[Free] Project Management: Two Real Plans, Traditional And Agile

A charter, a backlog and a burndown, built end to end. Two complete plans, nothing skipped, and the workbook you keep.

Added on October 17, 2026 Business 3 min read

What you’ll learn

• Write a complete product backlog: fourteen user stories, sized in points and ordered by customer value rather than by which part of the system they belong to.
• Plan a first sprint with no velocity to plan from, draw the ideal burndown before it starts, and read the drift on the day it appears, not at review.
• Re-cut a release when a dependency you do not control fails to arrive, cutting the delivery channel instead of the customer outcome.
• Forecast a launch date from measured velocity instead of optimism, and say honestly how thin a two-sprint average really is.
• Write a project charter and a full traditional project plan: stakeholders, budget, schedule, quality and risk, filled in rather than described.
• Run your own project in the included workbook, where entering story points and completion days computes the burndown, the velocity and the forecast for you.
• Earn 1 PDU

Requirements

• You should already know the vocabulary: what a sprint is, what a backlog is, what a project charter is. Nothing here is defined for you.
• No software required. Everything is done in a spreadsheet, and the spreadsheet comes with the course.
• No certification, methodology or framework prerequisite. If you have run a project of any size, in any method, you have enough.
• Bring a real project if you have one. The blank workbook is built to take it, and the course is more useful with something of your own in front of you.

Description

This course contains the use of artificial intelligence. Most project management courses explain what a backlog is. This one shows you a finished one.

Fourteen user stories, sized in points, ordered by customer value. Then the sprint that was planned from it, the burndown that drifted, the dependency that failed to arrive, and the decision the product owner had to make when the launch date would not move.

Then it does the same thing again the traditional way: a problem statement, a project charter, and a full project plan for a public library upgrading twenty-five computers.

Two complete plans. Nothing stops halfway.

WHY THAT MATTERS

You have probably met the other kind of example. It shows three rows of a backlog and says “and so on, you get the idea”. It describes a burndown chart rather than drawing one. It plans a project and never runs it, which skips the only part that was ever difficult.

That is why this course exists. Every artefact is finished. Every number can be checked while you watch.

WHAT YOU ACTUALLY GET

The agile example runs six weeks of a real-shaped project in seven short lectures. A coffee chain wants customers to order on their phone and skip the queue. The launch date is fixed, because the marketing is already printed.

You watch the backlog get written and sized in one sitting. You watch the first sprint get committed with no velocity to plan from, because there is never any velocity in a first sprint. You watch the burndown go flat for three days while three stories sit open, and you see the warning arrive on day two, eight days before anyone acts on it.

Then something breaks that the team does not control, and the release has to be re-cut against a date that cannot move. What gets cut, and what is refused, is the most useful five minutes in the course.

The traditional example is the same project discipline in a different shape. A library, twenty-five computers, a budget, a sponsor, and the paperwork that holds it together. Problem statement, charter, plan.

WHAT YOU TAKE AWAY

– A worked PDF of the whole agile example, page by page.

– A blank workbook with every formula still live. Enter your story points and the day each item closed, and the burndown, the velocity and the launch forecast calculate themselves. It is a template you can put a real project into on Monday, not a picture of a template.

Both files cover the agile example. The traditional half is narration.

The two examples are independent. Watch either first, or only the one you need.

Author(s): HK School of Management – LSP