Project Management (Part 2) - Clarifying What You Are Trying to Accomplish and Why

In Project Management (Part 2) - Clarifying What You Are Trying to Accomplish and Why, you'll learn ...

• How to manage stakeholders' expectations with a well-written Scope Statement
• How to identify people who may benefit from your project so you can then determine how their expectations and needs help justify the project
• The need to define your project constraints and how to work with them
• How to deal with the unknowns of your project

Overview

Preview a portion of this course before purchasing it.

Credit: 2 PDH

Length: 20 pages

Over the past 25 to 30 years the number of projects in the workplace has skyrocketed. Projects of all types and sizes are now the way that organizations accomplish their work. People who want to devote their careers to planning and managing those projects are vital to their successes.

At the same time, a new breed of project manager has emerged. This new breed may not have set career goals to become project managers, but they do know they must successfully manage projects to move ahead in their careers. Clearly, project management has become a critical skill, not a career choice.

Even though these people realize they need special tools, techniques, and knowledge to handle their new types of assignments, they may not be able or willing to devote large amounts of time to acquiring them, which is where this Project Management course series comes into play.

This course is Part 2 of a 9-part series based on the popular book Project Management for Dummies, 4th Edition, which provides tools and techniques in accordance with PMI’s A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK). Each course in the series is stand-alone. Feel free to jump back and forth through the courses depending on your own project-management knowledge and experience and your current needs. However, it is suggested that you complete the series in sequential order if you are new to project management concepts.

This course, Part 2 of the series, will show you how to develop a mutual agreement between your project’s requesters and your project team about the project’s goals and expectations. It will also help you establish the conditions necessary to perform the project work.

You’ll learn how to produce a well-written Scope Statement that will help to manage stakeholder expectations. You’ll discover how to determine the needs your project must satisfy to successfully achieve its purpose. You’ll learn how to clearly define your project’s objectives / deliverables. And you’ll learn how to address project limitations, needs and unknowns.

This course is applicable to engineers of all disciplines working in any industry. Whether you are an experienced project manager or you’ve never been on a project team… Whether you’ve had significant project-management training or you’ve had none… this course series will provide the knowledge and tools you’ll need to plan and manage projects.

The courses in this series were written to be direct and (relatively) easy to understand. But don’t be misled — the simple text still navigates all the critical tools and techniques you’ll need to support your project planning, scheduling, budgeting, organizing, and controlling.

For those seeking Project Management Professional (PMP) certification, the tools and techniques provided in this course series are in accordance with PMBOK. In fact, a section is provided at the end of each course module that specifies where the topics in the module are addressed in PMBOK.

It’s important to note that PMBOK identifies what best practices are but doesn’t address in detail how to perform them or deal with difficulties you may encounter as you try to perform them. In contrast, this course series focuses heavily on how to perform the project-management techniques and processes. However, if you’re preparing to take the PMP examination, use these courses as a companion to PMBOK , not as a substitute for it.

Learning Objectives

Upon completion of this course, participants will be able to:

• Clarify a project's justification and desired deliverables.
• Identify and engage the actual users of project products and services.
• Determine the underlying needs that a project addresses, including needs that may not be obvious.
• Explain steps for helping people understand a project's importance to the organization.
• Develop a scope of work description that avoids duplicated efforts by clearly specifying where a project starts and ends.
• Identify the elements to include in a project's list of objectives and deliverables.
• Create clear and specific project objectives.
• Classify the different types of project objectives.
• Respond to resistance to project objectives.
• Identify common excuses for not defining objectives specifically enough.
• Describe the various categories of project limitations and how to work within them.
• Apply methods for identifying all existing project limitations.
• Address unknowns by documenting project assumptions.
• Present a scope statement in a clear and concise document.

Certificate of Completion

You will be able to immediately print a certificate of completion after passing a multiple-choice quiz consisting of 10 questions. PDH credits are not awarded until the course is completed and quiz is passed.