Advanced Practice Track¶
At a glance
- Track: Part VI — Advanced Practice (extension, beyond the 32-session course)
- Level: Advanced
- Estimated time: ~12–16 hours of study, plus the exercises
- Prerequisites: Modules 01 through 12
- Assumes: You can produce a charter, WBS, schedule, estimate, risk register, quality plan, and status report without help
Overview¶
The core course teaches you to manage one project. This track goes after the situations that make that inadequate: a portfolio of projects competing for the same people, a governance body that cannot decide fast enough, an external supplier whose interests are not yours, a product whose accumulated shortcuts now limit what you can deliver, and an organisation that never learns from any of it.
These are the topics practising project and delivery managers spend most of their time on, and they are the ones where confident-sounding advice is least reliable. Every lesson in this track therefore does three things: explains the concept, states where it stops being useful, and names the choices that depend entirely on context — organisation size, regulatory exposure, product maturity, and how much freedom you actually have.
This is an extension, not a requirement
Nothing in this track is needed to complete the capstone or to follow the 16-week course. It is for readers who have finished the core material, or who are already managing software projects and want the harder half of the subject. The core course deliberately stays on single-project practice because that is what can be taught with confidence and assessed objectively.
What this track is not¶
- It is not a certification syllabus. It does not follow any one framework's structure or vocabulary.
- It is not a set of prescriptions. Where a technique is widely used and widely misused, both are stated.
- It is not a substitute for experience. Several lessons describe situations whose correct response is a judgement call; the lesson gives you the options and the questions, not the answer for your organisation.
The advanced topics, and where each is covered¶
| # | Topic | Lesson |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Project governance | 1 |
| 2 | Portfolio and programme context | 2 |
| 3 | Complex stakeholder environments | 3 |
| 4 | Project prioritisation | 2 |
| 5 | Advanced risk management | 4 |
| 6 | Schedule and cost trade-offs | 5 |
| 7 | Project recovery and corrective actions | 6 |
| 8 | Quality and delivery metrics | 7 |
| 9 | Change control | 1 |
| 10 | Distributed software teams | 8 |
| 11 | Vendor and procurement considerations | 8 |
| 12 | Ethical project management | 8 |
| 13 | Technical debt and delivery trade-offs | 5 |
| 14 | Agile scaling considerations | 7 |
| 15 | Project closure and organisational learning | 8 |
Several topics appear once because the core course already covers their fundamentals: procurement in Module 12 Lesson 1, distributed teams in Lesson 3, ethics in Lesson 4, and closure in Lesson 2. Lesson 8 approaches them from outside a single organisation, which is the part the core lessons do not attempt.
Learning outcomes¶
By the end of this track you should be able to:
- Define decision rights that let a project move without waiting for a committee, and say what must still escalate.
- Place a project in its portfolio context and explain why prioritisation is a capacity decision rather than a value judgement.
- Diagnose a stakeholder environment in which the difficulty is disagreement between stakeholders rather than resistance to the project.
- Manage correlated risks, aggregate exposure, and the risks created by your own responses.
- Cost a schedule trade-off, including the part that does not appear on the invoice, and reason about accumulating technical debt as a deliberate borrowing decision.
- Run a recovery — triage, options, re-baselining — and recognise when stopping is the better answer.
- Choose delivery measures that inform decisions rather than flatter them, and reason about when scaling a delivery model helps and when it only adds coordination cost.
- Critically assess the cross-organisational and cross-jurisdictional situations where your authority, your obligations, and the supplier's incentives do not align.
Lesson plan¶
| # | Lesson | Topics | Estimated time |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Governance and Decision Rights | 1, 9 | 90 min |
| 02 | Portfolio, Programme, and Prioritisation | 2, 4 | 90 min |
| 03 | Complex Stakeholder Environments | 3 | 75 min |
| 04 | Advanced Risk Management | 5 | 90 min |
| 05 | Schedule, Cost, and Debt Trade-offs | 6, 13 | 90 min |
| 06 | Project Recovery and Corrective Action | 7 | 90 min |
| 07 | Delivery Metrics and Scaling | 8, 14 | 90 min |
| 08 | Cross-Organisational and Jurisdictional Practice | 10, 11, 12, 15 | 105 min |
How to study this track¶
- Read the lesson and its limitations section before its technique section, on a second pass. The limitation is usually the part that tells you whether the technique applies to you.
- Do the practical activity. These lessons have no labs behind them, so the activity is the only practice you will get.
- Reuse your capstone artefacts. Each lesson's activity asks you to look at your own project or capstone rather than a fresh scenario, because the point of these topics is the interaction between things you have already planned.
- Where a lesson gives options rather than a recommendation, write down which option your organisation would take and why. That note is more useful than a summary of the lesson.
Where this connects to the rest of the course¶
- Labs 23, 24, and 25 are the closest practical exercises: agile versus predictive planning, a distributed team, and a project in recovery.
- The capstone can be extended with advanced deliverables — see the deliverables page.
- The Skills Progression map's fifth level, Professional practitioner, describes the capability this track is aimed at.
Where this track sits¶
It follows the course content and supports the capstone. Nothing here is required for the 16-week course.
Key terms¶
Governance · Decision rights · Escalation threshold · Change control board · Configuration baseline · Programme · Portfolio · Benefits realisation · Cost of delay · Weighted scoring · Correlated risk · Aggregate exposure · Technical debt · Re-baselining · Recovery plan · Stop decision · Delivery measure · Coordination cost · Multi-vendor governance — see the Glossary.