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Business & MarketingBeginner

Project Management Fundamentals

Scope, schedule, risk and stakeholders — run your first project well.

Taught by Binod Acharya · PMP, Program Manager

What you'll learn

  • Explain the five project lifecycle stages and choose between predictive, agile and hybrid approaches
  • Write a one-page project charter with objectives, scope boundaries, success criteria and named stakeholders
  • Decompose scope into a work breakdown structure that follows the 100 percent rule
  • Build a dependency-based schedule, estimate with three-point estimates and identify the critical path
  • Maintain a risk register with probability, impact, an owner and a planned response for every major risk
  • Run status reporting, change control and a lessons-learned review that closes a project cleanly

About this course

Every job now involves projects, whether you are launching a product, moving an office or rolling out new software, and the people who can run one well get trusted with bigger work. This free project management course is for beginners: new coordinators, team leads, founders and anyone who has been handed a deadline and a team without training. You will learn the project lifecycle, write a one-page project charter, break scope into a work breakdown structure, build a realistic schedule with a critical path, keep a risk register, and send status reports that stakeholders actually read. Examples use simple spreadsheet and plain-text templates, so you can follow along with free tools and no budget. There are no prerequisites beyond basic spreadsheet skills. By the end you will have a complete plan for a real project of your own and a clear next step towards CAPM or PMP study.

Course content

7 lessons
  1. 1What a Project Is and Why Projects FailProjects versus operations, the triple constraint, the lifecycle and the common ways projects go wrong.Preview
  2. 2The Project Charter and Your StakeholdersWrite a one-page charter and map the people who can make or break the project.
  3. 3Scope and the Work Breakdown StructureTurn a scope statement into a work breakdown structure and defend it against creep.
  4. 4Building a Realistic ScheduleSequence work packages, estimate honestly and find the critical path before promising a date.
  5. 5Budget, Resources and RiskEstimate cost with contingency, assign people realistically and keep a risk register that gets used.
  6. 6Running the Project: Communication, Status and ProgressSet a communication rhythm, report honestly with RAG status and measure progress with earned value.
  7. 7Closing the Project and Learning From ItGet formal acceptance, hand over cleanly, release the team and run a review that changes behaviour.