Next Start Date: St Augustine 2010-04-27

This course is designed for career project managers and those professionals for whom project management is an integral part of their daily jobs, and who have a vested interest in improving the effectiveness of project management and the success of projects – often under complex or difficult circumstances.

This audience has experience managing projects, but is looking to enhance its project management skills and its ability to handle more concurrent projects or to manage larger and more complex projects.

At Course Completion

After completing this course, students will be able to:

• Explain how effective project plans facilitate project success.
• Quickly set up project plans that communicate key project information to the entire project team.
• Develop schedules in Microsoft Project that communicate the project tasks effectively and accuratel.
• Assign resources to tasks to obtain the desired results.

Module 1:

Module 2:
Preparing an Effective Project Plan

• Why Effective Communication Is Important
• Techniques for Communicating Effectively
• Demonstration: Using the Outline View in Word to Organize Project Plans
• Walkthrough: Communicating Project Information
• Demonstration: Creating a Project Plan Template
• Building Project Budgets
After completing this module, students will be able to:
• Recognize why effective communication is important to project success.
• Examine techniques that effectively communicate project plans.
• Organize project plans by applying the Outline command.
• Explore techniques that effectively communicate project information to all stakeholders.
• Create a project plan template to facilitate the creation of future project plans.

Module 3:
Building Better Project Schedules

This module focuses on how to build a project schedule that helps stakeholders and team members understand the work that must be performed to complete a project. In this module, you will modify an existing project schedule to explore techniques for communicating project schedules effectively.
Topics and Activities
• Building an Effective Overall Schedule
• Building an Effective Gantt Chart
• Exercise 1: Clearly Communicating Phases, Tasks, Milestones, and Deliverables
• Best Practices for Communicating Task Detail
• Exercise 2: Documenting Work Packages
• Exercise 3: Linking a Task to a Work Package Document
• Demonstration: Preventing Inadvertent Schedule Constraints
After completing this module, students will be able to:
• Explain how easy-to-understand project schedules help team members contribute to project success.
• Create a project schedule with tasks that emphasize the phases, deliverables, and key milestones of the project.
• Create a project schedule that makes it easier to identify the deliverables that result from tasks.
• Differentiate tasks that represent work, from tasks that represent tangible results.
• Choose effective methods for communicating the details of work associated with project tasks.
• Avoid unintentional schedule constraints and remove any that may have been added by mistake.

Module 4:
Allocating Resources to Project Tasks

Topics and Activities
• Problems and Opportunities in Resource Allocation
• How Microsoft Project Calculates Task Values
• Exercise: Mastering Tricky Resource Assignments
• How Microsoft Project Levels Resources
• Putting It All Together: Presenting Project Plans More Effectively
After completing this module, students will be able to:
• Recognize why reasonable resource assignments make it easier to manage projects during project execution.
• Evaluate which Project task fields to modify to obtain the resource allocations you want.
• Assign resources to tasks without changing the desired characteristics of the tasks.
• Describe the algorithm that Microsoft Project uses to level resources and how that can lead to unexpected leveling results.
• Apply different techniques in Microsoft Project to resolve resource over allocations.