(187a) Introduction to Project Management Fundamentals

This presentation introduces the fundamentals of project management.  It will be especially useful for new engineers, young professionals, and advanced students, as well as anyone who serves or will served on project teams or leads those teams.  We will discuss the importance of people, the importance of setting excellent project objectives, and the importance of good planning.  Working with people is perhaps the most difficult.  Suggestions will be given on how to better communicate and better achieve unity with project team members.  We will discuss the real meaning of the word "Communication" and how that meaning can change the whole approach we take to interacting with people in a productive way.  Important ideas and tools for developing excellent project objectives will be presented, including the use of SMART objectives, the triple constraints, and tolerance diagrams.  An outline of the project planning process will be reviewed.  This planning process includes the use of work breakdown structures, network diagrams, and Gantt charts, as well as resouce histograms.  Also, we will briefly discuss doing fatal-flaw analysis.