Project Management

In today’s complex workplace of doing more with less, minimizing the impact of troubled projects is a required and valued core competency and critical success factor for Project Managers. Project failures don’t happen suddenly—typically, projects decline over time. Because of this it is critical project managers understand practical techniques and best practices for assessing and recovering projects that are in trouble as early as possible. Whether or not a project is Challenged, Troubled or Critical, this course provides Project Managers with the tools and techniques to identify project problems, assess their impact and take action to recover or minimize the impacts to the project objectives. This course also covers scenarios where the core root cause for project schedule/cost slippage is so substantial that a project may need to be put on hold for senior management to sort out complex issues such as dysfunction from cultural differences or escalated political roadblocks borne out of self interest, protectionism, hidden agendas or other organizational roadblocks.

Projects are inherently complex with a resulting set of chaotic actions and behaviors from stakeholders in response to a problem that often result in an ever-accelerating feedback of the same problem and/or more problems. If you have ever been part of a project that is considered “out of control” this chaos is familiar to you. This course presents how the command and control organizational model of twentieth century industrialization that is reflected in how projects are run, are giving way to newer mainstream learning and application of approaches for how Project Managers and project team members are to deal with complexity and chaos. This draws from current, mainstream approaches in very large and complex projects such as NASA, Fortune 100 organizations as well as from military applications where strategy and execution is built on complexity. For example, models and tactics are studied for the complexity and unpredictability of the battlefield where changing circumstances must be dealt with immediately or the battle, like the schedule and budget, will be lost. Such models and tactics adhere to not forcing a strict and rigid command and control project management approach. Thus you will learn to project manage with an adaption to the chaos, [...]

The has been a shift in how we work due to advances in workplace technology, a focus on work/life balance, and reduced budgets which has resulted in the prevalence of remote or virtual teams. Virtual team members may work from home, in different offices or parts of the company, on a client site or wirelessly while traveling. This shift is creating challenges to the way we work, manage and assess performance. In this course, you will learn new skills and perspectives that will help you effectively manage virtual or remote teams, foster the behaviors of high-performing virtual teams, assess barriers and opportunities for using virtual teams and to maintain and gracefully validate productivity with virtual employees. You will also learn and develop core influence skills to manage the politics of leading virtual teams. With this, you will define communication needs, coordinate and facilitate solutions to accomplish team tasks, and learn best practices that can be immediately applied to your workplace.    

In the 21st century, corporations achieve strategic objectives through projects that are planned and implemented in a connected global and diverse workplace. A premium is now placed on a Project Managers’ ability to navigate and adapt to differences while leading and influencing project team members to get the work done on time and on budget. The Project Manager who can recognize differences in culture and bridge such differences to align everyone to the performing organization objectives is a highly valued skill set in today’s organization. This course is designed to provide tools and techniques that will enable Participants with Cultural Intelligence — a person’s ability to adapt successfully to different cultures. Through varied personal assessments, activities, case studies, discussion, theory and application and reflection, this course creates strong awareness of oneself relative to others such that differences can be recognized, respected and aligned to the needs of the project. This course also provides tools and techniques to Project Managers so they understand how cultures differ, how these differences constrain communication and with this knowledge proactively create a more collaborative environment. By arming people with awareness and strategies on the more intangible people dimensions of teams – the Cultural dimensions – [...]

Senior and successful project managers are well versed at the importance of leveraging and maintaining political ties throughout their organization as a manner for achieving project success. Like the wireless network, politics can’t be seen, however it is there and one need only to plug into it to be far more effective in their work. Project Managers must be willing to employ appropriate political tactics to further project goals to manage risk or risk being sidelined by politics. This course is an in depth look at various political tools and techniques people employ in projects to further their success. As most project managers have enormous responsibility but not enough formal authority, this course is an insightful view into how increasing one’s own personal power in the organization to influence stakeholders. Participants will discover methods for increasing your personal power while learning practical guidelines for successfully influencing without formal authority. By creating awareness and arming Project Managers and Stakeholders with strategies to identify, assess and execute on the intangible people and political dimensions of projects, projects have greater probability of meeting their objectives.

In this course, students will apply the generally recognized practices of project management acknowledged by the Project Management Institute (PMI®) to successfully manage projects.