UBC Award of Achievement in
Project Management with Microsoft Project

Six Fridays- Sep 19- Oct 31, 2008 

Plan to succeed with Project Management. Planning reduces schedule time and cost while improving quality and reliability. Project managers clarify client objectives, define deliverables, analyze risks, develop strategies, identify tasks, recruit resources, schedule tasks, assign work, evaluate quality and track progress. A project manager must lead and manage people. Project managers define and assign work to project team members.

Planning lays the foundation for project management. Planning software like Microsoft Project supports planning and helps project managers evolve their plans. Microsoft Project enhances a project managers ability to plan and manage projects. Microsoft Project provides a multitude of views and reports from a single source saving time for project manager to keep project information current. These courses reduce the learning curve associated with Microsoft Project. 

'Project Management with Microsoft Project' course provides practical methods, tools and tips to manage projects more effectively, including demonstration of key concepts with hands-on use of Microsoft Project.

The six courses form an integrated methodology for planning and managing projects. The first two courses lay the foundation in Project Management skills and introduce Microsoft Project skills used in the remainder of the course. Unless you are a very experienced with Microsoft Project Manager the first two courses are mandatory.

You can complete the courses over multiple terms so you can schedule the courses to fit your schedule and budget. You may select individual courses to suit your needs or take six courses to receive a UBC Award of Achievement: Project Management with Microsoft Project.

Each participant gets a detailed course workbook for each session. Each session will include about three hours of homework to allow you to practice lessons learned and explore topics in more detail. To complete your homework, you can download a 60- day demo copy of Microsoft Project from the Microsoft Project web site "www.microsoft.ca/project/". Click on [downloads and trails]. Click on [Trial software] and select Microsoft Office Project Standard 2007 Trial Version.

Sequencing of courses:

Each course is $265. per day. Participants will receive about a 100 page Project Management manual for each day of the course.

All courses are presented by Brian Mullen, M.Sc.  at the UBC Campus at Robson Square, in beautiful downtown Vancouver, from 9am to 4pm. To register phone 604-822-1420 or go to the detailed pages for each course and click on the [click to register] button. 

These Project Management courses are scheduled three times per year in February-April, May-June and September-December. You may complete these courses over several terms to give you maximum flexibility in tailoring the courses to suit your needs. The courses are scheduled on consecutive weeks so you can apply the lessons learned before advancing to the next stage. You may take as many or as few courses as you wish.

UBC is a PMI (Project Management Institute) certified education provider. Each of these courses is eligible for 6 hours of PMI PDU's (Professional Development Units) applicable to your PMP designation. 

The next scheduled sessions are as follows:

Project Management Methodology 

The following core competencies in project management are covered in the UBC Award of Achievement in Project Management with Microsoft Project.

1. Defining project standards and methodology.
2. Defining project scope.
3. Defining client objectives.
4. Initiating projects to lay the foundations for success.
5. Evaluating feasibility and cost/benefit analysis.
6. Defining deliverables for project, phases and tasks.
7. Analyzing risks and develop mitigation strategies.
8. Analyzing requirements to meet client objectives.
9. Developing strategy to produce deliverables and minimize risks.
10. Designing solution architectures to meet client requirements.
11. Estimating effort and cost associated with the project
12. Evaluating and select vendors.
13. Negotiating contracts.
14. Procuring services and materials.
15. Preparing master schedules.
16. Forecasting resources required to complete the project work.
17. Mobilizing high-performance teams to fast track projects.
18. Developing detailed schedules.
19. Assigning work to project team.
20. Evaluating and level team workloads.
21. Recording actual task progress.
22. Assessing and report project progress.
23. Resolving issues and conflicts.
24. Expediting project tasks.
25. Communicating progress to clients and management.
26. Managing resources across multiple projects.

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Project Management Methods and Tools

Turbo brainstorming

Speeds up many processes in Project management and completing Project Activities. Many of the class exercises working in teams are accelerated with turbo brainstorming.

Team planning sessions

Teams that develop and refine plans to understand the big picture develop stronger commitment to plans. These sessions also build respect for other team members.

Cost/Benefit Analysis

provides a powerful tool to convince management to approve projects and to select the scope of a project so that it delivers the maximum results for a minimum investment.

Microsoft Project

Many organizations have standardized on Microsoft Project for their planning software.

Scope management with Zero-based budgeting

Turbo brainstorming

Benefits of using turbo brainstorming in Project Management activities include:

1. Deliver better results through more thorough consideration of alternatives.
2. Stimulate thinking and generate more creative ideas.
3. Deliver better results by sharing ideas and building better solutions
4. Build more effective teams through communication and solving challenging problems.
5. Speed team meetings by sixty percent.
6. Improve sharing of ideas.
7. Reduce conflict through better understanding of others ideas.
8. Reduce resistance to change by involving more people in key decisions.

• Project planning
• Risk analysis
• Estimating
• Work breakdown structure creation
• Task identification and sequencing
• Understanding client objectives
• Exploring objects with goal hierarchies
• JAD - joint application design sessions
• Business process mapping of existing and new processes during Re-engineering
• Deliverables specification
• Designing new products
• Problem-solving
• Root-cause analysis
• Impact analysis to evaluate pro's and con's of different alternatives.
• Decision making
• Action planning
• Team building
• Planning meeting agendas

Turbo brainstorming compresses project duration. Because you can cover more topics in less time you can compress three four-hour meetings into a single three hour meeting. This saves project schedule time, travel time, giving your project team more time to complete their project tasks.

Each topic can take 20 to 45 minutes so you can brainstorm four to six topics in a three-hour meeting. By covering topics faster you can reduce three four-hour meetings into a single three-hour meeting reducing cycle time from 15 days to 3 hours. This saves project time, team-meeting time and money while at the same time exploring topics in much more depth.

The biggest benefits of turbo brainstorming are improved quality of results,  the reduction in cycle time, reduced cost of meetings and increased energy of team members.

With traditional meetings you have to publish results at the end of each meeting and refresh people's minds at the start of the next meeting. When you compress three meetings into one you can only have to write up the final results and can skip the interim results.

Turbo Brainstorming can reduce your meetings by 75% and produce better results. Turbo brainstorming energizes a team, stimulates thinking and leads to creative breakthroughs.

Turbo brainstorming has developed by ISP information systems planning corp.

Team-planning Sessions

Team planning sessions identify tasks using post-it notes which are organized on sets of flipcharts. When the team planning session is completed then capture the results in Microsoft Project.

Cost Benefit Analysis

Process improvement plays a key role in achieving benefits from a system implementation. Unit costs can be determined by measurement and by process modeling. In the case above we have eliminated 200 transactions, and reduced the unit effort per transaction from 4 hours to 2 hours. Even though our unit labor costs have increased we still have a saving of $140, 000 for the first activity. Once you have determined the benefits you can then create a cash flow based on development cost and deployment timeframe. Delaying deployment significantly effects cash flow and rate of return.

Microsoft Project as a Project planning and management tool

During planning, you need to keep track of lots of detailed decisions and analyze the impact of thousands of decisions.

Without a plan, you cannot track and manage the project. Tasks don't start or finish on time. You can track project progress and compare the variance with the original baseline plan. 

We demonstrate planning concepts using Microsoft Project. With any sizable project of 100 tasks or more, you need planning software to plan a project, assign resources to tasks effectively and keep plan up to date. Microsoft Project has become the standard planning software in many organizations. Mastering Microsoft Project gives you a key career skill that will open the door to Project Management positions. If you don't already have access to Microsoft Project 2007 or 2003, download a 60-day demo copy of Microsoft Project 2007 from the Microsoft Project web site at  "www.microsoft.com/project". You will need Microsoft Project to complete some of the homework assignments.

Planning a project without planning software is like learning to drive a car without driving one.  Planning software enhances our ability to plan and track projects. Planning software can record working days in a calendar and translate working days (1, 2, 3, ...) into dates which spreadsheet software cannot. As well planning software such as Microsoft Project allows us to assign multiple resources to a task. Microsoft Project calculates costs based on assignment work and rolls costs up to the summary tasks and to the project level.

Learning Microsoft Project has a steep learning curve, partly because you are learning the planning discipline at the same time you are learning the software. This course will accelerate your understanding of why planning software is so valuable. These courses provide tips and tricks to save you time using Microsoft Project. 

Brian Mullen has extensive experience with Microsoft Project. He has taught Microsoft Project courses since 1992 at the University of British Columbia and the University of Calgary. He was a member of the Project 98 beta-test team. As well Brian uses Visual Basic for Project, Excel and Word providing an inside-out view of the structure of the objects in Microsoft Project.

Brian also has experience implemented Project Server for customers working in a project environment. Project server 2002 simplifies project management in a multi-team environment. Many people require access to project information. As well the effort to manage shared resources across multiple projects is simplified.

Zero-based Budgeting

Zero-based Budgeting to achieve the following results:

1. Allocate scarce resources to project activities.
2. achieve maximum return on investment
3. Select most promising features in a product.
4. Determine scope of a project.

Click here List of Recommended books on Project Management, Team Building, Estimating, Software Development methodologies, requirements definition, and Microsoft Project.

Comparison with part-time "UBC Certificate in Project Management"

UBC also offers a Certificate in Project Management. People ask me what's the difference between the Award and the Certificate. The Certificate and the Award of Achievement complement each other. Consider taking a couple of courses in the Award of Achievement if you want an introduction to Project Management before making a major commitment to the Certificate. For the award of achievement you need 36 hours of coursework. For the Project Management certificate, you need 150 hours of course work. 

If you are looking for the use of Microsoft Project integrated with Project Management processes then the Project Management with Microsoft Project is for you.

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