Great project managers are the lynch pin of consulting organisations. Being a great project manager is really hard. Consultants who have learnt ‘on the job’ often don’t have the tools and approaches to support consistent success.
Deploying staff, delivering projects, client centricity, developing team members, maximising utilisation, completing work, achieving profit, recognising revenue and positive cash flow are just some of the many things project managers directly or indirectly control. They can make or break our organisation.
Great training has to be bespoke to the organisation it serves.
Great training needs to cater to different learning styles and follow the see one – do one – teach one methodology. It should involve scenarios and role play that puts the new skills into practice and tests the delegates and promote them using the new skills they are learning.
In project management training delivered by us we setup for success by undertaking the following.
- Discovery call with leadership team and commissioning leader to understand what the organisation needs, budget and timescale and success outcomes they’d like to see
- Discovery calls held with delegates to establish the current status quo
- Scenarios and role play built from real life coaching examples discussed with members of the organisation and addressing challenges in the organisation
- Creation of clear lesson plans to cover the training, sign off the lesson plan with the commissioning leader and other key stakeholders and defining their active involvement in making the session a success
- Production and sign off of the training material, scenarios and association tools and checklists we are using
- Ensuring the training location is fit-for purpose and will create a good learning environment for delegates
This gives everyone a high level of confidence in the product. We then deliver!
We covered a number of topics based on the clients needs.
- Setting up the project for success – planning preparation, premortem, delivery schedule including gantt, comms plan
- Thinking commercially including change control, financial forecasting, monthly performance management
- Stakeholder mapping and management
- Communications best practice
- Having difficult conversations and negotiation
- Risk Management
- Previous training with the same client had also included coaching, delegation, prioritisation and leadership styles which we referenced and utilised.
Benefits of this approach to project management training include;
- Highly client centric and bespoke programme for the organisation
- Giving confidence to the organisation that they will get exactly what they want with high success rate of wants vs outcomes
- Highly engaged teams who feel they are receiving training which has been designed for them and are therefore highly engaged – learn and retain more
- Deployment of tried and tested tools to support performance of the project managers and their teams
- Pre and post engagement preparation and follow-up to support different learning styles and the embedding of the training and giving further confidence
- Tying into and embedding the material in organisational systems and processes
What did clients say?
The clients leadership team were delighted with the workshop and were seeing project managers using the tools taught immediately after the session.
And delegates…”The training was very well organized, prepared, conducted and managed. Practical, dynamic exercises, either in pairs or small groups (including role play) gave the opportunity to everyone to participate and engage with colleagues.”
“The training has been extremely useful in broadening my view on several aspects of PM, and the real life examples were extremely useful in understanding how to apply the concepts. Thank you very much! I feel much more empowered—true to your company’s name—to approach project management with a stronger foundation.”
EMPOWERED2 