Education is the First Step in Reducing Project Failure

Too often, project managers and their stakeholders lack the visibility into how their project's fit into the business' grand vision. Think how wonderfully your business would run if everyone from the C-suite to the feet on the street understood how to maintain focus executing business strategies.

Project Alignment for Management Teams helps your project managers and their stakeholders:

1. Understand what is valuable for your organization.
2. Reduce miscommunication.
3. Focus their energies and your resources.

Due to its abundant use in organizations, this workshop uses balanced scorecard as the tools to define and align strategic goals. However, balanced scorecard only works if its information is disseminated throughout the organization. This workshop helps executives, PMO managers, executive sponsors, project managers, and their project teams understand why and how a strategy is defined, the use of activity and strategy maps, and how they apply to the organization's projects.

Projects are never a success when they are delivered—their product must be adopted to declare success. Whether you are delivering a process for HR, creating new model of cell phone for your customers, or implementing a new ERP system for your company, if they do not see value in the output of your project, it is a failure. Most project teams, however, are focused on maintaining scope, schedule, and budget, they are far removed from the end-user, and they have little concept on how to persuade someone to use what they are developing. The fact of the matter is, though, that if they are the first people involved in the making a tangible product that their customers can use, adapt, and enhance to create value.

Organization Change Management for Project Teams helps your project manager, their teams, and their stakeholders:

Visualizing Change, is a new highly interactive form of workshop/seminar. It addresses virtually any problem by modeling the current and desired future states. If desired, it can be used to apply a set of principles to test how they can affect the problem. Visualizing Change workshops target specific problems that face business today.

Risk is in everything we do in life, from going to the store to managing our projects. If we understand the risks associated with something we are doing, we can address the risks better and in many cases avoid them all together. Unfortunately, risk often scares us and as a result, we ignore it. This course identifies types of risks on projects and ways to lessen their effects. What you will cover:

People fail to realize how many actions in personal and profession lives require negotiation. Whether managing contracts, running a project, or working on a raise, negotiation is a daily task. Implementing a process around negotiation and understanding the techniques for convincing your “buyer” of the need are critical in maximizing your chances for success. The planning that a process provides ensures collecting the correct information for preparing and proposing the new idea.

Almost every project has some form of outsourcing. It may be bringing in a contract laborer, a programming team, or someone to build the entire product. The reasons are varied and include staff augmentation, acquiring a specific talent, risk mitigation and more! Regardless of the situation, project managers need to understand the outsourcing process from all angles to ensure each party gets value from the partnership. Creating the correct business agreement is crucial to attaining the best results for your project.

Whether you are a project or a functional manager, estimates are a daily part of your life. Team members need to make estimates for a variety of reasons, these include:

• The amount of time for a task.
• The cost for resources.
• The cost of software, hardware and other materials.
• The time required to finish a task.

Most projects’ problems exist long before there is approval for the project to begin. Unrealistic expectations, misaligned goals, improper supplier involvement, and poor definition are a few reasons that projects go awry. Therefore, looking at different methods to start projects—getting engaged with the customer long before the project starts—is critical.

Daily, we are involved in two acts—developing and following process and generating estimate. We cannot escape them; they are part of the human experience. Processes are required to maintain consistency, accuracy, and abide by regulations. Estimates are required in every task we do.  Add people—people with personality, prejudice, and protest—and estimating becomes quite demanding.

A few weeks ago, I posted an article on five of the ten stupidest decisions management had done on troubled projects, as promised, here are the other five. Although these may all bring a little light hearted laughter, the goal is to educate in order to avoid repeat performances. We all have seen, and made, dumb decisions; finger pointing and blame will not improve the result. So, read on, enjoy and then share your experiences so we all learn more.