Project Management Courses | Management Course

Course Helps Provide The Fundamentals Of Project Management

Learning how to successfully manage projects is matter of exposure to common principals, time and experience. Taking courses in project management can help shorten the learning cycle by providing you the lessons learned from other people’s experiences. There are some basics that every good project manager should know, and while of course, experience will be the best teacher, a good project management course can ground you in the basics, and expose you to commonly used terms and methodologies.

Following are a couple of things you can expect to learn in a project management course. This is meant to be a sampling and not an exhaustive overview.

Go/No Go Decision

In the course of every project plan, decisions have to be made to determine whether the project is worth moving forward. Here Project Managers (PM’s) must be objective: however much work they have carried out to reach this stage, the plan may still not be worth implementing. This is frustrating after the hard work of detailed planning. It is, however, much better to find this out now than after having invested time, resources and personal standing in the success of the plan. Evaluating the plan now gives provides the opportunity to either investigate other options that might be more successful, or to accept that no plan is needed or should be carried out. Depending on the circumstances, the following techniques can be helpful in evaluating a plan:

PMI (Plus/Minus/Interesting)

This is a good, simple technique for 'weighing the pros and cons' of a decision. It involves listing the plus points in the plan in one column, the minus points in a second column, and the implications of the plan in a third column. Each point can be allocated a positive or negative score.

Force Field Analysis

Similar to PMI, Force Field Analysis helps you to get a good overall view of all the forces for and against your plan. This allows you to see where you can make adjustments that will make the plan more likely to succeed.

Cash Flow Forecasts

Where a decision has mainly financial implications, such as in business and marketing planning, preparation of a Cash Flow Forecast can be extremely useful. It allows you to assess the effect of time on costs and revenue. It also helps in assessing the size of the greatest negative and positive cash flows associated with a plan. When it is set up on a spreadsheet package, a good Cash Flow Forecast also functions as an extremely effective model of the plan. It gives you an easy basis for investigating the effect of varying your assumptions.

Implementing Change

Once you have completed your plan and decided that it will work satisfactorily, it is time to implement it. Your plan will explain how. It should also detail the controls that you will use to monitor the execution of the plan.

Project management courses will teach you more about each of these concepts and more. They will help you learn how to evaluate plans to make sure that they will be worth implementing.