Project Planning and Management

This is a practical case study intended to provide practice in key project planning and management approaches. Allow around three hours for completion.

A case study set around a charitable fundraiser exploring project management issues, in particular the problems caused by poor planning and personality clashes. Allow just over an hour for completion.

A useful checklist for those involved in project planning.

This diagnostic can be used with project managers to analyse their skills in planning and initiating projects, and to identify improvements that they could make to ensure that their projects get off to a good start. Allow 40 minutes for completion.

This brief diagnostic is designed to help a project team identify areas of their project which have been left open to risk. Allow 50 minutes for completion.

This quick icebreaker exercise is intended to get participants thinking about the success or failure of projects. Allow 25 minutes for completion.

A project planning tool used for estimating the total time needed to complete the various tasks and identifying the critical tasks which must be completed in time. Allow 1½ hours for completion and discussion.

This project planning tool is a graphical way of showing how tasks are interrelated; which come first and which can be happening at the same time. It should take about 40 minutes to complete.

Group exercise to assess stakeholder significance and to plan how to influence major stakeholders of the project. It will take around four hours to complete.

Decision trees are decision-making tools, whereby different outcomes are valued in order to decide the course of action to take. A decision tree for a relatively simple decision should take approximately 30 minutes. More time should be allowed for more complex decisions.

A project planning tool ideal for project teams brainstorming the tasks required in a project and organising them in sequence. Allow 1 hour 5 minutes.

This exercise, to be carried out with key stakeholders, will help you to identify all the potential risks to your project. It should take two hours to complete.

This exercise encourages your team to use fishbone analysis to brainstorm a problem or issue, identify its root causes and formulate a solution. Allow just over one hour for completion.

A paired exercise where a project planning tool can be applied to a real life project. Allow 30 minutes for completion.

Criticial Path Analysis is a useful project management technique to keep a project on schedule.

A Gantt chart is one of the most commonly used project planning tools. It is a very effective time management tool as it allows you to have a complete picture of a project, and the time it will take to complete it.

This article will help you to understand and use the Network Diagram, a useful project planning tool.

A short article outlining Work Breakdown Structure, a popular project planning tool.

Risks are events that could potentially threaten a project’s integrity. It is important to identify potential risks early on and derive a plan of action for managing each one. Here we provide templates to help you record and monitor risks.

A project scope document captures key project information, and provides a general overview of the project’s objective and deliverables. This template can be used to create your own project scope document.

A template to help you successfully plan and initiate a small project.