IT Project Management in the Public Sector

Course Overview:

IT project management is notoriously difficult due to the rapid increase in possible IT solutions leading to users and other stakeholders often only coming to realize that what they require is not what they initially requested! In many cases, solid predictive project management with rigorous change controls has been used to tackle this issue - sometimes successfully but not always! As the world becomes increasingly complex and IT demands become more diverse, another more agile project management approach has proven to be more effective in meeting stakeholders’ needs.

Course Objectives:

At the end of this course, the participants will be able to:

Understand when to use different project lifecycles for different IT projects
Reflect on the importance of enabling effective collaboration in IT projects
Perform core practices used in both predictive and agile IT management approaches
Recognize and tackle common issues that can occur in IT project management
Control IT project progress and report status appropriately

Course Coverage:

Topic 1: Nature of IT Projects:

Characteristics of projects
Fundamental concepts of project management
IT project lifecycle - core phases performed in IT projects
IT Product Management
Key IT Project Considerations - Globally Distributed Teams
IT project initiation - establishing the project charter

Topic 2: Scope - IT Requirements:

Requirements Engineering
Stakeholder management
Requirements elicitation
Quality factors in requirements engineering
Key roles: Product Manager - Product Owner - Business Analyst
Managing emergent requirements

Topic 3: Detailed Planning:

Software Engineering Methods
Work Breakdown Structures
Building the project schedule - critical path management
Establishing the release plan
Key roles: Technical Architect, Designer, Developer Quality Assurance Specialist (QA)
IT Project Quality Management - planning, executing and controlling quality
Developing the Quality Assurance Plan (QA plan)

Topic 4: Managing Project Execution:

Understanding IT Project Costs
Software engineering teamwork - developing and managing the team
Managing uncertainty - addressing risks
The challenges of using Waterfall (predictive project management)
Agile Software Development - values and Principles
Adaptive (Agile) Project Management (SCRUM)

Topic 5: Controlling & Closing IT Projects:

Preparing the progress report - the traditional approach
Progress dashboards using Earned Value Management
Controlling value generation using Scrum (Agile) - Reviews
Measuring Success - requirements traceability matrix
Measuring Success - confirming value generation
Continuous improvement - Lessons Learned & Retrospectives

Targeted Groups:

IT Directors considering digital transformation
IT project managers
Business analysts, programmers, quality assurance specialists
Other technical specialists involved in IT projects
Stakeholders in organizations who influence IT projects