October 21-25, 2024
(ONLINE - 7:30am PST)

The Project Design Master Class

Transform your career
The ultimate resource for the professional software engineer.

About This Course


Much as you design the software system, you must design the project to build it: from accurately calculating the planned duration, cost, and risk, to devising several good execution options, scheduling resources, and even validating your plan, to ensure it is sensible and feasible. This requires understanding the inner dependencies between services and activities, the project network, the staff distribution, and the expected efficiency and throughput. All of these challenges stem from your system design and addressing them properly is a hard-core engineering task – designing the project.

The Project Design Master Class will take you to a new level as an architect or a project leader. The class presents the IDesign Method’s techniques and ideas that we have applied across hundreds of projects. You will master the core body of knowledge and skills required of modern software project design. IDesign will mentor you how to gain credibility and perfect communication with top management by providing real life, repeatable and workable options for the project – solutions that balance cost, schedule and risk. Practicing our techniques feels as if “the blinders are off”, gaining superiority over every aspect of the project. Students of the class refer to it as the most important week of their professional career.

Overview

Assuming no prior knowledge, the class covers the essentials of the critical path method and its adaptation to software projects. By modeling the project as a network you eliminate the bias and objectively calculate schedule and cost. You will understand the typical behavior of a project, how it is impacted by limiting resources and schedule, and what recurring techniques and approaches to leverage as you cope with constraints.

With these basics in place, you will proceed to see the IDesign Method approach for project design, which enables you to determine the best overall plan across architecture, schedule, cost and risk. The IDesign Method for project design converges on the best and even optimal solution for the project while eliminating gambling, death marches, wishful thinking, and expensive trial and errors. Next the class discusses additional project design techniques such as the project time-cost curve, schedule acceleration with network compression, and IDesign’s original risk quantifying techniques. Since there are several design solutions for every project, some more aggressive than others, you must objectively measure the risk of each option and evaluate the project design solutions in light of risk, as well as cost and duration.

But no project plan survives unscathed the first day of execution – priorities, resources, deadlines, estimations and features will change, and you must constantly adapt the plan for the new reality. The class will show you IDesign’s techniques for closing the loop by tracking both progress and effort across developers and services, how to contain the impact of changes, allowing you to constantly stay on schedule and on budget, and meet your commitments.

The class ends with a comprehensive case study and walks through its various permutations in determining the best plan that will keep the project on time all the time, at the best risk and cost available. Moreover, the case study not only demonstrates end-to-end flow of project design across iterations, but it also teaches the thought process and rationale behind the decisions, our practical approach for using tools, how to integrate and compensate for the tools’ shortcomings, and how to utilize the IDesign templates.

While most training classes merely stack modules, focusing on a single topic at a time, the Project Design Master Class uses a spiral, and each iteration gains more insight across multiple topics, providing the motivation and objectives for the next iteration, thus mimicking the natural learning process. Each such iteration incorporates hands-on labs to cement the concepts and practice the techniques. In the class you will also receive the IDesign’s original tools, metrics, rules of thumb, project design templates, and reference projects.

Don’t miss this unique opportunity to learn and improve your project design skills with IDesign, and share our passion for excellence and project engineering.

Why should you do this

  • Become indispensable to your organization.
  • Create 2X more value to your business.
  • Learn breakthroughs in software engineering
  • Transform your career by changing the way you develop projects.

Course Agenda

Project Design Method Overview
  • Design granularity effect on the project
  • System design and the team
  • The fuzzy front end
  • The SDP review
  • The core team
  • Product life cycle
  • Service life cycle
  • Estimation techniques
  • Services integration plan
  • Staffing distribution
  • Scheduling activities
  • Viability and risk
  • Calculating cost
  • Tracking progress and effort
  • Roles and responsibilities
Essential Concepts
  • Project as a network diagram
  • Node vs. arrow diagrams
  • Identifying the critical path
  • Calculating floats
  • Floats and scheduling
  • Proactive risk management
Project Compression
  • Accelerating projects
  • Time-cost curve
  • Points on time-cost curve
  • The death zone
  • Cost elements
  • Staffing and cost
  • Activity compression
  • Project compression

Quantifying Risk
  • Risk and decision making
  • Risk curve
  • Risk and floats
  • Modeling risk
  • Criticality risk
  • Fibonacci risk
  • Activity risk
  • Risk decompression
Project Design in Action
  • Architecture and dependencies
  • Complexity reduction
  • Adding activities
  • Staffing requirements
  • Planning assumptions
  • Network and resources
  • Staffing distribution
  • Floats analysis
  • Infrastructure and dependencies
  • Design with limited resources
  • Design with subcritical resources
  • The normal solution
  • Milestones identification
  • Project compression
  • Accelerating schedule
  • Throughput analysis
  • Efficiency analysis
  • The time-cost curve
  • Quantifying risk
  • Risk decompression
  • The risk curve
  • Risk crossover points
  • Preparing for SDP review
Additional Thoughts
  • General guidelines
  • Compression and resources
  • Planning and risk
  • Tips
  • Architect and team
  • Hand-off point
  • Team and productivity
  • God activities
  • Decompression target
  • Geometric risk
  • Tracking risk
  • Execution complexity
  • Common misconceptions
  • When to design a project
  • Design of project design
  • Very large projects
  • Small projects
  • Design standard
  • Scope, effort, time, perspectives
  • Design by layers
  • Antifragility
  • Project design and quality
  • Debriefing project design
Project Design Mini Clinic
  • Project walkthrough
  • Planning assumptions
  • Normal solution
  • SDP presentations and review

Testimonials

John Caccavaro
Chief Architect
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The Project Design Master Class will have a greater impact on the time and cost of my projects than any methodology or technology that I have acquired to date. This course gives you the ability to put forth multiple project designs that vary from least cost to least time and everything in between. You will learn how to associate risk with each project design option and give your organization a powerful platform to make sound business decisions. Understanding the real trends of the project and what corrective actions to take before things get out of hand will be invaluable to me as an architect and provide a tremendous ROI to my company. I highly recommend this class to architects and project managers who place value on completing their projects on time and on budget. Simply stated, you can’t afford not to attend.

Thomas Kurilla
Project Manager and Architect
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A short review is just inadequate in trying to capture the importance of the Project Design Master Class. Rather than review the material or techniques, I would like to relate the value of the class. At the beginning of the class Juval Lowy stated that the Project Design Master Class would serve as a launching point to take the rest of our careers to a whole new level...and it did just that. By lunchtime on Tuesday I contacted my boss to let him know that we had already gotten our money's worth from the training. But as eye-opening and fruitful as the first day and a half were, the remainder of the week continued to expand upon the essentials, building in enough substance that we were comfortable doing our first project design by the end of the class. It may go without saying that any project manager regardless of background and seniority will benefit enormously from the IDesign techniques, approaches and insights. In my opinion, the Project Design Master was the single best use of training budget ever in my career of over 30 years.

Shaun Kiesewetter
Software Architect
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I would just like to update you on the massive success we are having, after placing myself and two other regional architects on the Architect's Master Class.
We are now practicing the Method on some highly complex software applications, and have developed a solid methodology around it.

Michael Emmerson
Chief Architect
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It is difficult with a short testimonial to capture what a pleasure the Architect’s Master Class was.My appreciation and applause. I have been in the technology business for 30+ years, with the last 15 as an Enterprise architect.

Your Instructor

A legend in Software Engineering

Juval Löwy is the founder of IDesign and a master software architect.

Over the past 20 years, Juval has led the industry with some of his ideas such as micro-services serving as the foundation of software design and development.In his Master Classes Juval has mentored thousands of architects across the globe, sharing his insights, techniques, and breakthroughs, as well as how to take an active role as design and process leaders. Juval has helped hundreds of companies meet their commitments and participated in the Microsoft internal strategic design reviews for C# and related products.

Juval a frequent speaker at major international software development conferences. He is the author of several bestsellers, and his latest book is Righting Software (Addison-Wesley, 2019) contains his groundbreaking ideas on system and project design.

Juval has published numerous articles, regarding almost every aspect of modern software development and architecture. Microsoft recognized Juval as a Software Legend as one of the world’s top experts and industry leaders.

Course details

Level - eLearner X Webflow Template
Audience: 
Architects, PMs
Duration - eLearner X Webflow Template
Duration: 
8 hrs/day
Videos - eLearner X Webflow Template
5
 
Intense Days
Lifetime Access - eLearner X Webflow Template
Oct 21 - Oct 25
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Zoom Class - Access From Any Computer, Tablet or Mobile
$3,950.00 USD
Limited Seats Available
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