[Free] Project Management 101: Beginner Guide To Project Management
Begin your project management journey: fundamentals, tools, and skills for beginners. – Free Course
Requirements
- No prerequisite
Description
Embark on your journey to becoming a skilled project manager with our “Simplest Guide to Project Management for Beginners” course. Designed for those new to the world of project management, this course provides a solid foundation in the essential principles, tools, and techniques required to successfully plan, execute, and complete projects.
You’ll explore the key concepts of project management, from defining project goals and objectives to understanding the roles and responsibilities of team members. Time and resource management are essential skills that you’ll acquire during the course, ensuring that you can efficiently allocate resources, set realistic timelines, and keep your projects on track. Additionally, you’ll gain insights into risk assessment and mitigation, helping you identify potential obstacles and devise strategies to navigate them effectively.
By the end of this program, you’ll be equipped with the knowledge and skills necessary to confidently tackle projects of various sizes and complexities. You’ll have a strong foundation in project management, enabling you to adapt and thrive in the ever-evolving landscape of business and technology.
Whether you’re a recent graduate, a career changer, or simply someone looking to enhance their organizational skills, this course will empower you to confidently tackle projects of all sizes and complexities. Join us and kickstart your project management journey today!
Glossary of Key Terms taught in this course
Agile Approach: A project management approach that focuses on flexibility, collaboration, and iterative development, responding to change rather than rigidly following a predefined plan.
Baseline: A fixed reference point, in time, against which project performance can be measured. The three main types are scope, cost, and schedule baselines.
Budget at Completion (BAC): The total approved budget for the project, including all costs, contingency reserves, and management reserves.
Business Case: A document that justifies the need for a project by explaining its benefits, costs, and alignment with organizational strategy.
Change Control: A process of identifying, documenting, and managing changes to the project scope, schedule, or budget, aiming to reduce the impact of negative changes.
Contingency Reserve: Funds set aside to cover costs associated with planned responses to identified risks.
Control Account: A management control point where scope, budget, and schedule are integrated and compared with the actual performance.
Crashing: A schedule compression technique to reduce project duration by adding resources to critical path activities, which increases risk and costs.
Critical Path: The longest sequence of activities in a project that determines the shortest time needed to complete the project.
Decomposition: The technique of breaking down a project’s scope into smaller, manageable components for ease of planning and execution.
Deliverable: Any unique and verifiable product, result, or capability produced to complete a process, phase, or project.
Earned Value (EV): The measure of value for the completed work at a given point in time, as compared to the planned budget for that work.
Enterprise Environmental Factors (EEF): Conditions, not under the control of the project team, that influence the project, such as regulations, market conditions, or political climate.
Fast Tracking: A schedule compression technique that involves doing activities in parallel that are usually done sequentially, which increases risk.
Gold Plating: Adding features or functionality that exceed the project’s requirements and do not add significant value.
Lessons Learned: Documentation of insights and experiences from a project that can be used to improve future projects.
Management Reserve: Funds set aside to cover unplanned changes or unforeseen events that were not identified during risk identification and planning.
Matrix Environment: An organizational structure that combines functional and projectized organizations, often sharing authority between functional and project managers.
Organizational Process Assets (OPA): An organization’s internal policies, procedures, guidelines, templates, systems, and best practices that can be used to manage a project.
Plan Value (PV): The cost of work that has been authorized and budgeted for a scheduled activity or WBS component in a given time frame.
Portfolio: A collection of programs, projects, and operations managed as a group to achieve strategic objectives.
Program: A group of related projects, subprograms, and program activities managed in a coordinated way to achieve strategic benefits.
Project: A temporary endeavor to create a unique product, service, or result with a defined start and end.
Project Charter: A formal document that authorizes a project, establishes the project manager’s authority, and outlines high-level requirements.
Project Constraint: Any limitation that restricts the actions of the project manager and team, such as time, budget, or scope.
Project Management: The application of knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to project activities to meet project requirements.
Project Management Plan: A comprehensive document that integrates all individual management plans and provides guidelines for the project’s execution, monitoring, and control.
Project Schedule: A document that establishes the start and end dates for project activities and milestones, and the sequence for the various steps.
Quality: The measure of to what extent you are satisfying the customer by meeting their requirements on the project.
Requirements Traceability Matrix: A document that links requirements to their origin and tracks them throughout the project lifecycle.
Risk: An uncertain event that, if it occurs, can have a positive or negative effect on project objectives.
Risk Breakdown Structure (RBS): A hierarchical structure for categorizing and managing project risks.
Risk Register: A document containing information about identified risks, their analysis, and response strategies.
Scope: The work that must be done to deliver the project, or product or service.
Scope Baseline: A group of documents that collectively describe the project scope.
Scope Creep: Changes to the project scope that are not approved by the project stakeholders or included in the project baseline.
Schedule Performance Index (SPI): The ratio of the earned value to the planned value, indicating whether the project is on, behind, or ahead of schedule.
Scheduled Variance (SV): The difference between the earned value and planned value that indicates by how much the team has lagged behind in delivering the expected project value.
Stakeholder: Any individual, group, or organization that can affect, be affected by, or perceive itself to be affected by a project.
Stakeholder Register: A document that identifies key project stakeholders and includes information about their roles, influence, and expectations.
System of Value Delivery: A mechanism by which organizations formulate, move, and deliver value from concept to cash through portfolios, programs, projects, and operations.
Work Breakdown Structure (WBS): A deliverable-oriented hierarchical decomposition of the project work into manageable components and visualizes the full scope of the project.
Work Package: The smallest unit of work in the WBS that can be accurately estimated for resources, cost, and time.
Author(s): Aslam Khan
