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This page orients you: what the course covers, what you need, how to study it, and how to check your own progress.

What this course is

A practical, self-study introduction to software project management — the discipline of planning, coordinating, and controlling software work so that it delivers the intended value to the people who need it. It is written for students who can already write software and want to learn how real projects are organised.

The course deliberately covers both predictive (plan-driven) and adaptive (agile) approaches, because real teams use both and often combine them.

What this course is not

• It is not a substitute for the practical experience of working on a team.
• It does not teach a specific commercial tool. The templates and labs use plain tools you already have, so you can apply them anywhere.
• It does not assume you will manage projects professionally the day you finish. It gives you the vocabulary, the reasoning, and the artefacts to be an effective contributor — and a credible junior manager.

What you need

• A software development background — you should be able to build and test a small program. One programming course is enough.
• No prior management experience. Every concept is introduced from first principles.
• A plain text editor and a spreadsheet. Most labs produce documents; you can keep them in Markdown or in any editor you like.

Nothing else is required. You do not need to install any software to read this course.

How to study it

1. Follow the order. Modules build on each other, especially in Part I. You can skim later modules, but do not skip the foundations. The Learning Path explains why this order and not another.
2. Do the labs. Management is a practice. Reading about a charter is nothing like writing one. The labs are where the learning sticks.
3. Try before you reveal. Quizzes hide their answers behind collapsible sections. Attempt each question first, then reveal.
4. Keep an artefact folder. Many labs build toward your capstone. Keep every document you produce — you will reuse it.
5. Revisit. Come back to a module after doing a lab; the ideas read differently once you have applied them.
6. Look things up, do not read ahead. The Reference section is a lookup shelf: the Glossary for a term, the Common Misconceptions list before you submit a lab, and Calculators to check arithmetic. Reading the whole reference section is not part of the course.

How to know you are making progress

Each module ends with a lab you mark yourself against a rubric. Every lab page ends with self-check criteria, so you can judge your own artefact without waiting for anyone.

Quizzes with instant self-checking are written for the foundations modules so far (Foundations), with quizzes for the remaining modules planned; the Self-Assessment page states exactly what exists today. Where a quiz is not yet written, the lab's self-check criteria and the module's objectives are the check.

Use any of these honestly. They are diagnostic tools, not gatekeepers — the value is in noticing what you did not yet understand.

The Progress Guide turns this into a checklist: one row per module, the six capstone milestones, and the artefacts to keep along the way.

flowchart TD
    accTitle: The study cycle: read, self-check, lab, next module
    accDescr {
    Reading a lesson leads to attempting the self-check questions before revealing the answers. If
    you are not confident, return to the lesson. If you are, do the lab and self-mark with the
    rubric; if the artefact does not meet the bar, return to the lesson, and if it does, move to the
    next module.
    }
    A[Read lesson] --> B[Attempt self-check questions before revealing answers]
    B --> C{Confident?}
    C -->|No| A
    C -->|Yes| D[Do the lab]
    D --> E[Self-mark with the rubric]
    E --> F{Meets the bar?}
    F -->|No| A
    F -->|Yes| G[Next module]

Suggested pacing

The course is designed as 16 weeks with two sessions a week — 32 sessions of about two hours each, plus independent study. The Curriculum Roadmap sets out that plan session by session, and the Semester Calendar turns it into a week-by-week plan: what to read, which lab to do, and which checkpoint to meet, with links on every line.

If you are studying on your own without a fixed timetable:

The course is about 125 hours of real work — the 64 hours of sessions, roughly 40 hours of labs, the capstone, and the reading around them — so the pace you can hold determines how long it takes:

Commitment	Typical completion
~3 hours per week	About 40 weeks
~6 hours per week	About 20 weeks
~7–9 hours per week	One 16-week term — the pace the course is designed for
Intensive (full-time, a few weeks)	Possible, but the capstone benefits from reflection time

Pacing guidance is a suggestion, not a rule. Move at the speed at which you can actually do the labs.

Course map at a glance

Part	Modules	Weeks	Sessions	Theme
I	01–03	1–4	S1–S7	Foundations, initiation, planning
II	04	4–5	S8–S10	Agile and adaptive delivery
III	05–10	6–11	S11–S21	Planning knowledge areas
IV	11–12	11–15	S22–S29	Measurement, control, advanced topics
V	13	15–16	S30–S32	Capstone project

Next: read the Syllabus and the Learning Path, then begin Module 01 — Foundations and its first lesson, Lesson 1 — What Software Project Management Is. Your first artefact comes from Lab 01 — Writing a Project Charter. To see how your capability grows across the course, keep the Skills Progression Map open, and use the Progress Guide to track where you are.