The document provides an overview of key concepts in project management, emphasizing the importance of progressive elaboration in planning and the necessity of treating the project plan as a living document. It highlights common project challenges, the need for risk identification and mitigation, and the benefits of involving the team in the planning process. Additionally, it suggests tools for project diagnosis, such as assessing budget burn rates and using frameworks like Six Sigma FMEA for risk assessment.

1. Key Concepts of Project Management
 Brief overview using easy to understand analogies
Compiled By: Jaiveer Singh, PMP

2. Project Feasibility - Illusion or Reality

3. Scheduling is Modeling

4. Progressive Elaboration
– Moving From the Unknown to the Known
Progressive elaboration, is defined by PMBOK*as
“continuously improving and detailing a plan as more detailed and specific
information and more accurate estimates become available as the project
progresses, and thereby producing more accurate and complete plans that result
from the successive iterations of the planning process”.

5. Understand Project Landscape

6. Identify Project Hidden Challenges
The Tip of the Ice Berg

7. Few Common Project Challenges

8. Panoramic Project Planning
How many times have you heard about
looking at the “big picture”?
Taking in the full panorama of the landscape during a project planning phase
could not only help you plan a better project, but it could flush out some key
details that could be lurking just off camera, especially the ones that may not
have hit you until just before “Go Live”.
8

9. Understand Project Activities Network

10. The Living Project Schedule
• Project planning
isn’t just an activity
for the start of the
project--the project
plan must be a
living, evolving
document that is
updated and
changed on a
regular basis.
10

11. Project Planning for Beginners
• The good project
manager
involves their
team in project
planning...the
great one
teaches them
how.
11

12. Identify & Mitigate Risks
• Hidden traps often come
from surprising sources,
resulting in project
delays or funding
shortfalls. It is critical to
identify all the risks up
front, establish
mitigation strategies and
allocate ample time and
budget to overcome any
hurdles. How? Through
effective planning, of
course!
12

13. Project Diagnosis
Pulse check: Assess the burn rate. Are you eating up budget faster than
you anticipated? What is the new estimated total cost?
Blood pressure: Perform a risk assessment, in terms of what could
happen between now and the go live date to cause a significant incident.
Various frameworks exist for this assessment. The Six Sigma FMEA (Failure
Mode and Effect Analysis) template can be modified to suit your needs here,
giving you an objective framework for assessing all possible places where
your solution could fail, and steering your future corrective actions toward
those that have both the highest likelihood of occurrence and greatest
criticality.
Temperature: Create a heat sheet (red yellow green) with respect to key
milestones. This should be part of your regular status report, along with some
basic trending.
13

14. Compiled by:
A practitioner of Analytics, Productivity,
Information Modelling, Enterprise
ProjectProgramPortfolio Management &
Execution Management.
Jaiveer Singh, PMP
Project Management Trainer focusing
on MS Excel, MS Project and MS EPM
product to improve productivity of
management community. @ singhjaiveer
Working as Project/Program & Portfolio
manager for large IT projects http://www.slideshare.net/Jaiveer
www.singhjaiveer.blogspot.com
www.project-management-practice.blogspot.com