Financial Mastery for Projects (FMP)
Learn the critical role that portfolio, program, and project decisions have in impacting the financial statements of your organization
With Financial Mastery for Projects, achieve a deeper understanding of the relationship between your organization's financial outcomes and the decisions you make as a portfolio, program, or project manager in this three-day elective course in the Stanford Advanced Project Management curriculum.
Financial Mastery for Projects helps you see projects as investments that enable the execution of your organization's business strategy. You'll get a high-level understanding of financial statements and and how programs and projects create new products, processes, and services that directly affect those statements. You'll gain insight into how a project's products and its performance affect revenue recognition, profitability, and cash flow for the organization as a whole. You'll learn how to analyze the value of programs and projects throughout their life cycles using discounted cash flow and similar analysis. And you'll be prepared to take the necessary actions to improve a project's financial performance.
You'll leave the course understanding the relationships among strategy, finance, and program and project management, and you'll be able to assess alternative options using discounted cash flow analysis and related financial tools. You may not be a finance whiz, but you'll learn enough about financial statements and how programs and projects impact them to know the value they deliver to your organization.
Financial Mastery for Projects can be taken on campus at Stanford University, onsite at your organization, through synchronous live virtual advanced project management courses, or via streaming video in our online Stanford Advanced Project Management program.
Benefits to the Organization
As a result of Financial Mastery for Projects, your organization will benefit from:
- Better decisions concerning project selection and initiation, project financing, and project management
- The financial perspective needed to make sure the organization is invested in the optimal project portfolio
- Stronger financial performance
Learning Objectives
After attending Financial Mastery for Projects, you will be able to:
- Understand how managing portfolios, programs, and projects relates to corporate financial performance
- Understand how the Strategic Execution Framework relates to corporate financial performance
- Read and understand critical information from selected corporate financial statements
- Assess business performance using selected financial ratios
- Conduct discounted cash flow (DCF) analyses of project costs over the project's life cycle
- Organize and analyze various alternative project scenarios
- Incorporate project benefits into the overall management of a program or project
Target Audience
This course is designed to benefit non-financial managers, including executives, senior managers, functional managers, program managers, and project managers.
Prerequisites: This course has no prerequisites.
Course Topics
Introduction to the Strategy-Portfolio-Project Continuum
- Welcome and introductions
- Course objectives
The Strategy-Portfolio-Project Continuum
- Financial Simulation - Zodiak: The Game of Business Finance and Strategy
- Basic accounting learned through a business simulation
- Key insights from Zodiak
Relating Programs and Projects to Corporate Finance
- Integrating project outputs into the enterprise
- Relationship of operations to the outputs of programs and projects
- S-P-P impact on projects throughout the life cycle
- Impact on enterprise profits
- The S-P-P continuum
Introduction to Financial Statements
- Financial statement principles
- Basic financial statements
- Understanding and applying selected financial ratios
Capital Budgeting and Investment Analysis
- Capital budgeting concepts for discounted cash flow (DCF)
- Executing a DCF analysis
- Using a DCF analysis
- Applying DCF: “Flowtronics Industries: The AK Project”
Project Scenario Analysis
- Project scenarios and DCF
- Project scenarios and sensitivity analysis
- Exercise: GeeWhiz new product case study
Project Benefits Management (PBM): An Overview
- Project benefits
- Failed and successful projects
- PBM and strategy
- The Integrated Project Benefits Management (IPBM) process
Course Summary
- Key insights
- Points to ponder
Read more about how to get started with the Stanford Advanced Project Management program for an individual, or bring Financial Mastery for Projects, as well as any of our corporate learning solutions, to your organization. Please contact us today to learn more.
