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.

Specific Knowledge or Skill Obtained

This course teaches the following specific knowledge and skills:

• Clarifying your project's justification and the desired deliverables
• How to identify and engage the real users of project products and services
• How to determine the real needs that your project addresses, which may not always be obvious
• Steps to help people understand your project's importance to the organization
• How to develop a scope of work description that avoids duplicated efforts by clearly specifying where your project starts and where it ends
• Elements to include in your project's list of objectives/deliverables
• How to create clear and specific project objectives
• How to identify all types of objectives
• How to respond to resistance to objectives
• Excuses people give for not defining their objectives too specifically
• The various categories of project limitations and how to work within them
• Methods to help you identify all of the project limitations that exist
• Dealing with Unknowns by documenting your assumptions
• How to present your 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.