Intended for executive leaders, this presentation provides a succinct overview of the role of project management. In less than 8 hours, it gives them insight into why projects fail, what makes projects succeed, and how professional project mgmt. increases success.

While primarily lecture, the session includes a number of interactive exer-cises to enhance understanding. Note that strong management support is one of the top ten factors proven to ensure the success of new systems.

The instructor for this course will be a project specialist with extensive organizational experience, such as Kris Mathisen (Click here for bio.). This ensures that the audience for this course, professionals with responsibility for managing projects, project teams, or project management office staff, will learn highly practical techniques. Each participant also receives a supporting notebook with tips, exercises and references.

For maximum learning, preferred class size is 10 or fewer. See list to the right for key topics in this 1-day session.

• Project management life cycle

• Project charter development

• Project and team organization

• Work breakdown structure (WBS) development

• Procedure Network Analysis

• Estimating activity duration and negotiating realistic estimates

• Scheduling

• Iterative plan refinement

• Project staffing

• Scope and issues management

• Budgeting

• Quality assurance

• Project control—status/progress, reports and meetings, corrective action, change and issues control

Intended for executives and senior managers, this mini-seminar focuses on the link between portfolio planning, project selection and success. In less than 4 hours, it provides executives with decision making techniques and tools to help them link IT investment decisions to strategic objectives, perform an opportunity assessment, and select the "right mix" of projects.

While primarily lecture, the session includes a number of interactive exercises to enhance understanding. Note that informed project selection strategies are critical to effective resource deployment.

The key instructor is Bruce McGraw (Click here for bio.), a certified PMP with extensive experience managing large projects and programs. Bruce holds a Master's degree in Technology Management from the University of Maryland.

For maximum learning, class size is generally 10 or less. See the list in the sidebar on the right for major topics addressed in this session.

• Selection Process

• Selection Criteria

• Team Involvement

• Decision Making

Intended for project managers, this pre-sentation provides a "back to the basics" view of staffing projects with the right people. There is no project management task that is more important to do well. Effective staffing requires a solid under-standing of what team members will be required to do, any skill gaps that must be filled, perhaps in unorthodox ways, and most of all, a deep appreciation of what personal characteristics are essential for successful team operations.

While primarily lecture, the session includes a number of interactive exercises to enhance understanding and numerous real world examples.

The instructor for this course will be a project specialist with extensive organizational experience, such as Bruce McGraw (Click here for bio.). This ensures that the audience for this course, professionals responsible for managing and/or staffing projects and project management offices, learn practical skills to help influence people and decisions in a positive way. Each participant also receives a supporting notebook with tips, exercises and references.

For maximum learning, preferred class size is 10 or fewer. See list to the right for key topics in this 1-day session.

Core problems of teams

• Characteristics of effective project teams

• Characteristics of effective project team leaders

• Selecting and developing project team members

• Visualizing the goal

• Creating buy-in for goals

• Developing effective project team leaders

• Achieving high project team member participation

• Creating effective work conditions for project team success

• Effective facilitation skills to drive project team success

• Getting results through effective action plans

• Maintaining effectiveness of the project team

• Handling disruptive events

• Measuring and monitoring project team and results

• Best practices and tools for project team success