Okay, So What’s the Plan?

The course has six modules which are further divided into chapters.

Module 1 has three chapters – 1.1 through 1.3.  Chapter 1.1 explains the basic principles behind project shortening and explores why people haven’t looked at this problem previously.

While you can certainly go through the course from start to finish – and would get benefit from doing that – a far better way to use it would be to look at your own situation, decide what you want to do and then use that part of the course which solves your particular issue.  (I take as my starting point that you’re like the rest of us – that you’ve got far more to do than you’ll ever have time to do it – so you don’t want to spend too much time messing around with this course.)  That’s why there’s Chapter 1.2.  It identifies eleven situations you might find yourself in and tells you how to apply the tools of this course in that particular situation.

Chapter 1.3 is called ‘The Starter’ and is there to whet your appetite for the rest of the course.  It describes an incredibly simple and outrageously versatile tool called the Probability of Success Indicator (PSI) and shows the extraordinary uses this tool can be put to.  More generally, the aim of chapter 1.3 is to show you that when you start to think of a problem from a new point of view, many interesting and useful things can result – which indeed could be a summing-up of the rest of the course.

Module 2 describes three basic shortening techniques in chapter 2.1.  Don’t be misled by the word ‘basic’.  You could achieve significant shortening with these techniques even if you never went any further.  Chapter 2.2 gives you five techniques for running your project with minimum effort.

Module 3 tells you how to scope and plan a project – even a very large one – in a day.  When you consider how much time can be wasted trying to get a project off the ground, this technique can enable you to achieve undreamt of time saving.

If you want to shorten your project as much as possible as quickly as possible Module 4 tells you how to do that.  It applies techniques proven to work in other industries to our kinds of projects.

Module 5 describes nine further ways you can look for opportunities to shorten a project once it is underway.

Module 6 is intended for anybody running a project delivery organisation i.e. running more than one project from a fixed pool of resources.  It has three chapters.  The first talks about how most organisations are run and the weaknesses in that approach.  The two remaining chapters show how these weaknesses can be overcome.  By stopping one thing (multitasking) and by doing another (capacity planning), the organisation as a whole can deliver many more projects without increasing resources.