Project Management

Concept and characteristics of project; Importance of project; Program versus project;Project life cycle; Determinants of project success; Project governance; Project management today: A sociotechnical approach.

Implementing strategy through projects; Projects and organizational strategy; Stake holder management; Project management structures; Key considerations for the right project management structure; Concept of organizational culture; Implications of organizational culture for organizing projects.

Project Selection – Introduction to project selection; Approaches to project screening and selection: Checklist model, simplified scoring models, the analytical hierarchy process, and profile models; Financial models: payback period, net present value, discounted payback, and internal rate of return; Choosing a project selection approach; Project Portfolio Management – Concept of project portfolio management; Objectives and initiatives; The portfolio selection process; Developing a proactive portfolio; Keys to successful project portfolio management; Problems in implementing portfolio management.

Concept of project risk; Risk management process: Risk identification, analysis of probability and consequences, risk mitigation strategies, and control & documentation; Project risk management:

Cost management: Direct versus indirect costs, recurring versus nonrecurring costs, fixed versus variable costs, normal versus expedited costs; Cost estimation: Cost estimation methods; learning curves in cost estimation; Problems with cost estimation; Creating a project budget: top-down budgeting, bottom-up budgeting, and activity-based costing; Developing budget contingencies.

Developing the project network; From work package to network; Constructing a project network; Activity-on-node (AON) fundamentals; Using the forward and backward pass information; Practical considerations; Extended network techniques to come closer to reality.

The five-stage team development model; Situational factors affecting team development; Building high-performance project teams; Managing virtual project teams; Project teampit falls.

Concept of project evaluation and control; General model of control cycle; Monitoring project performance; Earned value management; Using earned value to manage a portfolio of projects; Issues in the effective use of earned value management; Human factors in project evaluation and control.

Introduction; Types of project termination; Natural termination – the closeout process;Early termination for projects; Preparing final project report.