so as to obtain their support and effective decision-making on the project.

The Project Leader is responsible for ensuring the project team executes the project. 

Most large projects are managed by a cross-functional core team.  Core team members have a dual responsibility; they are responsible for the project achieving its goals and they are responsible to ensure that the project complies with their function’s standards and best practices.

Team Leaders adapt to the business and team environment to ensure the team creates the performance or implements the change for which it was chartered.

Agile Scrum projects rely on the leadership of the Scrum Master and Product Owner to assist the project team in accomplishing the project tasks. While neither of these individuals will be the project leader in a classic sense, both take on some of the typical responsibilities of project leadership that are necessary for effective project management.

The Agile culture is a set of characteristics found in all the Agile methodologies. These characteristics are empowerment, adaptation, and a focus on performance.

Project Team Building is a process that the Project Core Team normally goes through to improve team coordination and decision making.

It is common in today’s business environment to be a member of or lead a virtual project team.  There are several unique challenges with these teams that the project leader must be prepared to address.

When project team members are changed, the project leader needs to manage both the process of saying “Goodbye” to one individual and saying “Hello” to another.

The temporary and often virtual nature of projects leads to the creation of a project team who has never worked together. Effective use of project resources requires that the project resources are capable of performing the assigned tasks. A growing element of project planning is planning for project team training and in some cases team member skill training.

In the typical project of today, a project training plan is essential to address the challenges with project resources. At this time in the project, the impact of the training plan that was developed is assessed. In addition, changes to the project team will likely require modifications to the training approach.

Teams perform better when they have clear shared goals.  One key element of good team leadership is helping your team establish team goals. This module will provide several suggested approaches for establishing goals and a set of criteria for good team goals.

Project Decision Making is the process whereby the project leader and project team decide upon project strategy, tactics, and acceptable actions.

Team members will often need to negotiate with each other on tasks and activities and the team leader may need to negotiate with the other managers or supervisors of team members.

From time to time teams will experience conflict. When the team leader or team members are able to resolve the conflict in a positive manner, the team becomes stronger and performs better.

Understanding and leveraging diversity can improve project team performance in many situations. An interesting aspect of diversity on projects that it includes both cultural diversity and technical diversity. Both of these should be actively managed.

Projects are unique and project team members are frequently changing. Project mentoring - which focuses on coaching and aligning project team members and stakeholders - is frequently required. In this case, it is less about long-term career mentoring and more about effective engagement with other project team members to ensure project objectives are met.

Emotional Intelligence is a framework for improving communication and team dynamics. These principles can be used by a project manager to understand how to harness their own emotions and the emotions of others to achieve project goals.

A project manager can use the principles of emotional intelligence to improve their active listening skills. In addition, the application of emotional intelligence to project team and stakeholder interactions can reduce conflict and improve alignment between individuals.

Project managers and core team leaders can use the framework of situational leadership to guide their interactions with team members. By assessing the readiness of team members, the project manager or core team leader can interact with a leadership style likely to improve team performance.

Project Communication Management is a very broad term that refers to all of the communication activities associated with the project. Communication is a key attribute of project management.

Teams rely on effective communication, yet there are many factors that can inhibit communication. When these factors are present, the team leader needs to proactively manage the team communication processes to overcome them.

Team Meetings are a gathering of team members to discuss aspects of the project. Team pulse meetings focus on status. Team problem-solving meetings focus on problem resolution.

During a Sprint, the Scrum Team meets daily at a Scrum Meeting to provide status on progress.

Project Management Reviews are the formal documented meetings held periodically between senior management and the project team. 

Project technical reviews are formal decision meetings between team members and a panel of subject matter experts.

Sprint Demonstration Planning ensures that the Sprint Demo meeting appropriately reflects the work accomplished by the Scrum Team.

Misunderstandings frequently occur within project teams. The project leader to demonstrate and encourage effective listening and clear communication to minimize these. This lesson illustrates several best practices for avoiding misunderstandings

The integrated project plan that includes scope, schedule, and resource information for all aspects of the project is the project baseline plan.

Project requirements are often vague, incomplete or contradictory at the time of project initiation.  Normally, additional effort is required to collect and verify the true project requirements.

Learn how to identify project tasks and activities using the deliverables deployment technique.

Learn how to quickly identify project boundaries using the W questions.

Once a project is approved, the project planning starts in earnest. In this lesson learn the best practices for this start of project planning are presented and discussed.

The Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) is the most commonly used technique for organizing the project scope. The WBS decomposes the scope into tasks and organizes the tasks into logical groupings.

The WBS Dictionary is a table or spreadsheet that is organized by project task and contains all project planning details.

Task Descriptions are the statements of scope for each of the project activities.  They are written in the format of “action – completion point.”

Story Cards - also known as Product Backlog Items (PBIs) - are the technique used for documenting project scope, quality requirements, estimates, and priority of the deliverables in an Agile/Scrum project.

There is an art to creating effective story cards. In this lesson, an Agile project team member will learn the best practices for writing story cards.

Requirements are managed in an Agile project using the Project Backlog. This is a prioritized list of the project deliverables.

Understand when and how to use a milestone schedule on a project.  Learn how to create a milestone schedule.

Understand when and how to use a Gantt chart on a project. Learn how to create a Gantt chart.

A network diagram is a project scheduling technique that shows the relationship between tasks by depicting project activities as a flowchart.

A Task List Schedule is a schedule format used to communicate tasks with dates to extended team members or those who do not have a major role in the project.

A Kanban Schedule is a project scheduling tool for managing a batch of similar items that must be processed through the same project steps.

Float (slack or buffer) is extra time that a task could consume beyond its duration estimate without impacting other aspects of the project. Total float is extra time without impacting the end date of the project and free float is extra time without impacting another project task.

Critical Path is a project scheduling technique that determines the shortest time that the current project plan can be completed.

Sprint Controls are the planning and tracking techniques used by an Agile project team to organize the project tasks and activities.

The project Resource List is a list of all individuals working on the project with their contact information and all special equipment and facilities required to accomplish project tasks.

The Responsibility Matrix is a project management tool for correlating project work assignments with project team members.

Contractors, vendors, and suppliers are used on projects to reduce risks.  These external resources have capacity and capability that allows them to complete project tasks better than internal resources would be able to complete them.

Understand what is normally shown in a project budget.  Learn how to create a time-phased project budget.

Project resource demands are often inconsistent throughout the life of the project leading to times when resources are over-allocated.

The most commonly used techniques for creating project estimates are analogous estimates, bottom-up estimates, three-point estimates, and using a parametric model.

Time Boxes are an estimating technique that sets a finite time for a task or task group. The amount of scope that is completed is variable. Whatever scope is done when the time box ends is the amount of scope for that activity on the project.

Project estimates of effort, duration, and money are interrelated. Based upon the cost and availability of the resources involved, once you have one of the estimates, you can derive the other two.

Project plans are built with an accumulation of estimates, each of which has a level of uncertainty associated with it.  The level of uncertainty is a major contributor to the accuracy of the plan and the amount of project risk.

Task Accountability is the project management activity associated with ensuring the successful completion of project activities.

Contractors and vendors are often used to accomplish project tasks. The complexity, uniqueness, and uncertainty of the activity will determine the nature of the relationship between the project team and the contractor or vendor.

Sprint execution is the actual work of the Scrum team during the Sprint to accomplish the tasks needed to complete each Story in the Sprint Backlog.

Quality management on projects are processes and tools that aid the project core team and the organization in their effort to both do the right things and do things the right way on projects. It includes a focus on both corrective actions and preventive actions.

The Sprint Demonstration is the formal meeting where the Scrum Team demonstrates to the Product Owner the performance of each deliverable that was created during the Sprint.

Understand how to gain stakeholder acceptance during project closeout and learn how to create and use a Punch List.

A project is formally approved because of a business-level impact. That impact should be verified as the project nears closeout.

In addition to completing the project goals and objectives, an attribute of project performance is the performance of the members of the project team. Each team member should have continued to develop their own skills and leadership.

Since project teams are comprised of people, there are times when the project team will become dysfunctional. Team members begin to violate team ground rules and team cohesion and trust are undermined. In this lesson, we discuss a framework for recognizing this and addressing dysfunctional behavior.

Attributes of governance and compliance were discussed in planning. However, it is during project execution that compliance is demonstrated. In this lesson, we discuss the techniques to be used to monitor the level of compliance on a project.

Depending upon your organization's culture, compliance may be a primary value or it may only be treated as a minor element of project management. In this lesson, we discuss the compliance mindset and multiple methods for strengthening compliance on your project.

There are a growing number of things outside the control of the project team in today's business environment. The project manager must monitor the industry and organization to assess the impacts. Risk management has expanded to include items outside the control of the project team.

Project compliance with all appropriate standards, regulations, policies, and requirements documents is the responsibility of the project team. However, typically an independent review of compliance, in the form of a project audit, is done to confirm compliance.

Learn how to create and use a project dashboard to communicate project status with both management and your project team.

Earned Value Management is a comprehensive project management technique that combines scope, schedule and resource management into one set of measures.  It starts with task-level planning.

Earned Value Management is a comprehensive project management technique that combines scope, schedule, and resource management into one set of measures.  An element, in fact, the element that provides the name of the technique, is the setting of Earned Value.

Variance occurs when the actual situation is different from the planned or expected situation.  In projects, variance analysis applies to schedule variance and cost variance.  It determines both why the actual situation is different than what was planned and the impact that will have on the project.

Since projects seldom go exactly as planned, part way through a project the project team is typically asked to estimate how much time and money are required to complete the project.

Issues are any request, complaint, or unexpected condition that leads to unplanned, but in scope, work that must be accomplished on a project.  They normally result in the need to implement a workaround in order to resolve them.

Roadblocks are impediments that prevent the Scrum Team from completing Stories and tasks. The Scrum Master is charged with removing or creating a workaround for the Roadblocks.

Contingencies are potential risk response actions that will only be implemented if some triggering event or condition has shown that the risk probability has gone from unlikely to likely.

Scope creep is the uncontrolled expansion to project scope without adjustments to time, cost, and resources.

There are several approaches a project team can take to accelerate project tasks. Each approach has its own unique characteristics and risks.

The project performance is tracked against an integrated set of project baselines that support the achievement of the project’s triple constraint goals and objectives.

The unique nature of projects leads to an inherent level of uncertainty.  Project managers should expect and plan for project change.

A formal documented modification to the project baseline, boundaries, or an artifact.

Lessons Learned are a retrospective look at a project, or phase of a project, to identify best practices to be repeated and performance gaps to be improved.

The Sprint Retrospective is a lessons learned meeting with a focus on identifying opportunities to improve the performance and management of the next Sprint. 

The Backlog Refinement is the update of the Product Backlog based upon what has been completed and what has been learned in a recently completed Sprint.

To fully realize the benefit of a project, often business systems need to change to implement the project results. This transition can be a challenging aspect of the project.

In many organizations, a final report is prepared after all project activities have been completed and the impact of the project results have been demonstrated in business performance metrics.

In addition to transitioning the result of the project into the organization’s operations, projects often have accounts, systems, and resources that must be closed or disposed of before the project is fully closed.