Essential Skills for Project Scheduling and Planning

The late delivery of projects has become the nightmare of project managers worldwide. Countless numbers of projects undertaken by organisations in the private and public sectors notably overrun the project schedule and budget, and as a result fail to accomplish the organisation’s financial and strategic objectives.  This is often joined by sizeable increases in costs, reduction in quality and with substantial financial losses to the organisation. Why? This is due essentially to the failure of many project professionals to successfully apply the methods and techniques of modern project planning, scheduling and control to their projects.

Objectives

• Apply methods used in resource planning and control.
• Comprehend the time-cost trade-offs.
• Recognise risk sources, minimise their influence, and learn how to sustain project momentum.
• Administer project documentation and reporting.
• Develop effective performance monitoring and control systems.

Course Outline

Day 1

Project Scope Planning and Definitions (Fundamentals)

• Introduction to Project Management.
• Scope Planning.
• Work Packages.
• Scope Execution Plan.
• Triple Constraints – Time Cost, Scope.
• Project Delivery Systems.

Day 2

Project Schedule Planning

• Economic Evaluation and impact of interest rates.
• Work Breakdown Structures (WBS).
• Project Estimating.
• Gantt Chart – Schedule Baseline.
• Precedence Network Diagramming.
• Building schedule logic.
• What is float?

Day 3

Critical Way and Network Scheduling

• Activity development.
• Network calculations.
• Forward and backward pass.
• Lead and Lag Scheduling.
• Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT)
• Time-Cost-Scope Trade-off.

Day 4

Advanced Planning techniques and Project Control

• Preparing a Line of Balance Schedule (LSM).
• Project Control Systems.
• Earned Value Analysis.
• Earned Value Reporting.
• Resource Allocation Algorithms for Resource Prioritisation.
• Time and Cost Trade-off.

Day 5

Progress Reporting and Schedule Acceleration

• Progress Tracking and Monitoring.
• Options for Accelerating the Schedule.
• Crashing the Schedule – How?
• Lean Approaches.