Planning and Scheduling

A project without a plan is a wish. Before anyone pours concrete, books a venue or installs a server, someone has to work out what needs to be done, how long each part will take, what must happen first and whether it can all be finished by the deadline. Project coordinators do much of this planning work: building task lists, collecting estimates, drawing Gantt charts and keeping the schedule up to date when things change. This course teaches you to define the scope, break the work into a work breakdown structure, estimate durations and resources, identify dependencies and the critical path, read and draw a simple Gantt chart, plan backwards from a deadline and re-plan when things change. Examples come from construction, events, IT and mining in South Africa. The course is fully online and self-paced. Each lesson has a short activity in your workbook. You finish with a practical planning task and a final assessment, and you receive a MetaCo Certificate of Completion that you can add to your CV.