Course Overview

Delivering successful projects that meet or exceed both business and customer expectations is a process that starts long before kickoff and extends past the final release. To succeed, companies must run the gauntlet, which requires a number of fundamental skills, but, paradoxically, these are rarely taught. Only by understanding each step and mastering these basic, required skills can a company increase its ability to navigate a tight competitive landscape with both efficiency and agility.

Key Learning Areas

  • Communication
  • Requirements Gathering
  • Project Planning
  • Change Management
  • Project Management

Course Outline

Day 1:

  • A review of the history and current state of project delivery
  • A detailed look at what isn’t working and what rapid change means for planning and delivery
  • Driving toward alignment between the business stakeholders and delivery team
  • How to plan and derive value from plans in environments of change
  • Becoming an expert at gathering requirements
  • How to conquer fear and disillusionment and learn to love estimation

Day 2:

  • What actually is project management?
  • Dependencies as first-class citizens and working with delivery milestones
  • Why quality is critical and how to incorporate it to accelerate your process and make your customers love you
  • Everything you never wanted to know about plans
  • Risky business: analyzing your plan for different types of risk, earned value, and the probability of success before you even start
  • Beyond the myth of the generalizing specialist: how to maximize your team through intelligent task assignment

Day 3:

  • Wait, we’re actually building this thing now? What to do once you start
  • What is done and how to kill the “80% done 80% of the time” project-eating virus.
  • Showing progress outside demos
  • How to effectively manage technical resources–or any resource executing technical tasks. Or pretty much anyone, really
  • Retrospectives–both on projects and on this class

Who Benefits

Project Managers, Engineering Managers, Team Leads (optional - for career development), and potentially Sr. Devs (for career development).

Prerequisites

None