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!