Project Management in the Real-World

• Understand why Project Management is important, and why nearly everything in the real-world is a project.
• Define a project, program, and portfolio.
• Gain some professional context into the different types of projects.
• Define project phases and discuss how they apply and why they are important.
• Discuss the basics of scope development
• Apply scope development to complex, multi-discipline, real-world projects.
• Learn the basics of cost and schedule development.
• Learn about risk and change management.
• Understand what a stakeholder is and is not.
• Learn about stakeholder management and why it's critically important.

Alan Levy, the President of Epee Education, was a long-time project and program manager in the Pharmaceutical industry before launching Epee.  Starting with a degree in Chemical Engineering, he has worked as both an engineer and a PM with most of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world (e.g. Merck, GSK, BMS, J&J, Novartis).  His diverse background has ranged from maintenance and reliability engineering to managing the construction of research labs to establishing and running a global sustainability program.

Through many years with his professional society, ISPE, Alan found that he loved mentoring students and young professionals, particularly in the topics that schools were not teaching them.  A passion that ultimately led to the creation of Epee in order to reach more people with more content than he could do locally by himself.

In business and in life, you'll find that most of the things we do are effectively projects.  They have a finite start and end, they have a budget and schedule, they require decisions driven around risk, and they require communicating with everybody involved and impacted by them.  Because of this, there is tremendous value for everybody to have a basic understanding a project management.

This lesson explains what is and what is not a project.  Professionally, you'll find that basically everything is some manner of project.

This lesson discusses the differences between projects, programs, and portfolios.

This lesson will discuss the distinct phases of a project and how they relate to one another.  Alan uses a unique approach to demonstrate the phases by looking at his DYI project to build a brick smoker in his back yard.

This lesson includes discussion around Project Scope.

This lesson is a personal story discussing an actual project that illustrates Building Influence and Credibility through your actions.  In this instance, Field Survey.

This lesson is a personal story about scope development around a difficult request from an actual client.  It demonstrates the value of resoursefulness for a PM and how it helps build strong Client Relationships.  This is a great example of real-world problem solving that they never in school!

This lesson is a personal story about the need for creative scope development to win a New Project.  It demonstrates Real-World Problems, Appreciating Urgency, Challenging Project Constraints, Creativity, and Responding to Bids.

This lesson is a personal story demonstrating how "Everything is a Project".

It applies what we learned in Section 4 to a Home Project that everybody is likely to deal with at some point.

This lesson includes discussion around the basics of project finances.

Personal Story – Understanding the Reality of the S-Curve when the Owner’s Cashflow conflicts with Project Spend

Clients Rarely Appreciate This!!

This lesson includes discussion around project scheduling.

Using scheduling concepts outside of work

For student reference, work schedule for classes in a semester with individual classes as projects and all your classes as a program.

This lesson includes discussion around Project Risk and Risk Management.

Personal Story – Project vs Program Risk, Risk Management of finding asbestos

This lesson includes discussion around Project Communication and Stakeholder/Change Management

Definitions, Not every stakeholder is equal, stakeholder management, positive and negative stakeholders, leading by influence rather than authority

When Communications Fail – Over communicating > Under communicating, Avoid assumptions about people’s motivations, Stakeholders are often under pressure, Stakeholders have their own agendas that can help or hinder the project, Something ALWAYS goes wrong on projects, Build a thick skin and learn not to take things personally, PMs need to provide a calming influence (lighthouse in a storm), Your stress will influence your team’s performance and stakeholder responses.

This lesson includes discussion around Change Control and Change Management.

Personal Story (Parts 1&2):  Change Control on a large utility project.  The good, the bad, and the ugly for a technically challenging project with an enormous amount of client driven change.  Delving into the sources of change, known and unknown change, client approving a scope you didn’t want, working the changes into a project with a hard, physically-constrained deadline, conflict management, project communication lessons learned, and ramifications of angry stakeholders on an otherwise successful project.

Personal Story – Change Control on a large utility project – The good, the bad, and the ugly for a technically challenging project with an enormous amount of client driven change.  Delving into the sources of change, Known and unknown change, Client approving a scope you didn’t want, Working the changes into a project with a hard, physically-constrained deadline, Conflict management, project communication lessons learned, and ramifications of angry stakeholders on an otherwise successful project.

Recap of Project Management Basics