IT Project Management

Plan, run and report on a software delivery project without a senior manager supervising every decision, from charter to retrospective.

6 Weeks4 Sessions/WeekIn PersonBeginner-friendly

ScrumRisk ManagementStatus Reporting

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Overview Curriculum Capstone Assessment Enquire

What you'll be able to do

Graduates can plan, run and report on a software delivery project without a senior manager supervising each decision.

Write a project charter, scope statement and requirements document that engineers can build from
Break work into estimable items, sequence it and produce a defensible plan
Run Scrum and Kanban correctly, including all ceremonies and artifacts
Maintain a prioritised backlog and defend the ranking with evidence
Track progress with velocity, burndown, cycle time and flow metrics
Identify, quantify and mitigate risk, and manage change without silent scope growth
Manage stakeholders and client communication, including bad news
Plan a release, coordinate a deployment and run a retrospective that produces action
Report status to a sponsor in a form that supports a decision

Certification Positioning

Certification alignment with Professional Scrum Master and PMP terminology is covered without being the course structure.

Who it's for

Developers, QA engineers and designers moving into coordination and delivery roles
Business analysts, operations staff and account managers working with software teams
Junior project coordinators wanting formal structure
Founders and team leads running delivery without training

Prerequisites

Working familiarity with how software is built, from either a technical or a client-facing seat
No coding required, though students must be willing to read a backlog and a release plan

All students complete the two-session Engineering Onboarding module, since a project manager who cannot navigate a repository, an issue board and a pull request cannot verify what a team reports.

Tools and technologies

JiraGitHub ProjectsConfluence or NotionSlackGoogle Sheets for tracking and forecastingMiro for workshopsFigma for reading design handoffGit and GitHub for verifying deliveryGantt and roadmap tooling

Target roles

Project CoordinatorAssociate Project ManagerScrum MasterDelivery CoordinatorBusiness Analyst with delivery responsibilityTechnical Project Manager

Course curriculum

6 modules · 6 weeks

Concepts: what a project manager owns and what belongs to product, engineering and QA; project manager, product owner, Scrum master, delivery manager and business analyst as distinct roles, and how they overlap in small teams; the software delivery lifecycle; predictive, iterative, agile and hybrid models, and how to choose; why software projects fail, taught through documented cases; the triple constraint of scope, time and cost, and quality as the fourth; fixed-price against time-and-materials against retainer engagements, and how the contract shapes the plan; working with outsourced and distributed teams across time zones; project governance and reporting lines.
Lab: analyse three failed project case studies and identify the decision point at which each became unrecoverable; map the roles and decision rights for a given team structure; classify five engagement scenarios by the delivery model that suits them, with justification.
Project: a stated engagement context that the student will plan and run for the remainder of the course.

Concepts: stakeholder identification and analysis by influence and interest; running a kickoff meeting; the project charter; business case and success criteria; requirements elicitation through interviews, workshops and document analysis; functional and non-functional requirements, and why the second set is usually missed; user stories, acceptance criteria and the definition of ready; epics, features and tasks; use cases and process mapping; the requirements traceability matrix; scope statement and the out-of-scope list as the most valuable document in the file; assumptions, constraints and dependencies; change control and the mechanics of scope creep.
Lab: run a requirements elicitation session as a role-play with a deliberately vague client, then convert the transcript into user stories with acceptance criteria; write the out-of-scope list and defend each exclusion; process a mid-project change request through a formal change control decision.
Project: project charter, scope statement and a requirements document with a traceability matrix.

Concepts: why estimates are wrong and how to be wrong usefully; work breakdown structure; story points against hours, and relative estimation; planning poker and three-point estimation; velocity and capacity planning; buffers, contingency and the cost of padding; the critical path and dependency sequencing; milestones and release planning; the Gantt chart and its correct use; roadmaps against plans against commitments; resource allocation, utilisation and the effect of context switching; onboarding cost of adding people to a late project; budgeting, cost tracking and burn rate; procurement and vendor management.
Lab: build a work breakdown structure from the Module 2 requirements; run a planning poker session on the same backlog and compare estimates across the group; identify the critical path and simulate the effect of a two-week delay on one dependency; build a budget and a burn-rate forecast in a spreadsheet.
Project: Mini-project 1: a complete project plan covering work breakdown, estimates, sequence, milestones, resource plan and budget.

Concepts: Scrum covering roles, sprint planning, daily standup, sprint review, retrospective, the product and sprint backlogs, the definition of done, and the failure modes of each ceremony; Kanban covering visualised flow, work-in-progress limits, pull systems and continuous delivery; choosing between them; Scrumban and hybrid practice; backlog refinement and prioritisation through RICE, impact against effort, MoSCoW and weighted shortest job first; sprint goals; handling mid-sprint interruption; blockers and escalation; running effective meetings, and which meetings to cancel; asynchronous communication for distributed teams; documenting decisions.
Lab: run a full sprint cycle on a live backlog with every ceremony facilitated by a rotating student; facilitate a standup that has degraded into a status report and correct it; run a retrospective that produces owned, dated actions rather than complaints; configure a Jira board with workflow states, work-in-progress limits and automation.
Project: two sprints executed on the project backlog, with all ceremony records and a maintained board.

Concepts: progress tracking through burndown and burnup charts, velocity trend, cumulative flow, cycle time and lead time; forecasting completion from historical data rather than optimism; earned value basics; the metrics that mislead, including hours logged and lines of code; risk identification, the risk register, probability and impact scoring, response strategies of avoid, mitigate, transfer and accept, and risk review cadence; issue management and escalation paths; dependency and third-party risk; quality management covering the QA relationship, entry and exit criteria, defect triage, severity against priority, and the release readiness decision; technical debt as a tracked, costed item; security and compliance obligations in a delivery plan; documentation standards.
Lab: build and score a risk register for the project, then run a mitigation planning session on the top three; forecast a completion date from three sprints of velocity data and state the confidence range; run a defect triage meeting with competing priorities and a fixed release date; make and document a go or no-go release decision.
Project: Mini-project 2: risk register, tracking dashboard and a release readiness assessment.

Concepts: stakeholder communication planning; status reporting that supports a decision rather than describing activity; the executive summary; presenting to a sponsor; delivering bad news, including slippage, budget overrun and a failed release; negotiating scope against deadline; managing a difficult client and a difficult team member; conflict resolution; team motivation, workload and burnout; release and deployment coordination with engineering; go-live planning, rollback criteria and hypercare; handover and closure; the project post-mortem and the lessons register; contract closure and final invoicing; the career path across delivery manager, programme manager and product roles, with certification options.
Lab: write and present a status report for a project that is two weeks late and over budget, to a panel role-playing an unhappy sponsor; negotiate a scope reduction under a fixed deadline; run a go-live coordination walkthrough with a rollback plan; conduct the project post-mortem.

Capstone project

A complete delivery file for a realistic software project, run across the full six weeks. Where cohort calendars allow, the project manages the Full-Stack cohort's capstone work, which gives the student a real team, a real backlog and real slippage to manage.

Requirements

Project charter with business case and success criteria
Requirements document with acceptance criteria and a traceability matrix
Scope statement including an explicit out-of-scope list
Work breakdown structure, estimates and a sequenced plan with milestones
Budget and burn-rate tracking
A maintained board showing at least two completed sprints with all ceremony records
Tracking dashboard with velocity, burndown and cycle time
Risk register with scored risks and mitigation plans
At least one processed change request with its impact assessment
Defect triage record and a documented release readiness decision
Three status reports written for a sponsor
Retrospective and post-mortem records with owned actions
A ten-minute delivery review presentation followed by stakeholder questioning

Assessment

25%Weekly workshops and mini-projects

20%Facilitation of live ceremonies, assessed on a rubric

35%Capstone delivery file

20%Status reporting and the final delivery review under questioning

Facilitation is assessed directly. A project manager who cannot run a standup, a refinement session or a difficult client conversation has not completed the course, regardless of the quality of their documentation.

Out of scope

Programme and portfolio management
PMP examination preparation as the course structure
Formal earned value management beyond basics
Procurement law, and people management responsibilities such as hiring and performance review