PMP Roadmap 2026 | How To Become A Project Manager In 2026 | PMP Career Guide | Simplilearn

If at all possible, you can let us know where what you do as well. Hi Tony, uh thank you for joining us from Chicago. Hi Sundar, thank you for joining us from Chennai. Okay, we have Sjit from in India. There's someone joining us from London. Okay, a lot of things coming in. Great. Excellent. Wow. That's amazing. Amazing. We're also live on LinkedIn and YouTube. Uh so we have more participants joining us from uh different parts of the world. I'm sure as we can see here someone from I might it might take a long time to read all of these. Okay, we have Rashmi from US, Sham from Hyderabad, Mary from Chennai, Mitun from Dubai, Terren from Virginia, Sandra from Southern CA, Manikant from Pune, Fawad from Abu Dhabi. Wow, amazing. Balaji from New York, Calvin from Ohio, Karthik from Kamaturur. Amazing, great, wonderful, wonderful. Okay, so it's it's super exciting to have such a lively bunch of audience here. Let me quickly introduce myself. My name is Ana. I will be hosting the session on behalf of Simply Learn. Over the next few uh next three hours exactly, you're going to um not just hear about various project management artifacts but actually build them along with an amazing expert that we have here. So please do stay tuned because we'll be working through a lot of exercises together. Okay. So here are three quick rules to keep in mind throughout the session. First, if you have any questions, please use the Q&A box and not the chat box. Um, you can see the number of chat uh pins that keep coming here. So, we might not be able to keep track of all the messages that uh uh come here. So, please if you have any question that you want the expert to answer, please use the Q&A box effectively. Second, the chat is there. Feel free to use it to share your thoughts, your reactions, and answers to the exercises and the polls that we'll be launching. But just keep it relevant to what we are discussing. If you keep getting a lot of pings, we would have to disable the visibility to everyone in the audience as it might affect their workshop experience. So once again, let me tell you to use the Q&A box as much as possible. And third, um at the very end of the session, we'll drop a poll. Type your full name into it if you want your attendance certificate. Please do not miss that as we will not be able to take any manual entries and if your name is not in the poll we won't be able to provide the certificate or the recording of the workshop. Okay. Um right so just curious to know has anyone here attended a simply loan webinar before? We have hundreds of people here. So um we'd love to know if uh anyone is joining here for the first time. If it's first time you can just type out first time. If you've attended before, you can say that you've Yeah, you could type out yes. Okay, we have Sandra who's attended some webinar two weeks ago. Thank you for being here again. But wow. Okay, great. Most of you are saying it's your first time. Okay, so allow me to quickly brief about Simply Learn and what we do. Um, we help people build relevant job ready skills. It's as simple as that. Um in this journey we have helped more than 50 million people across 150 plus countries uh level up their careers and we work with some of the world's top universities and companies to make that happen. So like I said we have an ecosystem of great great partnerships. We built a curriculum in collaboration with highly ranked institutions that you can see here and as well as global tech giants like Google, IBM, AWS and Microsoft. These partnerships really shape what we teach and how we teach it. Which means when you learn with us, you're learning what the industry expects from you right now. Um, right. So, moving on, a couple of numbers like worth calling out here. Learners who come through our programs see an average 50% salary increase. Our graduate rate sits at 80 80 percentage which is well above industry average. And we are consistently rated 4.8 eight on on five by our learners. What really drives that? Well, um it's the curriculum um it's the curriculum that is built alongside top universities and companies like I've mentioned. Sessions are taught live by people who are actively working in these fields and you work through real case studies and projects and not just like you know theory and you have a cohort manager available to support you throughout the program. Okay. So let me uh get to the most exciting part of the workshop which is introducing the person who is going to be leading the workshop today. Tim uh Tim Jerome is the expert that we have today and I'm very very uh glad and honored to welcome him. Uh Tim has spent decades in the space. First as a consulting project manager working with Fortune 100 in Fortune50 companies and then as a trainer and mentor helping project managers around the world build their skills and earn their PMP credentials. Between 2004 and 2020 alone, he has taught over 15,000 students and he's not just focused on exam prep. His approach is about helping people um uh apply these skills in their day-to-day work. Tim, over to you for a quick hello Alo before we quick kick off and then we'll get into the content. Thank you for joining us and thank you for that great introduction. Uh welcome everyone. Yeah. Uh I I have a passion about business and project management. I have an MBA but I also have my PMP certification back from 2003. And so in 2004, I started working inside of my corporation to help people prepare and then it just sort of grew. And in 2012, I was doing it full-time. And so I understand the underpinnings, but that's not the exciting part. I've been doing research along the way. I'm I'm also a research analyst uh a lecturer um at a university as well as an adjunct professor. So I'm engaging in business over here. I'm engaging in the the real project work over here and I'm also engaging in the research and where project management's going for you guys who are entering the workforce and are learning these new skills especially in these uncertain times. These are very exciting times and many people are interested in what we're talking about today. Um, I'm really happy to be here. I'm happy that you find this interesting and we're going to have a great conversation. I think you're on mute. Oh, my my bad. Uh, thank you Tim for your perfect introduction. Uh, it's an absolute pleasure to do this with you. Before we dive in, let's do a quick pulse check with the audience. We want to get a sense of who's in the room today. So, I'm going to launch a poll um to understand all of you better. Um just tell us where you are in your PM j journey currently. Are you starting out just or are you managing projects a little you know informally um at a beginner level or are you preparing for the PMP exam already or are you already certified and here to just sharpen things up? Um so, take a second and vote. We will see the result come in live in just a few seconds. Okay. Okay. Great. We have already like about 100 people who have voted. We hope to get more responses coming in. It seems to be like it seems like we have a good mix uh of audiences here. But a lot of you are preparing for the PMP certification which is which is amazing. Tim, I think it's good to know um this good to know our audiences better as you work through the material. Okay, so I'm just going to have the poll live for five more seconds and I will end it just about now. Great. Okay. So, I've also shared the results so everyone can see the you know great mix of audiences that we have. Almost half of you are preparing for your certification. That's neat. That's neat. Yeah. Yeah. Amazing. So, great. Um we will um take you through the game plan for today. So, um here's what we're going to work through. There are eight segment segments covering the full project management life cycle from initi in initiation all the way through closeout. Um there's also a sneak peek into the project management with jennai program. Um so we will wrap up with a program deep dive and a live Q&A with uh Tim. So after each segment or most of the segments there is also a learning check a quick exercise tied to a you know a particular scenario. So you will be applying everything that you learn here in right you know right in the session in context. Um so before we dive in just one more thing um just because you're here today you're getting exclusive access to three resources um a project management interview Q&A guide a PMP exam prep guide and a playbook for building the perfect project management portfolio. This will be available only during the workshop towards the last segment. There is a lot of great insights and guidelines in store. So, please stay tuned till the end and grab your copy. We will not be sharing this later after the workshop ends. Um, so Tim, hope you're ready to kick off. I'll let you take it from here. Very good. And thank you again. Um, we're going to actually look at what I teach inside of SimplyLearn in our PMP preparation. You can imagine though, we usually use 35 to 40 hours and we're doing it in 3 hours. Well, that's not all because this is exactly what I teach also at university in either eight or 16 weeks. So, you can understand. We're not going to go into a great level of detail here, but at the same time, it gives you context. And I see someone's talking about Prince 2. PMP and prints 2 are two different type of certificates and they're based on the same standard ISO 21500 2151 and so forth. So what we're talking about today is is relevant to everybody and I see somebody's mentioning the eth version the new version of pinach. We may or may not talk about what's happening inside of project management institute and what it means for us. Um we can talk about that at the end of the course but today we're talking about just looking at project management at that really high level. Okay. Okay. Let's let's move on here. So so first of all before we talk about this let's let's set some context. Okay, let's let's get some definitions in place. Um, we're going to talk about projects. Okay, business is how companies generate revenue and make profit. Okay, and that's what they do, right? They create things for us to consume and use and we pay them, right? Well, you can break businesses into two categories. Number one, operations work, which keeps the business running. And then you have project work, which are timed events. They're unique timed events that create a deliverable and generate value. Okay, that's what we look at. It's unique, never been done before in this manner. It has a specific schedule and it has a deliverable and generates value. Okay, remember that. Now when I talk about business, I'm talking about that environment that's happening around it. So much of what is happening around it impacts the project. So we have to understand what's happening in that understand how decisions are made understand how information is shared not just in projects because as a business does this you can imagine it's going to happen in your projects the same way. Now in project management we're looking at a lot of factors. The highlevel factors are are what we call our constraint or limiting factor. Scope. What do we want to get done inside of a project? Yes or no? Right? This is all we're going to do. That's scope. Time. When are we going to get this scope done? And then cost. Well, this is not only all of the constraints because in order to figure out time and cost, you have to figure out how many people are going to do this, how long are they going to work, what type of tools and materials and supplies are they going to use. So, understanding how scope, time, and costs work together is a basic, but it's just the beginning. Okay. Now, you can imagine if you only have a limited time, you're going to have to approach this work inside your project. You're creating something, right? And it has to be created on a certain date or in a certain week or in a certain month. So, what you have to do is have a very organized approach. And what we do in in this framework is we say we break it up into five groups of activities. Number one, initiating. How does the project get approved? Who sets aside the money? Who actually says this is what we want to do? Who makes the decisions? That's the initiating work, right? And then we have the planning work. The planning work sets down what are the activities we're going to do to create the deliverable. What are the activities we're going to do to monitor and control? What are the activities we're going to change? And then we're going to be running, executing, and monitoring controlling at the same time. We're going to be building the deliverable over here. And over here, we're going to be collecting data and say we're doing a good job or we need to do better. Now what's funny is monitoring controlling sometimes says you know what we didn't know enough at the beginning of the project and we need better so we need to make a change. So sometimes monitoring controlling kicks off another round of planning too. So you can imagine that this project life cycle is not sequential. It's it's actually planning and executing and monitoring controlling all the time until monitoring controlling says okay we're done we met the objective we created the deliverable and people are satisfied and now we can transition the deliverable. Let's step into our first group of activities called initiation. What do we mean by that? First of all, in initiation, if you don't have any need, why spend money and set aside time and people inside of a company to do it? So, we have to have a need. Are we solving a problem? Are we trying to create more money? Are we trying to generate more profit? Are we trying to take command of the market that we're part participating in? This is a business need. Okay, this is what business spend money on. And this is why corporations have to change. There are tools we use inside of this needs assessment and this analysis. And these tools we have are usually used to create what we call a business case. A case for solving that need. It talks about the problem. It talks about it's going to spend money. Projects always cost. Are we going to get more out of it than we put into it? And that's what we call cost benefit. And then we're going to look at feasibility. Feasibility says, can we even do this? Right? For instance, if we have to take out a loan for this project, we might not be able to take out a loan. So, there may not be a business case, right? And then the big deal is a strategic alignment. You don't do a project unless it meets not just the objectives of the project but it meets the objectives of the organization. Corporations corporations and organizations don't set aside time, people and money unless there is a need. That's the beautiful part about project. You're always working on critical work. If we don't do this, we don't get to meet our objectives. You as a project manager are in the limelight and your work is contingent on being critical to meeting the objectives of the corporation. Okay, that's what the business case says. Now, once you have a business case, what do you do? Well, we create a proposal, right? We say, "Hey, we have a good idea for creating a project to fulfill that need." We call that discussion and that document a project charter. Now, a project charter says, "Here's the need. Here's what the business case says. Here's how we aim to fulfill it with the project work." Now, as a project manager, you may not be participating in this. As a project manager, there may not be a formal project man charter, but when you're pulled in to plan and help execute the project, it's your job to collect this information and create that chartering document because this is the initial understanding of what we're going to create. Okay? What does it have in it? project uh project objectives. What is the purpose of this project? What is it doing? Is it helping us because we have another pandemic and we're uh concerned we're going into lockdown? Are we opening up a new branch in our hospital and we need to make sure that we have all the services stable by the time people start using the hospital? What are the purpose and what do we call success? Success is not just I created something. Success is we created something. It has value and it works. It has functionality. And that's what success criteria looks like for our project. What does this deliverable do? Well, it fulfills a need, right? Well, how does it fulfill the need? What does it do? And that's where it is. And this is where in the project charter, you're doing some pre-planning. Highlevel scope, not the whole scope. your key stakeholders, not the uh not all the stakeholders yet. What is the money set aside right now to solve this problem? Because corporations are always thinking about money, people, and time. And they want a highlevel understanding of what this project is because this project is just a proposal. It's just a project charter. and they may be looking at four or five competing project charters to solve the need. And so we're not just looking at the key stakeholders and budget and high level scope. We're also looking at assumptions. What are our guesses? An assumption is a guess. It's it's it's a wild estimate that's not based on anything. Okay? And we have to use that sometimes. At the same time, we're going to look at limiting factors. We only have this much money. We only have this much time. We can't use research and development organization to help us on this project. Okay, these are limiting factors. And then what's the authority of the project manager? Are we going to be administrative? Are we going to be facilitators? or are we going to be director level project managers? That's what the project charter says. The function of a project charter is twofold. It announces we have a formal project, right? And number two, it defines the authority of a project manager. Okay, let's move on. Wow, we still have a lot of people going here. Um, okay. So, we're looking at who we're looking at people, right? We're actually looking at the idea of who are our primary stakeholders. If you take our classes, you learn that a stakeholder is somebody who impacts the work or is going to be impacted the work like a user of the deliverable or even thinks they could be impacted by the work. The primary roles that we're looking at is number one project manager and number two product owner. Okay, project manager is a project role. They manage the project. The formal definition of project manager is They ensure the project meets not just the deliverable but meets the objective. So they own the plan. They are accountable. They're concerned about the plan and the process. They're going to be managing things like risks and issues and changes. And they're going to be reporting to sponsors. A sponsor is another stakeholder. What is a sponsor? Sponsor provides the money and they're the pro primary decision maker. When I say money, it's not just money in account. It's also money through investing people and physical resources like materials, tools, and supplies. And they also are accountable for how are we going to get this done? Now, how is a big part of scope, but we'll get into scope when we talk about planning. So, what's the difference between a project manager and a product owner? Project manager is focused on the project, right? Product owner over here is a business role. I have a lot of friends who are product owners. Their job titles may be a business owner or a uh product manager. Um in in manufacturing construction, we call these people product managers. They they take an idea of a new product that they're going to launch in two years and they create the best they can for that idea, like a new type of laptop. and then they create the new laptop and then they launch and support that laptop. So they're getting into operations. They're not just getting into projects. So as a product owner, I may have a bunch of projects throughout the life of the product, right? As a project manager, I may be working for a product owner who's working for four or five working with four or five project managers. So the relationship between project manager and product owners is very tight. And where a project manager looks at sponsors and stakeholders and they are looking for how it gets done. A product owner looks at the customers, the customer experience, the voice of the customer, and they're accountable for what gets done, the life of the what, the product itself through its creation, its launching into production or the market, its management in the market, and finally when it becomes obsolete or it's no longer generated. generating revenue, right? That's a product owner who may be a project manager or who may have access to multiple project managers. So, let's look at a project charter for what we're doing. Your company wants to launch a new client onboarding portal. What do we mean? Well, we're going to bring new clients into our company so they can have a real good experience and learn how to work with us, right? Maybe we're a consulting group. Maybe we're a group who provides services and products to other corporations. So if we're going to name the project objective in a project charter, we're going to create a new client onboarding portal, but we're going to say also because because we want the experience to be as fulfilling and valuable for them. So when they're ready, they can be very very very satisfied with our services. Right? Okay. So that's the project objective. You see, we're not just talking about how and what. We're talking about why. And that's important about a project charter. It's a why document. So in academic researches the principal investigator the product owner and the postoc the project manager actually the principal investigator is going to be the sponsor but yes they are the product owner. Now what's strange is who's the project manager? Maybe the principal investigator, the person who owns the grant is the uh is is the sponsor and also the project manager. So when we talk about sponsor and project manager, we may not talk about job title or people. We may be talking about roles. Okay. Now let's list two assumptions about this client onboarding portal. Let's assume that we're going to make this portal small so that we can figure out that it works the way we want it to early. We want to launch it in production and and just use this. So we're going to limit the number of clients in the first six months. That's a limiting factor. That's that's a constraint. An assumption is we assume that we're actually going to use the way we onboard clients normally without a portal. That may change. Notice the difference there. Another assumption is we assume for the first two years that we're just going to use our current clients and migrate them over and then in the next two years after that we're going to bring new clients in. Notice how I'm using assumptions. We have to start somewhere. So we're going to start with guesses. Right? On top of that, we want limiting factors because these are going to create what we call boundaries or guard rails for our project. Okay? And those are really good to have in a project charter. Now, who should sign the charter? Okay? Sponsor. Now, one one of the ways we can think about this is let's take let's take um in a university setting with a federal grant, right? The person who owns the grant, the principal investigator is going to be the sponsor. They're primarily the ones who sign the charter. In fact, we we talk about the project charter as the sponsor's document because it's the sponsor's authority that says, "Yes, this is the project we want. This is the project I've been setting money, time, and people aside for Okay, you notice I have a cup of coffee here. Yeah, I I um on these uh on these threehour uh courses, I I really appreciate having an extra cup of coffee and a little bit of water. Um it's it's difficult to talk for three hours. Now, we're going to step in. Let's say that the project charter is approved. You are now the project manager. Um it can be. The question is, is the project charter prepared by the project manager? It can be. If a sponsor has an idea of who they want to make the project charter, they often invite them in. But sometimes they're so busy working on the charter that they haven't identified a project manager. And you can imagine in an informal project sometimes the project manager is added after the project is approved. So it goes it's it's a spectrum type of thing. Okay. I I would love to say a project manager uh participates in the development of a charter but sometimes it just doesn't happen. Okay. and and we have to be the bridge that says, "Okay, let's gather all this information up so we can start planning." And that's where we are now. Now, with that money and that decision, we can start planning. Okay. So the big part of planning that you first work on is how and what. Okay, we call this scope. The scope is what what are we going to have at the end of the project? You need a definition of that. Well, I had it in the charter. Yeah, we had it at a high level. Now we get into the detail planning. Okay. Like for a three-year project, if you're going to build a data center, probably you're going to spend six weeks building a charter, you're going to be spending seven weeks to build a plan. Uh seven months to build a plan. Okay? It's not unreasonable to do this. I I actually facilitated like what 30 data center uh transition uh projects in my consulting experience. So here we go. What are we doing to develop this? Well, first of all, we take that scope and that scope has requirements. What's a requirement? a requirement says this has to have this. If I'm building a box for manufacturing, I'm going to have to say the box has to be black and the box has to be this size in order for it to do this. Now, the box size and the color are the characteristics of the box. We also have to talk about how we have that how and what as a scope and then we break down that scope into pieces. Why? Because that's the way the human brain thinks. We think about the box. We think about coloring the box. We think about the material to make for the box. Let's let's talk about building a new cell tower. Okay. I I also worked in telecommunications and cell towers and we were talking about things like we have to figure out when we're going to do the construction. We're going to have to figure out when we're going to add the radios onto the cell tower and we're going to have to talk about when. So when you have scope you can do schedule. Scope always comes first and then schedule. And then with schedule, we can talk about who's doing the work. Okay. Resource are needed to determine when we can get things done and how long it's going to take because some activities are contingent on other activities. Right? In order for me to put cable onto a cell tower, I'm going to have to dig trenches and put conduit in there, right? So, we're going to have to look at sequence. And that's what scheduling is. And then when we have our schedule and our resources, we can figure out where do we need to spend money. Okay, that's where we're looking at the real budget. We're still planning. Um, we'll talk about let's let's talk about estimation. I see a question about threepoint estimation, right? Okay. These cost estimation methods are good for looking at schedule and budget and resources. Okay? So, don't think about these cost estimation methods only for budget. Okay? I'll talk about threepoint estimation in just a minute. Let's go through the easier ones. easier ones are going to say top down. Another an estimation method says here's what we think the whole thing looks like and here's the budget for the whole thing and let's let's break it down into pieces like analogous estimation. Right? We've done this type of project six different times and it's always come out between 65,000 and 75,000. So we expect this will be 75,000. That's analogous. And then parametric. Parametric uses a little bit of math, right? And it says, okay, we learned from 10 projects that it takes about about four weeks to develop a kilometer of road. Okay. Therefore, this project is going to create 10 kilometers. So, it's going to take us about 40 weeks. Okay? See how we use the math? It's still top down because it's using work history, but it's using a little bit of analysis. And then we're looking at bottom up estimate where we break things down in our scope into things like we're going to dig trenches and we're going to lay out the conduit and pull cable, right? And each one of those will have their duration and cost and then we add those up. Now, you can assume bottomup estimation is is more accurate. It is but it's timeconsuming and sometimes we don't have time. uh threepoint estimation says let's look at three different estimates and average them out like optimistic what if everything was perfect estimate pessimistic what if everything went wrong estimate and something in the middle most likely if if we if it's neither optimistic or pessimistic what do we think will happen and that's where a threepoint estimate can ha help really well and it's really nice when you don't have work history. Now we're at the same time we're looking at resources and I think uh and and this is where we're getting into purchasing and you're talking about procurement, right? We're going to talk about this in risk and quality. Um so when I talk about resources, I'm talking about labor, people, materials like nuts and bolts and cabling. I'm talking about tools like shovels and supplies like cases of bottled water. Okay? And we're looking at not just how much these are going to cost but how long they're going to be used and also when can they be used because sometimes we have the perfect schedule but people are not available and heavy equipment is not available. So we have to do this resource optimization um in our planning as well. Okay. Now, okay. So, we're talking about our portal, right? Our onboarding portal for our clients. Let's talk about three high-level deliverables for the work breakdown structure. And that's our scope. um the portal maybe we have to have an interface for people to log in. That's a piece and we call these pieces phases and then we have a piece which captures their personal data and it saves them in the database that's secure and then we have to have a way for them to maintain and update that. So we've just created three phases. Right? Now when we're developing that scope, we go down to the next level. Okay? Work packages. A work package is a piece of a phase. You notice I was talking about those highlevel deliverables as a phase. You can break them down too. Like if if I'm developing a cell tower, maybe construction is a phase, but in construction, we have to have build a little shed for the radios. And that's one work package in construction. And then we're going to have to do, you know, dig the trenches and lay out the conduit and cabling. And that's another work package under that. And guess what we get to do now? We get to put them all together. And that's what we call the scope baseline. Right now, what type of cost estimation method would you use? In my experience, the experts that I have who've done this work do top down because they did this all the time, right? I was a part owner for a telecommunications corporation and we would go out and we'd use like about 15 years of work history together to do these type of works. Now there's a word here that we need to talk about. So is the WBS equivalent to one project? Yes, Abalash. And that's what we have to remember. Okay. Yeah. Thanks for that. Don't blink. I am going through this very quickly and I apologize, but you're getting it all in three hours. Now, uh again, is is is the WBS equivalent to one? Yeah. And and the thing is when you talk about scope and the work breakdown structure like the phases to the work packages, we talk we use a concept called all and only. This is all the work we're going to do and this is only the work we're going to do. And we have to have this all and only because we're setting aside people and setting aside money and we want to make sure it's definitely going to happen. Okay. So, in cost estimation, as we're going top down, we're going to have to get more and more accurate as we go down in our levels and in our schedule. We're no longer working with work packages. We're working with activities. And activities have sequence and they have duration and they have resources and they have costs. And this is where we're able to put together our budget and our resources. Very cool, huh? What's the importance of critical path? So let me let me talk about this. Okay. Uh we we're we're a little bit ahead. So I'm going to spend time on the critical path. Okay. So you can think about a critical path as the one path through your project that says if we don't get this right, it's going to delay the entire project. It's the longest path. There are other see when when we talk about a path we're talking about sequence of activities and the critical path says these activities we can't delay. There are other activities that are going along inside them and they're going to be, you know, they're going to be important or they wouldn't be part of the project, but at the same time they're not going to last as long. And so we can delay those. And that type of delay is called float. We can actually observe float on some activities that say, "Okay, that's all right. That's all right. If if we don't get that done, we need to get that done by this date by the time we use up all our float, right? And but on the critical path, we have to say if we delay anything here because these are the long activities, these are the activities that def define the duration of the project from the start to end. Now, what type of activities would sit on the critical path? Well, we were talking about three phases on our onboarding portal scenario, right? The phases that create the registration and the login. You can't delay that because if you don't have that, you can't integrate how we collect information and save it in a database in a secure manner. So we can figure out that we can do the database development and also the login at the same time. But that login is the critical component. It's going to be on the critical path. See how we're doing this. Now does a project manager have to come up with this? No. No. No. In fact, I'm a great advocate. I'm a great advocate of saying I'm the facilitator. I bring the experts together who say you have to have this first and then this and then this. And while this is going on, we can get these done. But all of these things that are up here that are not so critical, they're going to be okay. I have still have to keep an eye on them, but I'm really keeping an eye on the critical path. So what's the importance of the critical path? That's the path of activities, the sequence of activities that if we delay these, it's going to delay the entire project. That's what you want to know about the critical path. It helps you focus and prioritize as a project manager to where you want to actually pay attention. How's that? Yeah. If and and again if you go into introduction to project management courses or if you go into um if you go into the um PMP preparation, we take you through the mechanics of defining and estimating the critical path which defines the duration of the project. Yeah, thank you for that. Yeah, Saturday morning I'm doing pretty well, right? Okay. So, we're laying out scope, schedule, and budget and resources, right? And we're building that plan. We can't just talk about that because we really want to have this happen, okay? We got to think about quality and we have to think about risk. A risk is something that might happen and if it does will impact. So we as a project manager are there to ensure that the deliverable meets the objectives. So we're going to have to guide and facilitate the analysis of risk, right? So what do we do? We identify risks. We prioritize risks because we might have 30 risks. We always want to be working and thinking about the top three to five. So, we identify, we prioritize, and then we develop responses because if we're ready for a response, it won't surprise us. It won't stall the project, and we can build those responses into our durations and our budgets, and we're making our project and our baselines more accurate. Okay, here's an example of a risk register that you might use. A risk register is a list of risks with prioritization and with a response. You notice on the right hand side, it's not just mitigation. Mitigation is how are we going to minimize that risk? We might not be able to eliminate it. Transfer is handing it over. You can actually avoid risks too. That's a response. Maybe you change the plan so that risk doesn't have any relevance for our project anymore. And there are some risks that are accepted because they're below threshold. They're below the threshold or the tolerance of the stakeholders. And we say that's all right. We understand this. Now, getting back to priority, we're going to have to use both probability and impact because impact is huge, probability is low, it's going to be somewhere in the middle. But if impact is huge, and probability is high, that's a critical one. And if impact is low and probability is low, that's probably going to be low. So building our probability and impact and generating this score is going to help us establish the prioritization of the risks. Where do I focus my attention on these risks? Now again the project manager doesn't do this. They facilitate it and they use the experts to put this together. This is not just done at the beginning of planning. This is started in planning and you're going to continue to identify, prioritize, and determine responses because in monitoring controlling, guess what we're going to do? We're going to find that a risk occurs. We hand over the responses to the team and they say, "Okay, this is what we're going to do." Now, there's a lot more detail in here, right? There's a lot more detail, but this is basically how you put together a risk register and use it on a project. Okay, we talked about risk. let's get into quality. Quality is doing work correctly. Okay? And it's it's funny because doing work correctly has a lot of definitions. I could I could go into the formal uh description and spend two hours on just quality itself, right? So what we have to look at are three components in quality plan, right? Quality assurance. Are we following process and procedure? Right? like in hospital projects, are we are we compliant? Are we protecting the health care information of our our people, right, that go through our hospitals in manufacturing and production? Are we making these things within tolerance, right? Are we making these things within that range of acceptability? That's quality assurance. Is the process working? Quality control on the other hand is looking for defects and finding root causes for defects. And this is where continuous improvement comes in, right? Because we want to not just do this work, we want to plan this work. So when we are actually doing the work of executing and monitoring controlling we have one way to find defects find causes of those defects and also find out are we doing this work the best way because remember at the beginning of the project what did we start with assumptions and constraints. Constraints are these factors we can't change. Assumptions are guesses. And this is where quality helps us. It helps us refine our guesses and get more accurate. Okay? Think about this whole quality activity as an experience of continuous improvement. Right? Collecting lessons learned, going through root causes, finding out exactly what the problem is. It's creating these defects and eliminating them, right? And we're also looking at our quality metrics. This is really important. We have requirements in scope, but in quality, we have quality metrics. Think about a quality metric as a requirement. Like we were talking about that box we're building, right? And that box has to have a hole in the top of it so we can reach in the box without opening the lid. Right? That's a requirement. What makes that a quality metric is how big does it have to be? Well, it needs to be about 13.5 cm. And we can allow a little bit of variation like plus or minus 1 cm. So when we're talking about quality metrics, we're taking a requirement and adding that acceptable variation in. So guess where we're going to keep our quality metrics? That's right, in our requirements list. Now, we're also looking at what type of standards do we have to align with and we're looking at how are we going to manage quality. It's not just the things we're going to do to find defects and fix them, but can we actually put the correct type of work into the plan at the beginning and then make sure we have all of these things laid out? Are we going to have external audits come in to make sure we're following process? Sometimes we have to like in manufacturing and also construction we have to have work safety certificates for all the workers right and that has to be part of the audits. Now the other part of continuous improvement is we're not just fixing process. We're fixing the way people culture. And this is going to be really important when we get into execution because people do tend to work together as a group, but we're not talk about doing this. Would federal or local regulations be part of quality control? That's a good thing. Actually, I would put federal and local regulations as part of quality assurance. Are we following process and procedure? Okay, that's where I would put that. Okay, uh that are we are we actually following laws and regulations as part of quality assurance. Now the next question is what about cost of quality? Yeah, we have to consider that because if we're spending too much money on quality, we have too much audits, right? What's going to happen? We're not going to have budget for the real work. We're going to run out of money quickly. And at the same time, we're not going to have time because all these audits are going to get in the way of creating the deliverable. So cost of quality says we need to invest in quality proactively. You know, things like training and documentation and making sure the team has things done well. If we don't do that, we're going to spend money on bad quality, right? And we want to spend money on good quality instead of bad quality. We want to be more proactive instead of reactive. So cost of quality says we have to look at this and we have to estimate this on all of our projects. Quality and risk are such huge components of managing work and they are some of the greatest values that a project manager can bring. Oh yeah, there a question that we have that I found relevant at this point. Um, so this is in the Q&A box. I'm just going to read that out. Uh, how does project management help in a BO or a KPO sort of operation? Um, and especially in quality line of business since we're talking about quality management. Um I thought I thought you could also give your perspective on how project management helps in the quality line of business. So your organization and corporation may invest a lot in quality themselves, right? And they have a quality organization. Well, that helps me as a project manager because I don't have to do this myself. I can bring in somebody and they love to do that both in planning and also in doing the audits because when you get into real formal quality you're not just talking about you know Tim's going to add training and and you know make sure the team does things right. We're talking about following things like six sigma and ISO 9000901 and ISO 10,000 and all of a sudden you have this formal framework. You can imagine it takes time and money but in some corporations like like imagine making heart monitors, right? Um you can imagine that they have their own quality to make sure that their defects are almost zero. And so these people come in and help you and and this this is why we have to understand the business environment in order to take the best use of the tools around us. But they they are such experts and they do this work all the time. So it's pretty easy as you lay out what your work is and what your product is if you have that right where you can work with these external teams. Sometimes we actually bring people under contract to help us with this too. And this is where procurement comes in. Okay. Yeah. And and that's a big thing too. I I like your statement about a company uh maintains its brand. It's a lot of companies are relied upon because of their level of quality and all of a sudden if your project doesn't meet the corporate expectations you can imagine what your career is going to be like and this is this is really big. Um I I want to put a plug on one thing okay as we move forward in the future in business one of the big things are sustainability. Sustainability means my organization's going to be around because we're doing great work and we're doing meaningful work. My corporation's going to be around because we're doing meaningful work and my environment is around because we're doing meaningful work. Now, each one of us individuals have to define meaningful work for ourselves and we can talk about this here or in other platforms. Um, for example, a brick manufacturing should produce strength and measurements to meet objectives. Exactly. And and again, this is where quality comes in from quality assurance. Are we doing the bricks the way we supposed to? Are we laying the bricks? Are we mixing the concrete? So, even in an informal project, when you're doing this in in in your backyard, you know, you still have to think about quality. Am I mixing that mortar to the best I can do? And can I do better? We we forget that this can I do better is so important. Okay, I see that someone has left a comment about voice not being clear. Uh we will check about that. We've not heard this concern from anyone else, but we will check um regarding the audio. Thank you for pointing that out. Uh Tim, thank you for addressing that question as well. It's just very fascinating to me how um you know the examples and the use cases that we're talking about here in project management is just so um you know um different in terms of the industries and and the domains. So that's just um quite interesting. So yes, I'll move on to the um learning check for this segment and then maybe we can ask our learners if they want um a quick break to probably grab some water, stretch stretch their legs um and so on. So yeah, we will we will do this learning check and then maybe have a quick five minute break if everyone's aligned with that. Yes. Okay. So, so, so let's let's let's get back to quality and risk, right? So, we're building this onboarding portal for our clients, right? We want these clients to log in. They want we want us to register and we want to make sure that they have all the documentation and support they need to be a great client and get what they need to get their work done. So a quality metric would say if I ask for support I should be able to get support within 5 to 7 minutes. The requirement is I need to be able to push a button and get some type of support whether it's a bot or whether it's a human being and that support needs to come back to me within 5 to seven minutes right the requirement is I need some type of a response that tolerance is 5 to seven minutes so putting that requirement and tolerance together is our quality metric. Now risks, we might have a client who misunderstands the instructions and actually partially creates their their login and they miss a couple things and they can't log in again. So if that happens, we need to be prepared for that to work with them either with a set of instructions. We hand over those restrictions and then we actually say um if you need more help, let's contact and work with you directly, humanto human. Okay? So that's a risk. It's a risk with response. And then we're going to have to prioritize those. Like a user accepting a broken login screen. Is this a QA failure or a QC? Okay. Um, a broken login screen could be a defect. It could be, but we need to say, yep, quality control says it's a defect. At the same time we have to say was it a defect in creating that login? Was it a defect in actually leading the person through the login and what was it? So quality assurance and quality control are looking for defects. Quality control plus looking for the root cause and finding what step in the process it was. So a lot of times quality assurance and quality control work hand in hand. Yeah. Technical glitch. It it is a QC failure. Yeah. Given a specific uh give a specific example like a data center project and requirements by stakeholders and how you implemented their requirements. Yeah. Uh and again, Shaheen, it's very difficult to lay these items out in such a way that it meets the needs of of hundreds of people. Um at the same time, it actually creates the whole landscape. And I apologize in advance. Um I'll take that under consideration though. Um and and this is the this is the big de detail and what Shaheen is talking about is you know we're getting into into all of these quality and risk it's driven by these initial understanding of the objectives where we're looking at the scope and we're looking at the scope in such a way we understand the schedule and the resources and the budget and with that we're building the quality and risk. So even though we're doing these all at the same time, they compound on each other. And this compounding is talking about tying things together. And this is a big part of what project managers do. Um so so for first skills should beginners focus. Um I'm going to take that question at a very high level. There are three sets of skills that you're going to look at and then we can go on a break here. Okay. The first skill is understanding your business. Okay. You have to have something what we call business acumen. An understanding of how business works, what your business does and how they go about doing it. Because they have policies and laws and regulations, but they also have culture and politics. Right now, when we talk about culture and politics, all of a sudden we're talking about people. So, you're talking about people skills, emotional intelligence, uh empathy, the ability to influence and motivate individuals and groups. That's another set of skills. And finally, the process skills. Learning about scope, learning about schedule. The project management is a comprehensive thing. It's it's like a mini MBA. Learning to be a project manager is just like a mini MBA. Okay. You know what? You're looking at this. Um I I like your data center. I have another way to look at data centers. Maybe when we get back, we'll actually look at how to put together the scope and schedule of a data center. Okay. And I think we'll use that for the first five or 10 minutes after we get back from break. How's that? We'll work on that. Yeah. Okay. So, if if everyone's aligned, then we will break for exactly 5 minutes. Um Yes. So, please go uh grab some water and maybe refill your coffee and we'll be back in just a few minutes. Okay guys, um I hope everyone is back. I just added this timer to have like a reference um for everyone here. Uh just give us a thumbs up if everyone's back and ready to get started. Um a quick show of hands will be great. Okay, perfect. Amazing. Amazing. Glad to know that like you know almost one and a half hours into the session and we still have the same high energy and engagement which is which is amazing. Um so before I hand it over to the team I have a couple of quick points. Um first is that I see that a lot of people have shared their email ID um in the chat and in the Q&A box as well. Please uh rest assured that we don't require your email ID currently. Uh if you require an attendance certificate or the deck or uh the recording of this workshop, we will be launching an um a poll at the end of the session. So please submit your full name in that poll. We don't require your email ID, just your full name uh and participation will be enough. And uh yes uh just a very very quick reminder that for all of you who do that um in the webinar we will be providing three exclusive resources for all the workshop attendees. You will get um um three playbooks uh which is you know the titles that you can see here. We have a project management interview Q&A guide, a PMT exam prep guide um and as well as a playbook for building the perfect project management portfolio. So please do stay tuned till the end. This is going to be available only in the webinar and not after. Okay. So um we know that you've just absorbed a wealth of knowledge on project initiation, planning, quality management and risk management. Now there's a lot of way to elevate the skills with the power of Genai as well. So in our professional certificate program in project management with GNI which is delivered in partnership with University Outreach, University of Oklahoma, we integrate advanced AI tools at every stage of project management. Um imagine enhancing this whole workflow with AI assisted risk identification, schedule compression and automated status reporting as well. So these tools are designed to transform the work packages into capstone deliverables and you will be working on a lot of cutting edge AI tools as well as projects across different domains. Um but this is just a sneak peek. We have more details coming on the program um at the end of the session. So please do stay tuned and let's keep building your future with these um you know with these certifications and tools. So yeah, back back to you Tim. Thank you so much. over to you to take over. Thank you very much. And um to continue our conversation, I want to talk about two more topics. Okay? And they're continuous of our conversation. Number one, um what do I need to know as a project manager? I said, well, you need to know the business. You need to know about these things about scope, schedule, and budget, and how to put those together and how to bring people together. But you have to understand how to lead, influence and manage work and people both individuals and groups. Now this is going to be important because um you're going to be a coach and mentor and trainer as well. Okay, I want you to think about this. As a project manager, you're going to see gaps in knowledge. the easiest way to do it is step in there and help them things with with things like conflict management, negotiation, and that kind of thing. So, you're going to be studying that. Um, the way you can study this is, you know, through our PMP prep program. Now, I as a lifelong learner have been studying things like artificial intelligence um for about three or four years. I've been playing with the tools and I've been playing with other items and I've been using them in some of my work to understand them. But it's not just how the tools work, but the impact of the tools. Things like, you know, ethics and sustainability that we're all talking about. This is important. That's a component of what you may be wanting to study. The other things I'm I'm studying and I talked about Ana before the webinar today on this um I'm understanding leadership more. I'm an author. I wrote a really interesting book on leadership. Um if you look my name up on Amazon, you can find it. It's it you know and and whether you buy it or not is not important. What's important is that you should realize I think leadership is so important. I spent four years researching and two years working with my co-author building it. This is this is what I believe in how important human behavior is in understanding that. And finally, this whole idea of, you know, this this whole idea of, you know, ethics and character, these things that are old-fashioned that are becoming new fashion now, I think they're going to become more important. Now, I do apologize because we're doing this in three hours where I usually do it in 40 hours, in 8 weeks, and 16 weeks. But at the same time, let me do one other item. Vanjani, I I'm going to stick to podcasting and webcasting. Okay. Um, yeah, that's I that I uh I I think that's enough for me. I'm I'm too intent on getting the knowledge of leading and managing work and leading people. You know that that's that's my focus. But I'm I'm glad that my voice comes across there. Now, I I I want to say one thing. Okay, you brought up a good point. What if I have a complicated project like a data center? Okay, how are this down? Well, when I was doing data center work, I worked with the experts. Okay? I went to Gartner. Gartner is a huge international research facility and they have people who've been studying this. I also worked with people who were advisors to Amazon Web Services and I was working with advisors to Rackspace and those people, right? and I actually consulted with them from a business standpoint when they were working with me from a technological standpoint. So when I look at a data center, I look at it a little differently from everybody else, right? So if I were to design the scope of a data center, I'd go, okay, you got to look at the data, you got to look at the application. So that's one phase. You got to look at the support structure like the network and the servers and the switches and the routers. And then you have to look at things like power and you have to look at heat management and you're going to be moving fluids throughout the building to cool things. And so you have all that infrastructure and then you have to worry about the building that's going to contain those and then you have to worry about things like physical and data security. So we have multiple levels and that is the phase level and you can imagine yeah I'll share the I'll share the title of the book at the end of the of the course. Okay. You can imagine that building these phases it will take weeks if not months to get down to the activity levels of these things and then you have to sequence them and then you have to figure out the resources and the budget. This is why when when we come into a corporation, we say you want a data center, it's going to take two and a half, three years. It's going to take thousands of activities, 500 work packages and we're going to have to work on it for quite a while. And that's why the project charter we said at the beginning the purpose of this is so important because just the planning is going to take the effort of tens 50 90 people if not 200 or 300. This is what real project management is. Now, your project may be just hosting a conference or your project may be moving your office from one building to another. It's just as important. And what we're talking about here is here is that there is a general framework that you can take and apply to any type of work you do. Okay. How can developers use project management skills in real projects? A developer is taking an idea and making it real. It's part of a project because you have to take it and make it real. That's creating the first instance of the physical deliverable, but then you have to use that deliverable and make sure it functions. And all of a sudden we're getting into multiple projects and maintenance is operations there. They there uh we're not moving on the slides yet vani because I'm following up on some questions we talked about earlier. Okay. So let's talk about communications now. Okay. Let's talk about communications. Why is it important? Without information, no work gets done. Without information, nothing gets done. Information is the lifeblood of a project. So, as we're developing our understanding of stakeholders and resources and all these things, we have to figure out who do we have to involve? That's our stakeholders, endusers, clients, right? They're stakeholders too. We have to take into them consideration. What do I need to share with them? How are we doing now? That's our status. What about our risks? What about the decisions we're making? What if our prioritize priorities are changing? And then we have something called a milestone. A milestone is an event in your project where you stop and you make a decision. That's what it is. It's a little diamond on your schedule that says we're going to stop here and we're going to make a decision. So, you can imagine that you need to actually have those discussions and share those with everyone. Cadence. What's cadence? Cadence is the timing. But that's a schedule, isn't it? Well, I have to communicate that because the cadence says we're going to meet every Monday morning and talk about what we're going to do and we're going to meet every Friday afternoon and we're going to talk about what we get done. That sets the timing for the work. And so, we're going to have to communicate that too and be prepared for it and make sure everybody's prepared for that, too. How do we do this? Well, we're getting into methodologies and tools and channels. Are we going to use dashboards? Are we going to use reports? Are we going to use email? All of these have benefits, but they all have weaknesses. And if you don't do it in the way your organization does it, you have to have a really good reason for stepping out. Okay? Like Slack. At my university, we don't use Slack. So, if we're going to use Slack, I have to have a really good reason and everybody has to buy into that reason or it's not going to work. Communication is tricky. It has to do not just with how do we functionally move information, but how do people want to share information? So, it's a negotiation between you and the stakeholders that create good communication. And why do we do this? Prevent surprises. Nobody likes to hear something a day before launch like things are not ready. Right? You don't want to do that. You want to make sure that everybody knows the efforts that we're doing at the beginning are just as important as the efforts at the end. And this is where communications can be very effective. It keeps everybody involved. It keeps everybody focused and it helps everybody understand how their impacts, how their efforts are impacting the project for better or worse. Communications, boy, it's so important. So, how do we do this? Well, we have tools, right? As you're developing your resources, you're going to figure out, okay, how are we going to work with issues? An issue is not a risk. A risk is a future event that might occur. An issue is a risk that's occurred. It is here and now. We have to deal with it. And sometimes an issue is an unplanned event. We didn't plan for the risk. And all of a sudden that risk becomes really important. So we want to look at issues not just risk. And we need to keep an idea of that in our heads and be able to share it with others on a moment's notice. Right? This is where our meetings, this is where our communications helped us, especially when it comes to change. You know how we created that plan? Now, if we're going to change that plan, we have to have a really good justification. So, we're going to have to be able to communicate why these changes must occur. On the right hand side, we have this acronym called Riki, right? Responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed. And in our course, we talk about building a raiki chart where it says, "Okay, I if I want people to do work and do work well, they need to know what their work is." So, I'm going to say, "Okay, here are the activities. Here are the people who are going to do the work, and I'm going to mark them as responsible. And here are the leads. They own the results, right? They're outcome. And they're going to be the sign off people usually. Okay? So, that that talks about the work. But the Reiki chart also talks about communication and the flow of information. Who do I need to ask? They're the consulted ones and they may be team members I can go to. Maybe they're stakeholders or maybe they're industry experts. And then we're going to get into informed. I need to share information with them so they can get their jobs done, whether it's teams or a stakeholder. And you're right, what we're developing here is a Raiki matrix. Here are the people, and I'm naming names. Here are the activities, and here they are. and are they an R, an A, a C, or an I. So when we do go through this, we don't get confused. The worst thing that can happen on a project is confusion. Okay, that's why communication is so important because confusation stalls work, no progress. If you can lay this out and make it very clear, people know what they're supposed to do. And if you can find a better way to do it, you're going to have to communicate that, too. So, we're talking about change management again. So, if you're going to change things, you're going to have to communicate that, too. So, we talked in our first part about laying out all this stuff and now we're starting to talk about how we're going to manage this. Um, we'll talk about phase gates a little bit later. Um um really quickly uh before we move on from this slide, a phase gate is an is an event or a meeting at the beginning or end of a phase that says are we ready to start? Are we ready to end? Are we ready to go to the next phase? Does the Raiki matrix change as a project? Oh yes it can. It can through change control. Uh, Ranjet, if if it if they found a better way to do the work, right? If we're improving quality, it can change or maybe we have to change. Um, so does project management involve who is the team? Um, sometimes we're given the people who are available and we're going to have to coach and mentor and make sure they're ready for their roles. Not not like building a database or that kind of thing, right? Not that type of role. I'm talking about what's their role in the team. How are they going to contribute? How are they interacting? And how are they going to engage? This is the part of of what makes a good project, a fantastic project as a project manager. Okay. Does that help you? And and yeah, is the PM responsible for creating and defining Maybe, maybe not. But I'm going to make sure that you understand one thing. Whether or not they create the document, they need to make sure that there is absolute clarity in what people are assigned to what work and they have what they need to get the work done. Decision gate and the phase gate are actually the same thing. It's just a different term. Does Reiki ensure quality management? Not comprehensively, but it's a component you can imagine, right? It it Yeah, quality management, quality planning can influence your your Raiki chart definitely. Oh, VUA. Okay, let's let's take three minutes here. Okay, Vaua. volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. Okay, this is a big gray cloud. You may not realize it, but we have many big gray clouds in our society today, Agile. In fact, the the framework that I that I belong to, right, the project management institutes project management framework um just acquired the agile alliance. That's how important agile is. And then in fact in the PMP prep material that's half of the work. I'm just talking about projects in general here. And when we get into vaua that the thing is a raiki chart is a communication chart but it actually influences quality. Think about this. Think about this. And this is why we talk about integration so much. Okay? Because a raiki chart talks about communication and who gets what work done. But that's going to make doing work correctly, easier and more effective. Right? So, this is this is the big part and this is what a project manager really does. They may not do all the little pieces of the work, but they're the ones who pull everything together. Think about the orchestra conductor. Think about the captain of a ship. They have to know all the pieces of the work and how they put together and make sure it fits together. On a small project and an informal project, this may not be as critical, but as we get to these huge projects like building a data center and building a cell tower, this gets really critical. What will be an issue? Escalation timeline, escalation matrix. Um, you know what that's important in certain production and manufacturing environments and certain other things especially when you get into hospitals too. It it's important and this is why I said at the beginning you know understanding how your business works. It's it's a component of business in itself the business operations and understanding how that works is going to impact how you design your project. Okay. So, yeah, let's move on. We're in execution. Yay. Right. The the what's what's happening in execution? Two things, right? The team is creating the deliverable and the project manager is collecting the data and ensuring that the team is productive and the stakeholders the interested people are involved. Okay, we're directing and managing project work. Okay, we're managing work. We're authorizing tasks. We're coordinating daily. We're we're looking at things that are blocking work, right? That's an issue. An issue can be something that stops work. Work stoppage is the most critical component that you can look for. Work slowing down is important, too. But work stoppage is the worst kind of issue that you can have. Now we're also communicating and we're involving our stakeholders. So as we talked about planning communication, we're doing communication and make sure that the communication is effective as it can. Now where we manage work, we're leading people. One of the things that we talk about in project management is like what we talk about in agile servant leadership. The very best type of a project manager is somebody who actually makes sure everything is available for people to do the work right. They have the tools. They have the time. They can get the resources they need. They may need training. That's part of leadership, too. And they may not make all the decisions, but they're going to facilitate them. And like I said, one of the one of the important things is we're going to be collecting data. Now, notice we're not analyzing data yet because in execution, that's where the data is created and we're collecting and organizing it. One of the things that we want to think about is issues and risks. A risk once it occurs is now an issue. But like I said, if we didn't identify risks, some issues are unplanned events. So we need to keep an issue log and a risk register. And you can imagine that a risk that occurs and you respond to it over it goes to the issue log and then it can close. So we're going to have this cycle of information not just going between people but actually between documents because documents are containers of information. They keep us organized. They keep the information clear and they keep this understanding of where we are right now in a way that everybody can agree. Okay. let's look at communication and execution for our client portal that we're building in. Right? We're creating an onboarding portal and we're we're saying, you know, here's the scope. Here's the schedule. We're getting it built. What's a Reiki? Okay, user interface. Who's going to lead it? Well, probably the user interface lead, right? one of one of the team members who's really good and has done this 20 times is going to be leading other people who can do pieces and maybe in future projects they'll become leads too. So those are my Rs and my A's. Who do I need to communicate this with? Well, I'm probably going to use a couple clients and so I want to be able to ask them, is that what you want? We're going to have little pilots and demonstrations of us interfaces for them to look at. So, they're going to be consulted and maybe, you know, finance needs to be informed because they want to know when they need to release funds for parts of the work. So, all of a sudden, we're building our Reiki for our communication that we're going to be using in execution. and the communication plan. Who are we going to need to be talking to? Like I said, who do we need to talk to on Monday morning? Who do we need to talk to on Friday afternoon? It may not be Monday, Friday. It may be every two weeks or every four weeks, but what is the cadence? Are we going to do it over Zoom? Are we going to do it over email? Are we going to do it over a cup of coffee in the cafeteria? What does it look like? Okay. What does our communication look like? An issue arises and the development team is blocked by a missing API. Okay. So, how am I going to do this on the issue log? I'm going to say missing API impact high work stoppage for the development team. Who am I going to assign this to? probably the accountable who has the relationship with the vendor and that may be me. It may be purchasing. It may be one of the development teams experts who actually has that relationship and I'll assign that issue to them and I'll check with them. And if it's work stoppage, I'm going to be checking with them a couple times a day, aren't I? So, is this a risk or an issue? Well, is this a current event or a future event? This is current. So, it's an issue. Goes up to the top, right? And we say, okay, let's going to do it. And like I said, this is why in in my communications, I'm going to change it for whoever this issue is assigned to. and say, "What can we do? What can we do? What can we do?" I'm not bugging them because if I bug them, I'm going to get in their way, but I'm going to make sure they have what they need to solve this in the most efficient manner. Wow. Okay. So, we're doing executing, right? We're managing the work. We're supporting the team. We're engaging the stakeholders. We're collecting data over here on a parallel path. We're monitoring, controlling, we're taking that data, turning it into information, and also being able to forecast on. How do I forecast? Well, I don't want to just forecast, can I? Right? We have data. We have to organize that data to create information. What do I mean? Data says we spent $4,000 last week, right? Is that good or bad? I don't know. How much work did we get out of that $4,000? Information says we're now a week behind because we didn't spend $4,000. We're now behind work. And that's status. So monitoring controlling is turning data information. It's also changing progress to status. And if we understand progress to status, we can estimate or forecast. What this does for the end of the project and future activities. Because remember our critical path if any activity along that critical path is delayed all the others get delayed including the end of the project. So we're looking at plan value. This is the plan that we put together right this is the work and the money behind it. This is what we started with. We also call it a baseline. And then we have the earned value. What is the work we have completed compared to our plan? Plan value to earn value. Are we ahead or behind schedule? And then what's the actual money we spent? So if we have our plan up here, our actuals are the earned value, the actual work, and the actual cost. And so we're going to be looking at not just are we ahead or behind schedule. That's our schedule variance. But we also look at how much work did we get done for the money we spent. Are we overbudget? Right? Did we spend too much money for the work we got done? Now you can imagine if you're not spending money in the right way, you can't get your work done. But if you're not getting work done, it's going to impact the way you're scheduling money. So this earned value looks at both your budget and your schedule together because why? Because num we're our quality is not just in creating the deliverable. Our quality is also in managing the project. So we're going to do root cause analysis. Is this a budget problem? Is this a schedule problem? Do we have a lack of skills? Do we need to get some training in there? What do we need to do? Right? So, our quality planning is not just for creating the deliverable. It's also for managing the work. But we don't just stop there because we don't just want to look at status. We want to look at forecasting schedule performance index. Right? What's that? That's looking at velocity, how quickly we're getting work done. And you can actually see velocity in the work slowing down more and more and more. You know, you can also look at budget. Are we spending money? Spending money is not just oops, it happened on Thursday. If you look at spending money, it's a habit inside of a project. And you can actually say we've spent money in this manner. You know, we were just spending money like crazy. You can imagine that's going to give you one type of a forecast and all of a sudden we're misers on another project and we're not spending money and that's going to be a forecast on another thing. and spending a lot of money and not spending enough money are are both negative impacts on a project that a project manager can capture, organize, and understand. Not just to fix a problem, but to make sure that everybody is not surprised at the progress and the results of a project. See how communication is part of earned value. We have status reports, right? What happened and where we are. We have forecast reports, right? What's our revised budget at the end of the project based on how we're spending money today. We can actually figure this out with this type of math. What's the difference? See, variance is really important because that's how I figured out we're ahead or behind schedule or we're over or under budget. Now, all of these things can be wrapped up in a dashboard. And this is what's really powerful. If you can give everybody a screenshot of our budget position, our schedule provision, our milestones, our changes, our issues, risks, and the objective in one screenshot. You can imagine how organized and how focused your communication can be. Number one, it's a great agenda topic for a project. Number two, it allows us all to agree where we are on this project and what changes need to be made to make it successful. Let's talk about change control. We talked about change management. What's the difference between change management and change control first of all? Okay. Can I show any created dashboard for example? Um I wish I could. We we don't have time today. Um I I wish I could in future events. I'll add a snapshot because I create a dashboard for all of my PMP prep classes. Right? We we use earned value to manage our PMP prep classes. Isn't that interesting? Now when when I talk about change management, change management says how do I prepare the people and the organization and the teams and the stakeholders for change. It's not just, you know, building a a cell tower or building a data center or something like that. It's not just that because it's going to change the way people do work. And so change management is preparing the people in their mindset as well as that. Right? When I get to change control, now we're talking about changes, good changes or what we call necessary changes, right? Laws and regulations change. You're going to have to change your plan. Right? Maybe a lockdown occurs. All of a sudden, we have another version of CO and it's even worse this time. What are we going to do? You know, this is something that we had to contend with in 2019 2020 and your project in the future may have other impacts too. Okay. So what are we going to do in our change control and this needs to be laid out and it needs to be communicated. How do we identify the changes? Probably two or three ways through change requests through necessary changes and through other change vehicles. Right? There's a lot of directions we get change from and then we have to lay them out and understand the impact right what does it impact what level of impact does it occur because a change may be an issue and then we may have a change control board. Does every project have a change control board? No. You may just have the team and the project manager agree. Right? These are the people who assess the changes and then determine the dispensation. Is that approved, rejected, or deferred? But on critical projects like like I'm talking about with cell towers and data centers, guess what? You're going to have a bunch of really deep experts that are there only to help you to make these critical changes. and they're going to be helping you with that analysis and the dispensation and and that's what a decision is. It's it's what we call dispensation approved where you update the baselines, right? Rejected where you're going to say no this is not a necessary change and this is why. And then finally deferred not today doesn't mean it's not a good change. It means that it's not relevant to today. Okay? And this is where we update the baselines. This is where we communicate and this is where we hand back that decision and any changes back into execution for the team to apply. Okay. Oh, good question. Before we go into the learning check, I'm going to answer one question. What about agile? Agile does it all the time. See the thing is…

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