Project Management

Course Overview

How often in the course of your career has a project come up? In many cases, your success in business will rely upon your ability to successfully meet the constraints on a project. In Manhattan Review’s Project Management course, you will learn how to identify these constraints, manage your resources, and dazzle your superiors with your depth of understanding of the issues surrounding project management. Project management is essential because it is a discipline that is relevant to every industry and in every sector: non-profit and for-profit. Each student, regardless of his or her current responsibility in his or hers field will benefit from the concepts and the experience they will gain from this course.

Firstly, you will gain understanding of what defines a project as opposed to a process. We believe that through this understanding a manager can begin a project with a more sophisticated strategy, which will produce better results. The precision and efficiency inherently involved in managing a project can be easily dealt with given that the manager has a thorough knowledge of the constraints, objectives and resources at his or her disposal.

Did you know that the triple constraint refers to time, money, and scope? How do you define your scope? What are your resources? In this course you will learn, through experience rather than explanation the activities and events that conglomerate to define the act of managing a project: Forecasting trends, managing risk, assigning tasks and directing activities, allocating and estimating resources and many, many more. Your increased knowledge and skill in project management will enhance your ability to creatively and effectively solve problems and quickly evaluate any given situation or challenge.

There are many integral components to project management and technical ways of describing these components. For some this may seem overwhelming and too business-theoretical. In our course, we will teach you how to use the depth of knowledge that has been developed in project management so you can apply it to real world circumstances and business situations. Talking about control systems, methodologies, and development stages may seem overly academic but without a thorough understanding of some of these issues, your project may not come to fruition and you may not know why. For example, if your initiation stage is not sufficiently developed, the project may never make it to further stages and you will lose that clients business. Without the knowledge to critically reflect in a meaningful way on these mistakes you and your businesses will not know how to avoid them for the next opportunity.

In adopting the role of project manager you must define your individual goals but never lose sight of the whole. The ultimate goal, besides reducing the risk of failure is the satisfaction of the client for whom your project is based on. You must prove that your approach and implementation will bring the desired results for the client. Not only is communication between personnel vital in completing a project on time, but communication with the client as well.

In this course you can expect to be shown potential or actual projects as examples and asked to define the constraints. You will be trained to identify them in a meaningful and sophisticated way. Additionally, in keeping with Manhattan Review’s goal to give you actual experience within the various business disciplines, you may be asked to complete projects in teams with each team member given a specific task. This will be done in a way that reflects how projects will be done in your industry. To us, and to many of your own potential future clients, the results you achieve are entirely dependent on your ability to manage a project and implement the management techniques required for successful project management. In other words you have everything to gain from honing your project management skills.

Topics Covered

• Constraints: Time, Cost, and Scope
• Resource Management
  • Personnel
  • Money
  • Materials
  • Communication
  • Energy
• Activities involved in Project Management
  • Planning
  • Estimating
  • Allocating
  • Assigning
• Various Project Management methodologies
• Basics of Cost Engineering relative to Project Management
• Approach
• Stages of development
• Control Systems
• Project Management Tools
  • Financial tools
  • Helpful Charts