Seminar Description

Do you manage your projects or do they manage you?  Sometimes it seems easier to herd cats than to get IT projects done successfully! Your success in the modern workplace depends on your  projects being executed within the triple constraints: on time, within budget, and within scope.

Your ability to balance these cornerstones of the project reflects your ability to manage not only the hard skills (your IT technical expertise), but also the soft skills (people, team, project sponsor, and vendor management).Failure to achieve these ends can and has driven companies out of business.  This two day project management training seminar is designed specifically to teach you how to cope with the unique characteristics of IT projects from understanding the basic principles of project management tools to managing all the people that will be involved in the success of the project. At the end of this project management training, you will have the fundamental knowledge required to professionally manage IT projects.

Bring this Workshop Onsite to Your Location.  Small or large groups; Save on travel expense and time away from the office by bringing the training right to your door. Find out more.

Learning Objectives

At the end of this project management training seminar, you will:

• Understand IT projects, project management concepts, tools, resources, and basic skills
• Know the triple constraints of successful project management
• Identify Project Management players and their roles
• Plan a project using project tools.
• Create time, cost and effort estimates
• Create appropriate management plans including communication, resource, procurement, vendor, and risk
• Know the essentials of project team management during project execution
• Create and track budget and other performance management indicators
• Understand how to deal with change.
• Manage project resources and quality
• Know the key parts to close out the project

Certifications and Exams

This IT project management training seminar is designed to help you quickly gain the essential skills necessary to effectively manage IT projects.  Many of the concepts taught will be helpful to the candidate for the CompTIA Project+" certification.  You should carefully review the seminar outline to ensure it meets your personal and/or career objectives.

Who should attend?

This seminar is for you if you're presently directing any type of IT project or will be doing so in the future.  You don't need to be familiar with project management principles and you don't need to know how to use project management software to get lots of benefits from attending this seminar.  You just need the desire to learn how to manage your projects instead of letting them manage you!

Bring this Workshop Onsite to Your Location.  Small or large groups; Save on travel expense and time away from the office by bringing the training right to your door. Find out more.

Seminar Outline

Module One:  Overview

In this module, you'll learn the project management concept.  We'll show you the basic tools you need to take control of your projects.  You'll understand the differences between traditional project management and IT project management.  In this module, you'll gain an understanding of:

• Why our projects in IT are different
• The triple constraints that affect every project
• Project phases
• The essential skills required to make you a great project manager

Module Two: Getting the project started

If project success only required calling your favorite vendor, taking delivery and installing hardware/software components at your leisure, anyone could be a project manager. The fact of the matter is people not only expect the project to work perfectly once complete, they also have an expectation that it will be seamless, on time and the installation will be completely invisible to them. And to top that off, the organizations executives expect the project will be cost effective. Getting started means:

• Identifying the stakeholders and their needs
• List the business requirements
• Determine the systems requirements
• Identify the key roles and responsibilities
• Create a project charter and define the project scope

Module Three: Project plans, estimates and schedules

Once the key players are convinced the proposed project will actually help the organization (and are now fully backing you), you can start putting together the nuts and bolts of how all this is going to get done. In this module we'll look at:

• The elements of the planning process
• How to create a work breakdown structure (WBS)
• Creating the effort, time, and cost estimates
• Putting the project team together
• Creating a schedule

Module Four: Plans for all the other stuff

Now that you have a great plan for the project with a great team ready to go there are a few more considerations before you actually start the work. As they say, the devil is in the details, and the better you understand all aspects of the project, the higher the probability for success. Before you start you need to have some more plans:

• Communication and resource planning
• Procurement and vendor management planning
• Risk and quality management planning
• The comprehensive project plan

Module Five: Keeping everyone on track

The plans are complete in every detail, every contingency is planned for, the boss is backing you 100%, and the equipment, materials and people are in place for now. It is at this point you come to the realization that are many people actually working on the steps you carefully planned. Others are going to be asking you about the project and now you must turn your attention to:

• Managing the project team
• Managing client relations

Module Six: Managing cost and project performance

Things seem to be running along smoothly everyone is working together well and all appears fine until the project sponsor (your boss) comes down to get a status report. The CFO sent him an email that the project was slightly over budget, and slightly behind schedule, and may not meet quite all the hoped for benchmarks promised. The first major problem is that the CFO is delivering this news instead of you. A big part of project management execution is having your finger on the pulse of the thing you are creating. Remember all those plans you made (schedule, budget, etc.)? Now you need to be paying close attention to what was planned and what is actually going on, and figuring out how to fix it. You need to:

• Identify project-tracking tools
• Evaluate and measure project performance
• Compare actual expenditures to the budgeted amounts

Module Seven: Dealing with project change(s)

All that effort you put into creating the perfect plan and all the management skills applied to pull this project off is not going to keep it within the triple constraints of on time, on budget, and on scope. This a real cold dose of reality but the real reason we make the plans is so that we have something to deviate from. In all projects, but to a greater degree in IT projects, stuff happens. Technology changes mid-project, team members get pulled away to work on some crisis, and the list goes on. Being flexible is a key ingredient to successful project management. In this module you will learn to dynamically:

• Manage change
• Manage resources and quality

Module Eight: The end (of this project)

The project is complete and the next one is looming on the horizon. (More than likely it is already underway.) You have just a few more things to tie up before you walk away from this project. You must demonstrate that the project does what you said it would do. Contracts and all other paperwork must be completed with a final meeting with the customer (your boss) to ensure that s/he is delighted with the results provided by your team. One last important detail before you let the team go to their next assignment is the team debriefing:  What have we learned from this project, both the good and not so good. It's time to say thanks to everyone involved because we've finally reached project closure.

• Project review
• Boss debriefing
• Contract closure
• Team debriefing

Prerequisites

Prospective attendees should possess a sincere desire to improve skills as a help desk engineer or technician and a willingness to apply the methods learned.

Schedule and Registration

Two Days

• Registration (day one): 8:30 a.m. to 9:00 a.m.
• Morning session (both days): 9:00 a.m. to 11:45 a.m.
• Lunch (on your own both days): 11:45 a.m. to 12:45 p.m.
• Afternoon session (both days): 12:45 p.m. to 4:00 p.m.

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