Welcome to the Fundamentals of Project Planning and Management. My name is Yael Grushka-Cockayne and I'm an assistant professor at the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business. Over the next four weeks we're going to together learn some basic ideas and develop a common language around what it takes to plan and manage projects. Our course is developed and built over four weeks. Week 1 is titled, Lets Get things Started, and covers all the activities that take place before we even start a project. Weeks 2 and 3, in gray on my screen are associated with the planning of projects. Week 2 is titled Developing Plans. And Week 3 talks about a risky world, It's a Risky World. In Week 4, the orange, Ready, Set, Go! We're going to be talking about the actual execution of projects. Let me give you just a little bit more detail on what we're going to cover in each one of the four weeks. As I said, week one is all about the initiation of a project. How do we define it, how do we organize our project from the get go to make sure that we're off to a good start. We're going to define the project goal and we're going to think of three objectives associated with the project. The scope, the time, and the budget. We're also going to be very careful and identify the priorities that we have among these three objectives. Finally, we're going to think about the organization. Who are those folks involved in the project, affected by the project and critical for the project's success? As part of Week 1, we're also going to take a little bit of time to look at successes and failures of projects, that we think about. It will help us learn some lessons and make sure that we avoid any pitfalls that we can. Weeks 2 and 3, as I said, are all about the planning. In Week 2, we are going to develop a plan. We're going to start by scoping a project. How do we make sure that a project has the content and has the right set of activities that we would like it to have? We're also going to define dependencies and sequences of activities, what has to come before what. Ultimately, one of our main goals is to come up with a schedule. How long will it take us to execute our project? And we're going to learn some techniques in how to do that. In Week 2, we're also going to focus on the trade-offs. How do we trade off duration with cost and with scope in order to ensure that we are satisfied with the plan that we're putting forward, and in order to make sure that we have our key priorities when we come to make decisions during the project life cycle. Week 3, we're still planning. We're not quite ready for execution yet. And we're going to think about risk. We're going to assess the risks associated with the project with the schedule with the cost, even with the scope, and we're going to be cautious about how we can plan for ambiguity. How we can plan for uncertainty and ambiguity in order to make sure that we're not surprised during the execution. Finally, in Week 4 we're going to be ready to talk about executing projects. In order to really understand how to execute projects and how to make the most out of the project execution, we're going to be thoughtful of those involved in the project. Who are the individuals that are doing the work, and what kind of tendencies do they have? And how those tendencies might suggest a certain mode of execution. Should we use earned value analysis? Should we use a more agile approach such as scrum or kanban? And how do these ideas come together in the concepts of our project, and how do they support the priorities and the goals that we set out to achieve with our project. Now this is a fundamental course, and we're here to gain a common appreciation, and a common language to anything, or everything that has to do with project planning, and project execution. There are a few topics that we don't have time or scope to cover in this course together. We're not going to cover exact certification process or study for specific exam by one institution or another. And we're not going to become experts in using one software tool versus another software tool. There are many project management tools out there. We're going to hear about a few, but we're not going to become expert in one specific one. Another topic that unfortunately we're not going to cover here together is project portfolio, project portfolio management, project portfolio selection. But there is enough for us to dig into, and there is a whole lot that I'm excited to teach you over the next four weeks. So let's get going.
