Overview Certification

Certificates provide people with an individual benefit that motivates them to learn new things and change their ways. This is why ProjectPro offers certification with its training in scheduling projects and programs. Certification also allows clients to measure progress their people make in developing their proficiency.

Our ‘Forecast Scheduling’ certification curriculum consists of three levels: Time Model, Workload Model and Cost Model. Time is where it starts, a project is a temporary endeavor after all. A Time Model forecasts the finish date. The levels build onto each other; they are incremental: A workload model is a time and workload model. A cost model is a time, workload and cost model. A cost model is the highest level of proficiency in project scheduling applications. The following visual illustrates this:

Three Levels of Proficiency with MS Project 

When you ask us to deliver training in project scheduling, we first ask you what level of proficiency you aim at:

  • If you want to know when projects will be finished, a Time Model will do. The discipline or maturity may not be there yet to load resources into schedules. Time models allows you to reap the benefits of scheduling and lay a foundation for your organization to step up to the next level, when ready.
  • If you experience problems in resource management, demand management or capacity planning, you have a need to create Workload Models. Problems may manifest themselves in imbalanced workloads, serious over-allocations or missed deadlines. If your project managers fight for scarce resources, Workload Models will make the bottlenecks visible. Once workloads are aggregated across projects, over-allocations will be visible and can be addressed. Making total workloads visible using a shared resource pool supports demand management and capacity planning.
  • If you see your projects often go over budget or if you experience problems with cash-flow forecasting, Cost Models will help getting a handle on project expenses and staying within budget. When you use Excel for reporting cost, your project managers may complain about how much effort it takes to update the spreadsheet, since Excel does not reschedule costs when the project changes. A dynamic Cost Model in Microsoft Project may be the answer.
You will find each certification level described on their product pages. For each level, you will have to submit your schedule. We check your schedule with our 'Forecast Scheduling Application' and will send you a detailed evaluation report. You can download a free 30-day evaluation version of this application here. You can earn 20 PDUs with each level of certification.