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Instructor
Lou Russell
In most organizations, it is not unusual for much of the staff to spend their time working on dedicated enterprise-wide, cross-functional projects. These costly projects are managed by professional project managers using sophisticated processes, tools and techniques to manage complexity and risk.
More of the company's employees (including our audience of learning professionals) manage multiple smaller projects that while vitally important to the organization are almost invisible to management and those responsible for maintaining productivity and increasing profit. What if all these small-scale project managers used practical, repeatable project management tools that would increase their productivity and success rate?
While learning professionals certainly benefit from attaining formal training and certification in the field of project management (for example, becoming a Project Management Professional (PMP) through the Project Management Institute), this is not a realistic possibility for most. Many books have been written to support the work of the Project Management Institute's best practices - the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) which is used by those seeking formal certification.
This material is relevant if your role is to run a large, dedicated project, like the Olympics. The clear majority of those who must manage projects, including most learning professionals, do not think of themselves as project managers and find these processes and tools too detailed and intimidating to be helpful. However, project management is a critical competency required for almost anyone in business today to do their work. How do we target the gap? Enter Realistic Project Management.
In the webinar, we'll discuss the pathway to build practical competencies in the discipline of project management using targeted processes, tools, techniques and influencing skills for the types of projects most organization employees manage. In the real world, managers, team leaders, and individual team members must juggle multiple projects. Often, "to do" items on a daily task list morph into these kinds of projects without notice.
The need for these project management competencies among learning and development and other groups of professionals is increasing as companies adjust to new and continuing economic and global competition demands. In addition, learning professionals are being asked to take on broader roles and responsibilities in response to these same economic and competitive demands.
My 10 Steps to Successful Project Management book published in 2008, sought to fill this need. The most useful aspect of the book is that it creates a common project management language to bridge functional areas in a business. Although this book shares tools for collaboration and managing conflict, the primary focus is the use as a toolset for planning, scheduling, managing and reviewing projects. Independent of software, users easily follow the steps thanks to the visual techniques used in the book and the simplified terminology offered.
This includes the most difficult part of project management - the people:
A great deal of information is available for those seeking professional certification in project management, but there are fewer resources for those who need the skills and techniques of good project management in the real world. This webinar is specifically targeted to learning professionals, and almost any business where individuals must meet goals and attain results by managing projects with stakeholders and sponsors who really don't have time to help.
New project management techniques include: analytical techniques to establish initial scope, additional tools for establishing and reinforcing governance and change management, tools for juggling IT and process development projects (like implementing an LMS for example), social media tools for building a virtual project management space, tips for ending a project, and more criteria for separating maintenance and development. of project management. As we say in our workshops "Bad News Early is Good News - tell me when I can still do something about it."
Project Management has changed. According to PMI (Project Management Institute) research, across all industries, the average percentage of projects that are deemed failures is 14 percent. This doesn't sound bad until you realize the definition of failure varies. Many projects miss their deadlines, skip customer requirements and then call the project DONE. A project is a failure if it does not meet the customers needs. Almost everyone is working on a project, but the ROI to the business can be difficult to see.
Ironically, following traditional project management processes adds to the likelihood of failure. The way we work has changed, with multitasking, multiple projects and multiple stakeholders the norm for a project manager. Chaos is the norm. Everyone, PM and stakeholder, has multiple projects which require multiple stakeholders who already are too busy to participate much in a project. Another factor is that Agile changes the way projects are done.
This new way of working requires a simpler, collaboration-based method for meeting the customers project needs. Project management is neither easy nor straightforward- it is a complicated, multilayered matter. Using project management software isn't enough, as many project managers painfully learn.
This webinar takes you through 10 steps that, if followed correctly, will lead to successful project management. You'll learn how to determine whether something is a project or a task, build a charter, define the scope of the project, weigh the risks and constraints, and much more. At every step, author Lou Russell presents the key questions to ask before the project begins as well as the potential risks of skipping certain aspects of project management.
Join this webinar to learn 'minimal' project management which you'll leverage to get projects DONE.