Week 3: Project Scope and Initiation; Project Planning

• Requirements determination:what is it, importance, common problems
  • Types of clients
  • Traditional approaches to RD
• Planning
  • Elements in the planning process
  • Work Breakdown Structure (WBS)
    • what it is, how a PM uses it, relationship to work package (lowest level of WBS)
    • 6 Completeness criteria for WBS
  • Project network diagrams (will not work a problem, but will need to understand them for scheduling resources and schedule reduction)

Week 4: Project Planning

• continued network diagram and WBS

Week 5: Project Planning: Resource Scheduling and Reducing Duration

• Estimation
  • What is estimation? Purpose, it's importance, factors that influence the quality of estimates,
  • Different philosophies on estimating - macro v. micro estimates; when each is appropriate, different top-down (macro) techniques; different bottom-up (micro)
  • Duration v. effort v. productive time
• Resource scheduling
• • What is resource leveling?
  • Logical constraints, physical constraints, resource constraints.
  • Approaches to leveling time & resource constrained project.
  • Impacts of resource constrained scheduling
  • Why conduct (benefits of) resource scheduling?
  • Will not work a complete resource leveling problem but could work part of a problem
• Reducing Duration
  • Motivation for reducing project duration
  • Direct v. indirect costs and role in duration reduction
  • Be able to shorten project duration to achieve cost-optimal project duration (work part of a problem)