BCS Foundation in IS Project Management

The course is designed for people new to the project management field within IS. It is also suitable for others such as business analysts, solution developers and change professionals, who want an understanding of project management or who have to undertake project management responsibilities alongside their nominal duties.

The IS Project Management course is designed for people new to the project management field within IS. It is also suitable for others such as business analysts, solution developers and change professionals, who want an understanding of project management or who have to undertake project management responsibilities alongside their nominal duties.

This classroom-based course provides participants with a good general understanding of the purpose, structure and techniques of project management within the information systems (IS) field.

• Project environment
• Characteristics of a project; the ‘triple constraint’ of time/cost/quality
• Project and operational responsibilities
• Special features of computer projects
• Role of the Project Manager
• Project success and failure
• Development lifecycles
• Project initiation
• Stakeholder analysis and management
• Defining the objectives and scope of the project
• The role of the Client and their responsibilities
• Project constraints and resources
• Project Initiation Document
• Project planning
• The importance of breaking work down
• Product breakdown structures
• Project and User deliverables
• Standard deliverable sets and templates
• Product flows and work packages
• The concept of dependencies
• Estimating deliverables
• Key concepts in estimating
• Estimating difficulties
• Estimating by analogy
• Parametric estimating
• Effort and elapsed time estimates
• Schedule compression
• Planning networks and charts
• Precedence diagrams and project networks
• The critical path and its implications
• Gantt charts and resource histograms
• Planning at an appropriate level
• The use and abuse of planning software
• Working in teams
• The elements of a good team
• Team composition
• Team roles
• Motivation and management style
• The roots of motivation at work
• Approaches to motivation (Maslow, Herzberg)
• The effect of management style
• Project risk management
• Purpose of risk management
• Risk management process
• Identifying and assessing risks
• Introduction to quantitative risk assessment
• Project quality plans
• Principles of quality management
• The contents of a quality plan
• Quality Management
• Configuration management
• The project plan
• Elements of a project plan (schedule, quality, risk)
• Contents and structure of a project plan
• Project monitoring, reporting and control
• The importance of monitoring and control
• Allocating personal deliverables
• Progress measurement
• Time recording
• Introduction to earned value analysis
• Dealing with non-delivery
• Slippage and re-planning – corrective actions
• Change control, scope creep and over-engineering
• Reporting structures
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• Project completion
• Project sign-off and the need for a controlled close
• Post-project reviews
• The project manager
• The project manager’s role revisited
• Qualities and characteristics of effective project managers