Webinar Series:
Planning a Great Project
for Dummies
Successful project management ultimately boils down to planning. How successfully you've planned dictates how successfully you'll be able to work, and complete, the plan. While this sounds straightforward, projects are continually plagued with cost overruns and schedule delays.
Inspired by the new eBook, Planning a Great Project for Dummies, this four-part webinar series will feature steps for improving the practice of project planning so that project goals and deadlines are consistently achieved. Perfect for planning rookies and a thorough refresher with tips and tricks for project pros.
Join us and go back to the basics of scheduling, risk management, cost management, and obtaining team consensus. Can’t attend a session? Register anyway and we’ll send you the recording.
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Tuesday, October 7, 2014 at 11:00 a.m. ET
The first webinar of the series focuses on the first step towards improving project success: building a sound basis of schedule. Learn the diagnostics available to assess schedule quality and initiatives you can implement for avoiding the pitfalls common to the practice of project scheduling.
Highlights include:
- The building blocks of a successful schedule
- The strong correlation between schedule quality and project execution
- Common pitfalls to avoid during scheduling
- Tools and techniques available for improving schedule quality
Speakers: Tom Polen, Director, Solutions Architecture
Tuesday, October 14, 2014 at 11:00 a.m. ET
CPM schedules are excellent at providing a completion forecast based on the planned duration and sequence of work. However, they fall short in accounting for external risk events—those discrete events that have an impact on a project execution teams' ability to execute the plan. This webinar focuses on the second step towards improving project success: identifying and reducing project risk exposure through project risk analysis.
Highlights include:
- The difference between scope uncertainty and true project risks
- Best practices for looking at project risk qualitatively and quantitatively
- Evaluating risk scenarios to identify mitigation opportunities with the largest ROI
- Tools and techniques for accurately analyzing and reporting project risk
Speakers: Tom Polen, Director, Solutions Architecture
Thursday, October 30, 2014 at 11:00 a.m. ET
Think of project planning as a three-legged stool. If you’ve joined us for the first two webinars of the series, we've already improved the quality of our schedule (leg 1), improved accuracy by accounting for risk (leg 2), now we'll take a look at the third key element to successful project planning: cost.
Highlights include:
- Marrying the work required to complete a project with the resources necessary
- Tips for tracking progress through earned value
- Using schedules to feed your ERP system
- Tools and techniques for accurately forecasting cost/resource requirements
Speakers: Kim Koster, Sr. Director, PPM and Tom Polen, Director, Solutions Architecture
Thursday, November 6, 2014 at 11:00 a.m. ET
The steps presented in this webinar series each require an essentially new version of the project plan to be created. While each step furthers the maturity and reliability of the project plan, often times, it also pushes the finish date out much later than expected. This webinar looks at the importance of optimizing the critiqued, risk-adjusted, resource-loaded project plan and ways to ensure team buy-in and approval on the final project plan.
Highlights include:
- Gaining team buy-in through a consensus-based approach to planning and risk management
- Tools and techniques for identifying the fastest, most realistic, path to project completion
- Using the steps from Planning a Great Project for Dummies to create a repeatable process with consistent success
Speakers: Tom Polen, Director, Solutions Architecture
- Contact Events
- (571) 262-0222
