Project Management for Mere Mortals: The Tools, Techniques, Teaming, and Politics of Project Management - Softcover

Baca, Claudia M.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0321509196 ISBN 13: 9780321509192

Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional, 2007

Synopsis

For anyone who wants to master project management&;from novices to experienced PMs who want to successfully run more complex projects.

 

Looking for a better way to master today&;s rapidly changing programming technologies? Want expert help, but don&;t have the time or energy to read a book? Can&;t find classroom training worth the money? Discover LiveLessons: self-paced, personal video instruction from the world&;s leading technology experts.

• LiveLessons are three-to-four hour video courses, on DVD with a book supplement, that are organized into bite-sized, self-contained lessons&;you&;ll learn key skills in as little as fifteen minutes!
• Each lesson begins with well-defined learning objectives and ends with comprehensive summaries, which help you track your progress.
• Follow along as your instructor shows how to get results in today&;s top development environments.

In this LiveLesson&;which contains 7+ hours of hands-on video training&;top project management trainer Claudia Baca makes real-world project management simpler and easier than ever before.

 

Project Management for Mere Mortals^® is a comprehensive video training course that teaches key techniques, using a live case study that covers all five process groups of project management: initiation, planning, execution, monitoring/controlling, and closing.

 

Learn at your own pace and get practical, common-sense help with scoping, scheduling, budgeting, organizing work, building teams, setting quality goals, identifying risks, coping with politics, controlling changes, baselining, ending projects, and much more!

About this title

About the Author

Claudia M. Baca, PMP, PMI Certified OPM3 ^® Assessor/Consultant, is an independent project management consultant and project management trainer. She has lectured at more than ten of the Project Management Institute chapters across the country. She has more than twenty years of project management experience and served on the leadership team that produced the Organizational Project Management Maturity Model (OPM3) standard. She contributed to the best-selling PMP: Project Management Professional Study Guide and co-authored PMP: Project Management Professional Workbook and PMP: Project Management Study Guide Deluxe Edition. She is also the author of Project Management for Mere Mortals ^® (Addison-Wesley, 2007).

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Whether you think you can or think you can’t: either way you are right.
—Henry Ford

I started my career in project management many years ago when a wise woman I worked for told me about a new discipline called “project management” and suggested I check it out. I signed up for a class called “Government Project Management.” On the first day of class, I walked into a room with 19 men in military uniform—I was the only woman and the only person from the private sector in the class. After I completed the class, my organization decided that I was now a project manager, and it gave me a very complex project to run that included changing more than 500 software modules from all parts of the organization. I delivered the project three months late and well over budget. My career continued on, with me learning from the school of hard knocks until 1995.

In 1995, I attained my Project Management Professional designation from the Project Management Institute and also received a Master’s Certificate in Program Management from Denver University. These two accomplishments changed my career and my outlook on project management. Since receiving these two designations, I have never missed a triple constraint on a project for which I was the project manager. Now I can’t say that I haven’t negotiated a new date, new Measures of Performance (MOP), or a new budget since then, but my clients and sponsors have since willingly agreed to the change based on what was best for their business and the project.

What Is This LiveLesson About?

This LiveLesson contains the knowledge I’ve gained over the years, as well as the wisdom shared by my friends who are experienced project managers. It covers the basics of good project management built on the good practices in The Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK Guide). It also includes tried-and-true techniques for making projects work and work well.

The LiveLesson is organized into sessions that cover specific topics of project management. For example, Session 7 is about project quality; in it you will learn about processes, tools, and techniques that you can use to ensure quality on your projects.

A unique feature of this LiveLesson is the collaboration between this course and Microsoft Project for Mere Mortals ^® by Patti Jansen. Patti’s book and this course were developed in conjunction with each other. Based on that collaboration, you’ll find a topic described in this course, for instance, resource leveling. You’ll see this course use that feature in Microsoft Project, and then you can go to Patti’s book and find detailed information about that Microsoft Project function. With this course and her book, you have everything you need to manage your next project using sound tools and techniques and Microsoft Project.

Who Should Use This Course?

Originally I intended this course to be an introductory project management course. As I developed it, though, I realized that many facets of this course are applicable to project managers with different levels of experience. My reviewers confirmed this; they learned about new tools and techniques while reviewing the manuscript, even though they have been project managers for many years. Here is a synopsis of what is available for each of you.

New Project Managers

As a new project manager, you will learn about the basics of your craft in this course. You’ll find, as you get more into your newly chosen profession, that some projects need more rigor than others. I have noted throughout this course where you should apply the different processes described. You’ll find techniques you can use now and some that you will probably decide to use later in your career as you become more skilled.

Intermediate-Level Project Managers

You’ve managed a few projects and things are getting better on each, but you are looking for a way to make a quantum leap to completely successful project management. This is the course for you. Here you have the opportunity to review what you do against the processes outlined in this course. You can refine your own processes based on what you find here. Besides, with the time it takes to manage a successful project, you probably haven’t had the time to spend on certain areas, like the work politics that surround you (covered in Session 17). Here’s your opportunity to tackle some of those tough subjects in one-session increments.

Experienced Professionals

As an experienced project management professional, you have honed your craft and have gotten to be a really good project manager. You may find, though, that there are still a few areas of your profession that you’d like to learn more about or refine. You’ll find a myriad of sound techniques to warrant your time in this course. Also, the way the course is organized lets you focus on the topic you’re interested in and gives specific ideas on how to handle that situation.

How This Course Is Organized

The course is structured around project management topics. It starts with a session defining some of the concepts of project management, and then continues with sessions on planning, executing, monitoring, controlling, and closing projects. While the structure is sequential and can be viewed from session to session, if you prefer, you can zone in on specific topics and view how to handle project risks from those perspectives. The LiveLesson format makes it perfect for you to learn about one topic at one time and then come back at a later time and view a different subject.

The following are the sessions in this course.

• Session 1, Setting the Project Management Context, establishes the structure of project management and introduces you to some fundamental definitions.
• Session 2, You’ve Been Assigned a Project!, discusses how to successfully start a project. You’ll explore initiating a project and the preliminary documentation that must be produced at the start of the project. In addition, you’ll learn about Measures of Performance, which are a terrific way to get clear about the project’s expected results.
• Session 3, How Big Is This Project?, helps you define the scope of the project. Basically, that means asking this multipart question: How do you progressively elaborate the MOP to create the scope, the work breakdown structure, and the order of magnitude estimates for the project?
• Session 4, Creating Product Requirements, walks you through the process of creating good product requirements.
• Session 5, Laying Out the Work, continues the work of progressively elaborating the work breakdown structure (WBS). You will take the work packages and create activities or tasks, apply the completion criteria, and then transform the WBS into a network diagram.
• Session 6, The Art of Estimating, provides everything you need to successfully create estimates. It explores the different types of estimates as well as the different estimating techniques.
• Session 7, Quality—How Good Does It Have to Be?, is devoted entirely to the issue of project quality, a topic that most project management courses don’t spend a lot of time on. The session includes planning quality into your project and the concept of the cost of quality.
• Session 8, Communication—What Do You Think about My Project?, covers one of the most important planning elements you need to complete for your project: the planning of your communication. It introduces a communication template that spells out the “who, what, when, where, and why” of communication.
• Session 9, Risk—What Should You Worry About?, lays out a methodology that is easy to use and yet effective when you deal with risk. This strategy can be easily modified depending on the size of your project and the rigor you want to apply.
• Session 10, Creating the Schedule, describes tools and techniques that will help you pull together your schedule and meet the requested project end date.
• Session 11, Budgeting—How Much?, covers how to build a budget, including how to reconcile the amount you’ve been given with what you actually need.
• Session 12, The Rhythm of Project Execution, introduces you to the activities you must complete to execute your project. We’ll explore each thoroughly, as well as what it takes to build a rhythm.
• Session 13, Keeping the Project on Track, discusses the important topics of variance and the earned value technique. Once you understand these concepts, you can then determine the impact of the variances and take corrective actions.
• Session 14, Controlling Changes, walks you through a change control process so you will know how to construct your own effective process.
• Session 15, Success!—Closing the Project, covers the activities you perform just before the end of a project: planning the end of the project, conducting a readiness review, verifying your deliverables, and turning the project over to operations. It also discusses the last set of activities that you perform to close the project—archiving the project documentation and gathering lessons learned.
• Session 16, Building Effective Teams, explores the specific skills you need to set up an effective team, and what you need to do to move your team through the forming, storming, and norming stages to the performing stage.
• Session 17, Working Project Politics, discusses the concept of you, the project manager, as your own public relations firm, and how to do some analysis to understand and defend yourself in the political environment surrounding you and your project.

About the Opening Quote

Henry Ford’s quote at the beginning of this preface emphasizes that success is all about attitude. Project management is a discipline that you can learn and execute well, but the basis of your success is really going to depend on your attitude. If you “think you can,” you will. You will find solutions. You will find mentors. You will find video mentors. You will find reference tools that guide you through the ins and outs of project management. I hope that this course becomes part of your success.

Edition details

• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0321509196
• ISBN 13: 9780321509192
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 104