Introduction
Hello! My name is Michelle Nickolaisen and in this lesson I'm going to introduce you to the concepts that we will cover in the Project Management for Freelance Developers course.
What is project management?
According to Wikipedia, project management is the process of planning, organizing, motivating and controlling resources, procedures and protocols to achieve specific goals in scientific or daily problems. In other words, project management is simply making sure that a project is done right. It is the art of making sure that projects are done right, on time, without exceeding budgets (in terms of estimated amount of time or money that you thought was going to be spent on it).
Why learn project management?
If you're a developer or a designer, you might wonder why you should take the time for this.
- It will help you run your business and projects more effectively. You can be the best designer in the world but if you don't have some concept of project management, then there's a pretty high chance that your business will fail.
- It makes you more marketable. If you learn project management, you can charge more because that is more work and stress that you're taking off of your potential clients' plate; the client can hand more stuff off to you.
Course overview
In this course we're going to do an overview of some standardized methods of project management: Agile, Lean, Scrum, and Waterfall. These are four different schools of thought, though there's definitely some overlap between them. Unfortunately there's not enough time in this course for you to really learn the in depth ins and outs of each of these methods, but as a freelancer, you probably won't need to fully adopt any of these techniques into your business.
We're going to talk about the pros and cons as a freelancer working on a team that uses Agile project management, or Lean, or Scrum, or Waterfall. We're going to discuss the things that you, as a freelancer, can pull from these schools of thoughts.
We are also going to talk about how to create your own personalized project management system.
We'll cover things like the common things that cause you to miss a deadline. We'll cover what is a scope creep and how to avoid it.
We'll cover the way that you can make time in your business for administrative work and business development.
We're also going to talk about what to look for in a project management tool as far as what features you should be considering based on how you work and the kinds of clients that you work with. I'll tell you about some popular solutions like Asana and Basecamp.
#What's next?
View all handouts for the course Project Management for Freelance Developers on Lesson 1.1