Requirements, Scheduling and Risk Masterclass - Course Content

1. Overview of Project Baselines

  • Review the foundations of project management to allow you to effectively integrate the Requirements Management and Risk Management lifecycles with your project
  • Develop concise project objectives to guide the team during project planning and assist in stakeholder decision making during implementation
  • Develop the project baseline to effectively set stakeholder expectations and manage your project

2. Building a Winning Team

Stakeholder Management

  • Stakeholder identification and analysis to ensure ALL stakeholder requirements are included and conflicting requirements are resolved up-front
  • Stakeholder analysis as the basis for initial risk planning and communications with your stakeholders

 

Leadership

  • Understand the essential elements of leadership in the project environment to maximise team productivity and avoid micro management
  • The basic stages in the development of every team and how to apply the appropriate management style to ensure optimal performance of EVERY team member

 

Resource Management

  • The essential techniques and tools for setting team roles and responsibilities and gaining commitment

3. Requirements Management

Requirements Planning

  • Difference between fixed and evolving requirements to allow you to choose the most appropriate approach for effective requirements development
  • Simple multi-step model to allow you to plan and manage project requirements within your project management lifecycle
  • Processes to identify all your project requirements starting with the project objectives through functional, performance, technical and general requirements
  • How to initially identify your project requirements and derive detailed requirements to ensure they are complete, unambiguous and consistent with the schedule and cost objectives of your project
  • Prioritising requirements with your stakeholders and avoiding conflicts

 

Requirements Management & Control

  • How to ensure project requirements are traceable backwards and forwards to allow you to effectively initiate project closedown and gain final stakeholder acceptance
  • Best-practice model to test IT systems at the program and systems levels and ensure user acceptance
  • Understand the sources of requirements change and apply a process to avoid scope creep

4. Project Scheduling

Project Scope Management

  • How to use the project definition and requirements to develop a complete deliverables based Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) to facilitate project schedule development, risk identification, procurement planning and manage project scope

 

Developing a Schedule

  • How to develop a critical path schedule directly from the WBS
  • How to critically review the integrity of your schedule to avoid inaccurate baselines
  • How to identify and use schedule float to manage your resources more effectively

 

Estimation

  • Learn a number of techniques for greater confidence in your estimates
  • How to apply the PERT estimation technique in complex projects where accuracy is essential

 

Resource Levelling

  • Understand the principles and techniques of schedule resource levelling to effectively use project float to minimise project resources to meet schedule objective

 

Schedule Acceleration

  • Two techniques to reduce schedule duration
  • Understand the risk and cost implications when choosing an acceleration approach

5. Risk Management

Introduction to Risk Management

  • Identify risk threats AND opportunities to improve your chances of meeting project objectives
  • Understand risk contingency to ensure a realistic project budget
  • Understand where risk fits into the project life cycle for more effective risk management

 

Risk Management Plan

  • Proven 6 step model to plan and manage project risks in a standardised and structured approach
  • Proactively manage your projects to avoid plan discrepancies and crises
  • Develop a comprehensive risk plan to manage risk in your project

 

Risk Identification

  • Techniques to ensure all risks are identified
  • How to describe the risk event to simplify risk analysis, prioritisation and strategy development

 

Risk Analysis & Prioritisation

  • Learn the difference between qualitative and quantitative risk analysis to determine the most appropriate approach for your company/project
  • Understand basic probability theory for risks to ensure accuracy of your risk analysis
  • How to assign probability and impact ratings to ensure the validity of your prioritised risk list
  • How to rank your risks using various techniques to ensure that the key risks to the project are addressed

 

Risk Strategies

  • Understand the risk response strategies for handling project threats and opportunities
  • Determine the most appropriate strategies to effectively handle project risks
  • Evaluate response strategies across all project risks to optimise the plan

6. Bringing It All Together

This final section ties together the information needed to achieve optimum success with Requirements, Scheduling and Risk.