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Welcome to the wonderful world of Project Management. Is this course right for you? If you ever need to manage a project, probably.
What exactly is Project Management? We summarize the complexities and clarity of everything - time management, risk assessment, scope creep - good project management entails.
The phases, or steps, of successful project management are (spoilers) initiation, planning, execution, control, and closure. In this lesson, we dive into what that means.
Let's begin at the beginning: with asking questions of the sponsors and stakeholders behind the project; and with the logistics you have to tame. Plus, the project manager's secret weapon.
Projects fail when you fail to plan - so let's talk about the importance of the planning phase and tools like WBS and scheduling that will help you actually deliver deliverables.
In this lesson, we cover all the forces project managers have to bear in mind as they plan: time, cost, and scope. We visualize these constraints with the not-actually-ominous Iron Triangle. Pythagoras would be proud.
Stay PERT, everyone! Now we get into the grit (and nit?) of estimating your project completion time and developing workable schedules.
Now we turn to cost - the resources and personnel you have available for a given project. Designing a project with cost in mind will make everyone above and below you happy.
What do schedules actually look like? One of the most common and useful tools for schedule creation is the magnificent Gantt Chart.
Welcome to our discussion of scope, in which we tell you to (constructively) say no to power, to decide what can and can't be accomplished, and to look at your project with a bird's eye.
A sponsor with a very Southern accent has a project she'd like you to manage.
In this challenge, use what you know about the small bakery you project manage to formulate a sponsor interview for Alice and her jaunty scarf.
In this next phase of the challenge, the sponsor gives you all the context and requirements for her project. Listen closely.
In this part of the challenge, it's time to create a WBS form and a Gantt chart which addresses all your sponsor's requests.
We discuss the constraints, risk, deliverables, and dependencies of the great cake challenge. There's a lot of options and variety for how to solve the problems. But we'll work through a few possible solutions.
In the execution phase, we translate goals and deliverables into tasks to achieve them. Or, in our example project management challenge, to achieve tasty, tasty cake.
As we enter the execution phase, it's time to talk about task management systems. We're going to go through several in detail, but this lesson gives you some important ideas to keep in mind about them.
Welcome to Trello, a flexible and open source task-manager. Its boards, lists, and cards are perfect for organizing your projects, deliverables, and tasks.
The next task management system we examine is Basecamp. While it's more geared towards professional project management, it's customizable for an infinite variety of projects.
Welcome to the third task manager on our tour: Asana. It has similar functionality to Trello and Basecamp, but a lot of customization, and circle icons, all its own.
As you move through your project, screen sharing problems can facilitate meetings and check-ups with remote contractors, freelancers, or coworkers across the office.
While Google Spreadsheets and Excel are perfectly fine for scheduling and project management, Team Gantt has a lot of power and flexibility specifically for project management. Let's go through it.
What other tools do you have to help execute a project? Everything. Everything that helps you communicate with your team is a valuable tool.
In our continuing project management challenge, this next step is to take everything you've planned and input it into a task management system.
Trello again! In this next project management exercise, we look an example of how a task manager can display all the deliverables you need and the schedule in which you need to roll them out.
As a project manager, you need to both active listen and be listened to. So how does that work? We talk about the monitoring or control phase, which is really all about effective leadership.
Talking about talking: we cover some best practices for communicating with your team, active listening, and some of the pitfalls of ineffective communication all project managers should watch out for.
You have 175 new ways people ignore their emails! In this lesson, we discuss strategies to keep information you send via email clear, concise, and out of the spam folder.
Meetings don't have to play out like a Dilbert comic. We cover how project managers can make them concise, comprehensive, and, dare we say it, useful.
Your job as a project manager entails a lot of damage control. Here we talk about steps you can take to put out whatever fires you can't prevent.
In this lesson, we cover some of the types of problems - from scope creep and schedules to stupidity - you're likely to encounter. Watch for what to watch out for.
Change we can believe in. Here's how to handle it and have protocols in place so that whatever change occurs, it never derails your project.
What do you do when you're done? We cover how to effectively close out a project, and learn from it for the next one.
Now it's time to slip your project manager hat on and put all these communication tips into practice. Look at these emails and see if they're effective.
Are all your edits in? Good. We go through the challenge emails in depth to discover what they do well and where they fall short - or run long.
This week, you're ready to tackle your very own project. You'll assess risk, define your constraints, create schedules, and, in short, be a project manager. It'll be fun. Promise.
Begin at the beginning with a sponsor interview! This will help you as a project manager to head off risk and develop the version of your project any high school yearbook would vote Most Likely To Succeed.
Time to analyze this and analyze that: make a WBS to identify your project's deliverables and use an Iron Triangle to understand how best to work within your project's specific constraints.
Never start a land war in Asia and never start a project without making a full list of all the risks you could run into. Check out our Risk Management video for more tips.
Time to set your schedule. Plan out the nuts and bolts with a Gantt Chart, which will let you see interdependencies and manage your project efficiently.
Now that you've done all your scheduling and pre-planning, take your project to task. Use a free task manager system to set up all your deliverables and deadlines so your team can get to work!
Now that you've gone through the steps of setting up your own project, you can actually start being a project manager. Utilize your resources in the One Month Project Management Community and use everything you've learned to accomplish your own project, or anyone else's.
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