• Length: 2 days (15 PDUs)                   Read a customer story

Call them “Accidental project managers,” “Incidental PMs” or “Unofficial project managers”. They are the staff and management that are running over half your projects – important projects that need to be delivered successfully.

Give these leaders the practical, proven tools of project management, scaled to fit their needs.

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Learn and practice specific techniques such as Stakeholder Analysis, Building an Action Plan, and Project Communication in class. Be able to perform every technique and explain how each technique contributes to your leadership ability and a successful project outcome.

The course provides the building blocks of project leadership. Participants learn how the project management tool set enables them to satisfy all their stakeholders -- sponsors, management, customers and the project team. 

Participants plan one of their own projects in class. It's the best way for individuals to learn the concepts faster to transfer the learning to their job. 

The workshop component is embedded in the course so that each lecture topic is immediately followed by the workshop component.  For example, after the scheduling lecture, teams will create their own project schedule.

Anyone responsible for leading or sponsoring projects benefits from understanding the tools of project management.  This course is particularly appropriate for leaders of part-time, internal business projects – “project management for non-project managers.”

Upon completion of this course the student will be able to:

• Identify five project success factors that apply to every project.
• Articulate the business benefit of their current project
• Develop a partnership with a project sponsor.
• Describe the cost, schedule, and quality constraints and tradeoffs for their projects
• Systematically apply the proven techniques of project management to define, plan and control a project.
• Develop a realistic project schedule that relies on team members who are less than fully assigned to the project.
• Plan stakeholder communication based on stakeholder authority and involvement
• Understand the relationship between the science of project management and the art of leadership.

I.          Why Project Management?                             

A.         Project Success Factors

B.         What is Project Management?

C.         A Successful Project Delivers Value

D.         Project Life Cycle and Product Life Cycle

Workshop: Selecting projects for the workshop   

II.         Project Definition                                            

A.         Assign the Sponsor and Project Manager

B.         Top Five Definition Questions

C.         Project Charter

Workshop: Develop a Statement of Work           

III.        Project Planning

A.         The Purpose of Planning                      

B.         Break the Project Into Manageable Units of Work                    

Workshop: Developing the Task List                                  

C.         Network Diagrams Help Visualize the Sequence of Events                                

D.         Task Estimating Guidelines                                  

Workshop: Build the Network & Visualize the Schedule                             

E.         Establish a Realistic Schedule with a Part-Time Team

Workshop: Completion of the project plan          

IV.        Project Control

A.         Stakeholder Engagement                      

B.         Plan Communication

Workshop: Identify Stakeholders                        

C.         Change Management

D.         Project Team Kickoff

E.         Monitor Schedule, Risks, and Issues                 

F.         Project Close Out

V.         Course Summary: Project Leadership            

A.         Project Manager Skills

B.         Art Based on Science

Project Management is a Social Services Career 

Are you looking for a career that makes the world a better place? Well, few people are trying to make the world a worse place. Some of the benefits people have claimed during Versatile’s project management training: 

• Project management reduces my stress. 
• Project management will give people a better understanding of how their piece fits into the big picture. 
• I think we could all work fewer hours, get home to our families, and still make stuff people want on time. 

And that doesn't count the work that actual social services firms do. Check out www.PM4NGOS.org. There are a lot of human lives being saved because projects are being better managed. 

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Do You Know What You Don’t Know? 

Before searching for project management training, it makes sense to get some basics. 

Top 10 Terms Project Managers Use.

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A Practical Book for the Occasional Project Manager 

You want something that is easy to read, easy to scan, and super practical. 

This is the book we hand out in our project management training for non-PMs. 

See what people are saying about it: 

“Really enjoying this book so far! It's well written, engaging, concise, and really lays out the PM function and role!” 

“This is a great book. It is a total page turner. So easy to read and a great helper to understand pmbk guide. Great real experiences and lots of downloadable free reference documents.” 

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Shaping your Intercultural Project Leadership: How to Leverage Cross-Cultural Challenges in your Project 

Intercultural gaps threaten many projects. National cultures, job cultures, enterprise cultures, generational cultures: any gap in those components can lead projects to face culture clashes…and additional problems. Yet, project managers can not only actively manage those gaps, but also leverage them and thus extend leadership skills. 

This webinar will highlight which levers project managers can use to identify and proactively manage intercultural factors within the project, and suggest practical ways to develop an intercultural leadership style which can be effective both at personal and team level. 

Watch this Webinar.  

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DON’T Attend Microsoft Project Training. 

Don’t attend it if it teaches you about resource leveling. 

Don’t attend if you’ll learn about cost management. 

Don’t attend training that teaches you everything you need to know to pass the Microsoft Certification Exam. 

Because you don’t need to know that stuff. 

Attend Microsoft Project training that is designed for people leading part-time teams! 

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