Engineering Professional Programs

Course Faculty: Wynnlee Crisp

Effective control of a project's scope, schedule and budget is fundamental to achieving a quality project. Understanding and managing the interrelationship of these three elements largely determine the project manager's success. Scope creep increases cost and produces delay. Delays increase costs and cause critical dates to be missed. By organizing tasks, managing the level of effort, developing and monitoring a critical-path schedule, and comparing actual cost to planned cost at key milestones, the project manager can deliver a quality project on time and within budget.

This three-day training explores practical methods used by successful project managers in the public and private sectors. It covers understanding the work breakdown structure; managing the scope of work; preparing a schedule that can be managed effectively; tracking milestones on the critical path; budgeting work in ways to facilitate cost control; managing risk and change; and how to recover when things go wrong. A highlight is the daily Management Clinic, where participants can get advice for improving their current projects.

The course is taught by project managers with more than two decades of experience from both the public and private sectors. Through short lectures, videos, and practical exercises, the instructors demonstrate key project management techniques. Participants may use their own laptop computers or those provided to manage a schedule and experiment with budget control techniques.

Course Topics

Use of affinity diagramming to organize work

Use of a work breakdown structure to relate tasks

Developing a scope of work that can be managed

Managing scope risk and change, and controlling scope creep

Monitoring and managing a critical path schedule

Scheduling and tracking the use of equipment and labor

Managing schedule risk and contingency planning

Defining and measuring "percent complete"

Use of an "S" curve to compare actual versus planned cost

Calculating earned value to simultaneously manage time and cost

Managing budget risk and employing contingency

Interrelationships among scope, schedule, budget, and quality

Who Should Attend

This course is appropriate for project managers from the public sector, private industry, and consulting who want to learn how to manage the three key elements of project delivery or to enhance their existing skills in these areas.

Continuing Education Units and Professional Development Hours

Course participants will earn 2.1 CEUs/21 PDHs upon successful completion of this course. The CEU is a nationally recognized measure of participation in a noncredit continuing education program that meets established criteria for increasing knowledge and competency.