Few things frustrate a project sponsor more than a schedule that keeps slipping and a budget that keeps growing — often for reasons nobody flagged early enough. The gap is rarely bad planning; it is usually the absence of a disciplined monitoring and control system that turns a plan into a living, trackable commitment.

This program from the Arab British Fellowship Training Academy closes that gap. It combines internationally recognised planning techniques — scope definition, work breakdown structures, scheduling logic — with the monitoring tools that keep a project honest along the way, from Earned Value Management to structured change control. Participants finish with a repeatable framework for planning projects that can actually be tracked, not just plans that look good on paper.

Who Should Attend?

• Project managers and coordinators responsible for planning and execution.
• Planning engineers and project monitoring specialists.
• Team leaders and department heads working on cross-functional projects.
• Anyone preparing for a role in project management or a PMO.

Course Objectives

By the end of the course, participants will be able to:

• Apply the principles of effective project planning from scope to schedule.
• Build organised schedules, budgets, and resource plans.
• Track performance and deviations using recognised monitoring techniques.
• Spot risks early and apply corrective and preventive actions.
• Use integrated planning and monitoring to deliver projects on time and within budget.

Module 1: From Idea to Baseline — Scope, Objectives, and Work Breakdown

• Setting a clear, agreed project scope and SMART objectives.
• Building a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) and breaking it into manageable components.
• Aligning the WBS with time and cost estimates.

Module 2: Scheduling and Resourcing the Plan

• Activity sequencing, dependencies, and the Critical Path Method.
• Milestone planning and managing float.
• Identifying, allocating, and levelling project resources.

Module 3: Building the Budget Baseline

• Estimating labour, material, and equipment costs.
• Establishing baseline budgets for monitoring.
• Integrating schedule and cost into one unified baseline.

Module 4: Monitoring Systems and Progress Measurement

• The role of monitoring in project success and its main types.
• Setting up systems to track scope, schedule, cost, and quality.
• Tracking actual performance against the plan and defining KPIs.

Module 5: Earned Value Management in Practice

• Core EVM concepts: Earned Value, Planned Value, Actual Cost.
• Calculating schedule and cost variances.
• Using EVM indicators to assess overall project health.

Module 6: Forecasting and Controlling Schedule and Cost

• Analysing delays and forecasting completion dates.
• Controlling expenditure and predicting financial performance.
• Adjusting plans based on current performance.

Module 7: Managing Risk and Change Without Losing the Baseline

• Identifying planning-related risks and integrating responses.
• Understanding the change management framework.
• Assessing and implementing approved changes.

Module 8: Communication, Closure, and Lessons Learned

• Aligning planning and monitoring functions and coordinating stakeholders.
• Completing monitoring activities and closing work packages.
• Documenting lessons learned and archiving records for future projects.