The Project Design Master Class -PMP

Overview

Much as you to design the software system, you must design the project: from accurately calculating the planned duration and cost, to devising several good execution options, scheduling resources, and even validating your plan, to ensure it is sensible and feasible. This requires understanding the inner dependencies between services and activities, the critical path of integration, the staff distribution and the risks involved. All of these challenges stem from your system design and addressing them properly is a hard core engineering task – designing the project. This design task requires both the project manager and the architect to work closely together to determine the best overall plan.

The Project Design Master Class will take you to a new level as project managers and architects. The class shares IDesign's original battle proven techniques and methodologies that so far have only been the privilege of IDesign's direct customers. You will master the core body of knowledge and skills required of modern software project design. IDesign will mentor you how to gain credibility and perfect communication with top management by providing real life, repeatable and workable options for the project - solutions that balance cost, schedule and risk. Practicing our techniques feels as if "the blinders are off", enabling you to mechanize most aspects of project design while relaying on the IDesign Method and making the most of other tools.

Assuming no prior knowledge, the class covers the essentials of the critical path method, a technique admirably suited for complex software systems and arguably, the only one that works. By modeling the project as a network you eliminate the bias and objectively calculate schedule and cost. You will understand the typical behavior of a project, how it is affected by limiting resource and schedule, and what recurring techniques and approaches to leverage as you cope with constraints.

With these basics in place, you will proceed to see the IDesign Method approach for project design, which enables you to determine the best overall plan across architecture, schedule, cost and risk. The IDesign Method for project design converges on the best and even optimal solution for the project while eliminating gambling, death marches, wishful thinking, and expensive trial and errors. Next the class discussed some advanced project design techniques such as the project time-cost curve, schedule acceleration with network compression and crashing, and IDesign's original risk quantifying techniques. Since there are several design solutions for every project, some more aggressive than others, you must objectively measure the risk of each option and evaluate the project design solutions in light of risk as well as cost and duration.

But no project plan survives unscathed the first day of execution – priorities, resources, deadlines, estimations and features will change, and you must constantly adapt the plan for the new reality. The class will show you IDesign's techniques for closing the loop by tracking both progress and effort across developers and services and containing the impact of changes, allowing you to constantly stay on schedule and on budget.

The class ends with a comprehensive case study and walks through its various permutations in determining the best plan that will keep the project on time all the time at the best risk and cost available. Moreover, the case study not only demonstrates end-to-end flow of project design across iterations, but it also demonstrates the thought process and rationale behind the decisions, our practical approach for using tools, how to integrate and compensate for their shortcomings and utilizing the IDesign templates.

While most training classes merely stack modules, focusing on a single topic at a time, the Project Design Master Class uses a spiral, and each iteration gains more insight across multiple topics, providing the motivation and objectives for next iteration, thus mimicking the natural learning process. Each such iteration incorporates hands-on labs to cement the concepts and practice the techniques. In the class you will also receive the IDesign's original tools, metrics, thumb rules, project design templates, and reference projects.

Don’t miss on this unique opportunity to learn and improve your project design skills with IDesign, and share our passion for excellence and project engineering, gain from our extensive experience of numerous projects design and profound insight on architecture, the process and its application.

While the class will open new horizons for you about project design and the possibilities, we recognize you often need to educate others even on the basics. You may find our project design call for action instrumental in getting support for transforming your environment.

Target Audience

Any project manager, architect, development manager or even aspiring senior developer wanting to grow their skill set would benefit greatly from the class. The class's specific objective is to train the project manager and the architect of the same solution to work together synergistically, so it is particularity suited for such a pair to attend together.

Duration

5 very challenging days.

Outline

Project Design Method Overview

• The core team
• Development plan
• Product life cycle
• Service life cycle
• Estimations techniques
• Services integration plan
• Staffing distribution
• Scheduling activities
• Viability and risk
• Figuring cost
• Tracking progress and effort
• Roles and responsibilities

Essential Concepts

• Project as a network diagram
• Node vs. arrow diagrams
• Critical path pre-requisites
• Identifying critical path
• Calculating floats
• Floats and scheduling
• Proactive risk management

Project Compression

• Time-Cost curve
• Points on Time-Cost curve
• Solutions and feasibility
• Cost elements
• Staffing and cost
• Critical path compression
• Activity crashing
• Project crashing

Quantifying Risk

• Risk curve
• Risk and floats
• Modeling risk
• Criticality risk index
• Activity Risk index
• Exponential risk behavior
• Risk decompression
• Tracking risk

Project Design in Action

• Architecture and dependencies
• Complexity reduction
• Adding activities
• Fuzzy front end
• Tools and network diagram
• Working with/around MS-Project
• Abstracting network diagram
• Staffing requirements
• Planning assumptions
• Network and resources
• Staffing distribution
• Floats analysis
• Infrastructure and dependencies
• Design with limited resources
• Design with sub-critical resources
• Milestones identification
• Project compression and crashing
• Accelerating schedule
• Team throughput analysis
• Building and modeling Time Cost curve
• Quantifying Risk
• Risk decompression
• Planning and risk

Project Design Mini-Clinic

• Project walkthrough
• Planning assumptions
• Normal solution
• SDP presentations and review