Project Management

- Overview of project management principles, domains, and the project life cycle.
- Differences between projects, programs, portfolios, and operations.
- Project charter, objectives, deliverables, milestones, and success criteria.
- Stakeholder identification and preliminary needs analysis.
- Introduction to the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) and core planning documents.
- Role of the project manager in traditional, hybrid, and agile environments.
- Ethics, professional responsibility, and value delivery in projects.
- Real-life project planning case study and mini planning workshop.

- Collecting business, technical, and user requirements.
- Defining project scope, boundaries, exclusions, assumptions, and constraints.
- Creating the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) and scope baseline.
- Managing dependencies and aligning scope with project objectives.
- Scope validation, acceptance criteria, and stakeholder approval.
- Change requests, scope creep prevention, and scope control.
- Requirements traceability matrix and documentation techniques.
- Case study: controlling scope in an educational, business, or digital project.

- Activity definition, sequencing, and milestone planning.
- Dependencies, leads, lags, and schedule logic.
- Gantt charts, network diagrams, and the Critical Path Method (CPM).
- Estimating activity durations and developing the schedule baseline.
- Schedule compression: fast tracking and crashing.
- Monitoring schedule performance and reporting delays.
- Digital scheduling tools, dashboards, and AI-supported planning.
- Case study: recovering a delayed project through schedule adjustment.

- Identifying human, physical, technological, and financial resources.
- Resource Breakdown Structure (RBS), Responsibility Assignment Matrix (RAM), and RACI charts.
- Capacity planning, workload balancing, and resource optimization.
- Building effective project teams and defining clear roles.
- Managing team dynamics, motivation, and collaboration.
- Conflict resolution and decision-making within project teams.
- Communication channels, meeting discipline, and remote/hybrid teamwork.
- Project leadership skills for professional and multicultural contexts.

- Project budgeting principles and major cost categories.
- Cost estimation techniques: analogous, parametric, bottom-up, and three-point estimation.
- Creating the cost baseline and managing contingency reserves.
- Budget approval, cost responsibility, and financial accountability.
- Earned Value Management (EVM) basics: Planned Value, Earned Value, and Actual Cost.
- Cost variance, schedule variance, and performance indicators.
- Budget risks, inflation, currency considerations, and financial assumptions.
- Case study: preparing and defending a professional project budget.

- Procurement planning and make-or-buy analysis.
- Vendor selection, supplier evaluation, and procurement criteria.
- Requests for Information, Proposals, and Quotations (RFI, RFP, RFQ).
- Contract types, service-level expectations, and procurement documentation.
- Procurement ethics, transparency, and compliance.
- Financial monitoring, periodic reporting, and budget control.
- Managing supplier performance, claims, and procurement risks.
- Closing procurements and documenting lessons learned.

- Agile values, principles, and mindset for adaptive project delivery.
- Scrum, Kanban, Lean, and hybrid project approaches.
- Agile project planning: product backlog, user stories, sprint planning, and release planning.
- Agile roles: product owner, scrum master, team members, and stakeholders.
- Agile execution: daily stand-ups, reviews, demonstrations, and retrospectives.
- Burndown/burnup charts, velocity, and agile performance metrics.
- Managing changing priorities, feedback loops, and customer value.
- Continuous improvement, adaptation, and agile governance in real organizations.