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Overview:
The Challenge
Organizations use projects to answer business needs and fulfill strategy. Because projects are crucial to an organization's growth and financial well-being, project failure can be a serious and damaging event. Nonetheless, project failure is an all too common occurrence with failure rates approaching 30% in some industries (Standish Group). This is simply unacceptable. We need a robust project management approach that will ensure successful delivery and provide long-term project value.
The Solution
Effective Project Management provides three days of practical, hands-on training in core project management tools, concepts and techniques. The course extends PMBOK® concepts with supplemental, field-proven best practices that are effective in any project setting. Participants are shown how to write a convincing project charter; identify key stakeholders and obtain their buy-in to project goals and approach; establish project control through careful scope definition and management; develop a comprehensive schedule and budget; establish project baselines; track status and forecast project outcomes; minimize issues through proactive risk management; control costs and more. The importance of planning for post-project value (Project Value Management) is emphasized throughout this course.
The format is multimodal, with a mixture of lecture, numerous exercises and simulations, and group discussions. Learning is reinforced by having participants truly get their hands on the tools. All participants return to their workplace better equipped to bring their projects to a successful conclusion. Course topics include:
- Sources of project success and failure
- Product and project lifecycles
- Purpose of every project: Realization of Business Value
- Building a collaborative partnership with stakeholders
- Providing estimates that work for you
- Using a charter to get buy-in on goals, scope and approach
- Setting and managing expectations
- Defining scope: WBS and requirements
- Developing a rigorous schedule, resource plan and budget
- Setting project baselines
- Avoiding project procurement pitfalls
- Establishing effective communication
- Planning for long-term project value
- Building quality into deliverables
- Preventing Scope Creep: Using change control to keep scope, time and cost in balance
- Minimizing issues through proactive risk management
- Keeping management informed: status reports and forecasts
- Delivering the goods: Planning and executing an effective Transition
- Administrative and contract closure
- Lessons Learned
Audience:
This course is ideal for project managers who are looking for an update on core concepts and techniques, new project managers looking for a jump start in their new profession, team leads, managers of project managers, functional managers with project responsibility, and Project Management Office staff.
Prerequisites:
This course assumes some experience with project work.
Course duration:
3 days
Course Outline:
I. Introduction
- Sources of project success and failure
- The project environment
- Essential PM Concepts
- Impact of human factors: Every project is a Human Endeavor
- Project and product lifecycles
- Project roles
- Creating value after the project: Project Value Management
- PM Methodologies
II. Project Initiation
- Use and benefits of the Project Charter
- Defining project and business objectives
- Importance of establishing preliminary scope boundaries
- Project Manager authority
- Identifying, analyzing and managing stakeholders
- Project constraints: keeping scope, time and cost in balance
- Creating useful estimates of time and cost
- Building a strong project foundation
III. Project Planning
- Defining Scope: Requirements and the WBS
- Scheduling and the Critical Path
- Resource planning: choosing the right team; ensuring stakeholder participation
- The budget lifecycle: Developing and tracking an effective, time-phased budget
- Procurement and contracts
- Using deliverables quality to drive Business Value
- Strategies for effective project communication
- Proactive risk management: Minimizing issues to protect budget and schedule
- Setting project baselines
- Planning for long-term project value
IV. Execution and Control
- Building deliverables; Monitoring project work
- Delivering useful status reports
- Forecasting with Earned Value Management
- Preventing scope creep: Tools and methods of change control
- Controlling cost and schedule
- Managing project baselines
- Transition planning: preparing for deployment to the customer
- Executing the Transition Plan
V. Successful Conclusion
- Executing the Business Value plan
- Contract and administrative closure
- Lessons Learned and continual improvement
Customize it!:
- Have you identified specific problems with project delivery in your organization? The content of this class can be delivered with special emphasis on those topics of greatest concern.
- Are you a project manager who would like to go beyond the standard project management curriculum? Effective Project Management presents a practical approach to resolving many of our most persistent project management problems. Take home a whole new set of tools and techniques.
- Are you a manager, executive, or sales person whose work includes responsibility for project success? Take this course and learn what you can do to ensure that your projects get off to a strong start and complete with the delivery you need.
Learning Approach
- A highly experienced instructor will use interactive lecture format, numerous hands-on exercises, team activities, group discussions, and other techniques to drive home the essential points of this material.
- You have the option of using your own, ongoing project as the focus of class exercises. As a result, not only do you gain experience with the tools, but you also learn more about your project.
- We will build on your prior experience in this topic, while providing you with a structure and vocabulary to use in future projects.
- If you have modest project management knowledge, you will find that the clarity of the material and direct presentation style of the instructor will make the subject matter easy to understand.
- You will receive a Participant Guide which will help you follow the material, take notes and retain what you learned so that you can apply it on your job.
Why should I take this course?
- Experienced project managers will discover a vocabulary and framework that lends structure and perspective to the wealth of experience they already have.
- If you are new to project management, the exercises in this course will give you hands on experience with primary techniques required to manage a project.
- All participants take home a set of tools and techniques to help them deal with all aspects of project planning and execution.
- Take this course and learn how to avoid many of the problems that project managers most often encounter.
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