CORE-05 · Foundations

Project Ownership — Scoping, Executing, and Delivering Work

Teaches students to own a project from start to finish — scoping, executing, verifying, and shipping. Quality assurance and error recovery are integral parts of the delivery workflow, not separate activities. Students learn to ship work that is correct, complete, and verified — and to recover gracefully when things go wrong.

35 Hours

11 Learning objectives

Create Bloom's ceiling (?)

6 Competencies

What You'll Be Able To Do

Learning Objectives

Objectives

Depth

Scope a project by defining what's in, what's out, timeline, dependencies, and measurable success criteria Apply
Manage a project through plan→execute→monitor→iterate→deliver phases with explicit checkpoints and decision gates Apply
Present completed work to stakeholders and incorporate feedback without losing project coherence Apply
Write project documentation: scope briefs, progress reports, and post-mortems with actionable insights Apply
Identify and propose process improvements proactively, with data or evidence justifying the change Analyze
Estimate effort for tasks, track actuals against estimates, and calibrate estimation accuracy through structured reflection Apply
Execute preflight verification before delivering work: checklists, cross-environment testing, fact-checking, and stakeholder-specific review Apply
Respond to mistakes using the blast-radius protocol: assess scope of impact, notify affected parties immediately, implement fix, document prevention measures Apply
Conduct post-mortems that identify root causes without assigning blame, producing actionable prevention measures Analyze
Give and receive constructive peer feedback using structured frameworks (specific, actionable, kind) Apply
Build and maintain checklists and SOPs from experience, iterating them as processes and tools evolve Create

Levels: Remember · Understand · Apply · Analyze · Evaluate · Create — highest demands most original thinking.

Core Competencies

What You'll Master

Project Scoping

Defining boundaries, dependencies, success criteria, and explicit out-of-scope items.

Project Execution

Phase management, progress tracking, checkpoint communication, adaptive replanning.

Quality Assurance

Preflight checklists, verification workflows, testing deliverables before shipping.

Error Recovery

Mistake response protocol, blast radius assessment, transparent notification, post-mortems.

Process Improvement

Identifying inefficiencies, proposing changes with evidence, documenting SOPs.

Estimation & Calibration

Effort estimation, tracking actuals, improving accuracy over time through structured reflection.

Portfolio Artifact

What You'll Build

Project Case Study — Student runs a real or simulated project end-to-end: writes the scope document, executes the work in tracked phases, creates a preflight checklist, delivers the final output, and writes a post-mortem that includes at least one thing that went wrong and how they recovered. Includes all documentation artifacts and a reflection on estimation accuracy (estimated vs. actual hours for each phase).

Tools You'll Use

Industry Tools, Not Toy Projects

Notion / Google Docs

Documentation platforms for scope briefs, progress reports, post-mortems, and project artifacts.

Asana / Linear / Trello

Project tracking tools for managing phases, tasks, checkpoints, and delivery timelines.

Google Sheets

Estimation tracking, actuals vs. estimates analysis, and project metrics dashboards.

Claude

AI assistant for documentation drafting, scope review, and post-mortem analysis support.