• 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

Unofficial Project Managers Need Practical Advice 

More and more people are working on projects. The number of accidental project managers and unofficial project managers is growing. 

Part-time project managers want to keep it simple. This isn't their full-time job. So insights from the experts need to be distilled. For example, these practical MS Project tips from Eric Uyttewaal are easy to understand - although they take skill and discipline to put into action. 

Project management training for non-Project Managers must cut through the jargon and make project management easy to understand! 

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A Simple Explanation of Project Management 

Project management is a big topic. The PMBOK has 43 processes (and adding more!). So Todd Brown's practical question was refreshing: "On day 1, what are the top 3 things a PM must do when hired for an existing Project?" Everybody who answered included "review the S.O.W" in their top three. 

When asked a similar question during a recent project management training in Seattle for Amazon, I replied, "Today is the first day of the rest of your project. Make sure your Statement of Work is accurate and that you have agreement from all stakeholders." 

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Unofficial Project Managers Must Embrace Risk Management 

Small projects can become big hassles when we ignore potential problems until they blow up in our face. 

Risk management is a common topic in project management training. Project risk management doesn't need to be complicated. In fact, in Versatile's project management training we show you some simple techniques for reducing the problems your team will encounter. 

Keeping it simple is always a theme in our PM for non-PM training. Unofficial project managers can easily be turned off by processes that are too complicated. Project management training tips from ProjectManager.com give you some easy to apply ideas.  

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