Technical Project Management

Synopsis

A best-selling seminar for managers and team members of technical projects!

This enriched program gives you three days of knowledge and practice in managing projects related to R&D, construction, capacity expansion, instrumentation and control, plant outages and more. You’ll work with project examples that range from designed experiments and hypothesis testing to installation and commissioning of new assembly lines. You’ll learn how to reduce task cycle times to achieve the fast track results required in the technical field. And you’ll be exposed to the terminology, codes, conventions and performance standards of public and private sources, such as ISO, ANSI, ASME, IEEE and more.

Seminar Content

Benefits of Project Management

Time, Cost and Scope

• Time-cost-scope tradeoffs and negotiations
• Gathering and documenting requirements
• Differentiating among product, process and project requirements

Project Leadership

• Potential source of conflict: when the PM is also the principal investigator

Transforming Project Objectives into a Work Plan

• WBS and its detailed work packages
• Choosing the right life-cycle approach or template for your project
• WBS as a planning, scheduling, staffing, budgeting and control tool

Project Scheduling: Network Logic and Dependency Analysis

• Network diagrams…precedence diagramming…arrow diagramming
• Key dependency relationships
• Dealing with overlapping tasks

Project Scheduling: Estimating the Work

• Estimating and uncertainty in scientific projects
• Targets vs. estimates vs. commitments

Project Management Milestone Plan

• The spreadsheet metaphor
• Project plans: asset and resource utilization, cost or budget, milestones
• Project management software examples

Scope Control and Plan Management

• The change control process
• Reporting project status and formats
• Transition planning: from lab to product business

Project Closure: Documenting Lessons Learned

• Tracing final documentation back to project requirements and specifications
• Documenting lessons learned: technical, operational, commercial, legal, etc.
• Organizational and other closures

Special Benefits

• Apply Work Breakdown Structures (WBS) and network development
• Identify potential problems and avoid them using troubleshooting techniques
• Track projects more effectively
• Create status reports that show top management where budgeting, scheduling and manpower trends are headed
• Cope with tight schedules