Archive for the ‘Training’ Category

5 reasons for business people to attend project managment training

Sunday, October 17th, 2010

Let’s be clear, I’m not asking business people to prepare for PMP or Prince2 or any other certification. I mean training on the basic skills, techniques and processes of project management.

Do any of these describe you?

  1. You have just been assigned a project off the side of your desk and have no idea how to start
  2. You have been picked as the sponsor of a project (big or small) and you don’t know what to expect from a PM
  3. Your projects (as a sponsor or assigned PM) are getting off track
  4. As the sponsor you have no idea if your projects are on track or not
  5. As a business leader/owner you have too many projects on the list and no way to prioritize

Whether you have to lead or sponsor the project, it’s important to know what to expect. How do you start a project so that it’s more likely to be a success?

  1. scope statements will detail what you will or won’t deliver
  2. success and closing criteria will help keep you on track
  3. good governance documented in a charter will help keep the project moving

How do you manage communications? Who get what information?

  1. status reporting will provide an overview for most audiences
  2. a communication plan will help identify who your audiences are for each communication
  3. a stakeholder management plan will help keep everyone up to date based on their needs.

Shameless plug

I have a course designed as a full day workshop designed for the business person that leads you through the process from initiation to project closure.

If you are interested check out my training courses or contact me directly perry@perryawilsonconsulting.com

Happy PMing

Perry

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What is the scope of Project Management Training?

Sunday, January 24th, 2010

I’m putting together a series of project management training sessions targeted to people who have been assigned a project and don’t necessarily have a desire or need to become certified. I am in the scoping phase of this project – what courses will I offer? How will I offer them? and, how will I find participants.

So, let’s start with what will I offer?

My last post on this topic dealt with the three topics I thought were most important; understanding scope, understanding the communication needs, and dealing with issues and challenges. That got me thinking about what a curriculum would look like.

Taking the assumption that the participant is competent in the skills required for their specialty, what would be different for project management?

So, everyone needs to get their head around what they are supposed to be doing. For operational tasks, that means knowing what you need to produce each day, each week, each month, each quarter, and any other pertinent cycle. For project managment – what is it we need to do for this project, and the shorter timeline are the milestones. That means, what do you need to produce to get to each deliverable, end each phase, and finally end the project.

The difference boils down to scope based on constant repetition, and in some cases, improvement, versus scope based on one time performance and hand over – improvement coming at the level of how you run a project, not how well you do the task.

Great, nice and clear, right?

What about when your job is a series of similar projects. The marketing person who produces campaigns, the HR consultant who manages hiring/downsizing, the operations manager who manages a series of process improvement efforts.

I’ve been there. It’s hard to separate the project from the operations. Let’s focus on the operations manager situation.

In my experience, process improvement projects don’t come as a long term strategy with XX% as the productivity goal in 5 years, with increments quarterly and annually.

The operations manager has two things to juggle, operations is often a firefighting job, process improvement is an adoption job. The only way I’ve been able to balance it, or see others balance it, is to link the two together.

If there is an area in the operations that causes the most fires, start the process improvement there. Your scope can include anything that will reduce the fires – I always think fires are a symptom of something more fundamental.

The operations manager can look at the fires and build a project around the scope of reducing errors by X% in 30 days = project 1. Then reducing processing time by X% in 30 days = project 2. By tying the project to the day job and the corporate goal of process improvement, the operations manager can get traction on both the day job and the project.

So, how does this tie into training? I think my lesson here is that I need to focus more on connecting what they already know to project management than training them on shiny new skills.

Enjoy the week!

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Project Training for non project managers

Sunday, December 27th, 2009

When I was the manager of a PMO I was responsible for the training and professional development of the project managers on my team. I remember searching out seminars and workshops that would help them develop all the skills they needed to be successful and pass the PMP exam.

Now that I’m a consultant I’m often called on to provide training to non project managers. The audience is made up of people we would think of as subject matter experts or stakeholders. These people don’t want or need to know the details of earned value reporting, or know what step quality planning is in the process. They have been given projects, or they need to projectize their job and they need to be successful fast.

That means they need to initiate, plan, execute, and close a project – sometimes as the entire project team and project manager. I think there are three key points they need to learn and practice during the training session.

They need to learn to describe what they are supposed to deliver through a scope statement, and a set of success measures that are aimed at achieving their goals.

They need to understand the importance of communication. Not only status reporting but communicating to the larger audience. Communicating when there are issues and communicating when there doesnt’ seem to be anything to communicate. We know the importance of keeping the sponsor in the loop no matter what’s happening.

They need to be able to address issues and challenges to the priority of their project. I say the priority of the project because my experience is that  most issues are based in a need to share too few resources between all important projects.

With these three basics in their toolbox, the non project manager – and the newbie – can start to gain success in their projects. If they decide to take the next step into a full time PM gig, they will be set to learn the details of the whole professional toolkit.

Tooting my own horn here. I’ve developed and delivered courses for this niche group.  If you have a need, check out the information on my website.

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