Project Management Services

Your Source for Project Management Training

Project Management Training

On-Site Customized Project Management Training

The opportunity	IS project managers need training, just as any experts in your organization. There are many sources of seminars and courses available, but they all suffer from one of two problems. Either they're canned, pre-packaged "public" courses, or they're canned, pre-packaged in-house courses. In neither case do they offer completely what you want.
Customized training	Our training is a twenty-hour project management course, delivered at your site, offering the topics that you want covered, with the schedule that you select. Unlike a pre-packaged, canned course, our On-Site Customized Project Management Training delivers the topics that you think are important, with an emphasis on your organization’s unique needs.
The topics you want	We offer a menu of over forty topics, organized into three groups: Project Management, Advanced Project Management, and Management Skills For Project Managers. You can select up to twenty-five topics from any of the three groups. Uncertain about which ones to select? We can offer suggestions once we find out more about your organization.
The schedule you want	The training is twenty hours, and we can deliver this in one of four different schedules:
	A crash course, delivered in two days, ten hours per day
	A normal course, delivered in three days, seven hours per day for the first two days and six hours on the last
	A lengthened course, delivered in four days, five hours per day
	An extended course, delivered in five days, four hours per day
The dates you want	Just pick the dates that are best for you and let us know three weeks in advance. We’ll be there.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Is the course lecture or exercises?	The course is based on a combination of lecture and exercises. Participants work in teams on planning a live project—one of the ones they are involved with. At the end of the course, one project from each team will have the basis for its plan already prepared.
How many participants can attend?	Because the course is interactive, we limit each course to twenty participants. We will deliver it for as few as fifteen. Participants are grouped into teams of four or five members.
What do we need to provide?	We ask you to provide the room, a projector and screen, and the participants. That’s it. If you also want to provide refreshments, that’s at your option.
At what level is the course taught?	That depends upon your participants. We find out before the course what experience your people have and we customize the course to that level. However, there are no prerequisites and we have often delivered the course to new project managers.
What's included in the price?	We offer an all-inclusive course fee that provides you with the following:
	Twenty hours of on-site instruction delivered in person by Jolyon Hallows, author of Information Systems Project Management and The Project Management Office Toolkit.
	All course materials including, for each participant:
	A course binder containing the course notebook, a set of appendices used for exercises, and the course overheads
	A CD containing the course notebook, the appendices, the course overheads, and an electronic copy of Information Systems Project Management, Second Edition
	All travel and living costs for the instructor.
The price includes all your travel and living costs?	Yes.
Do you do an evaluation?	Yes. We ask the participants to evaluate the instructor and the course. We provide you with those evaluations.
What is the price?	That depends on your location and the date on which you want the course. Contact us and we’ll provide you an all-inclusive fixed price. We think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

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The Course Topics and Topic Descriptions

Project Management Topics

Topic Name	Topic Description
Definitions and terminology	The basics. What is a project and how does it differ from other activities? What is project management? What are the stages of a project?
Project success and failure	Why do projects fail? What does it mean to say that a project has failed? What are the warning signals that a project may be heading for trouble?
Defining scope	Learn how to prepare a comprehensive scope statement for a project. Reduce the potential for arguments about scope or expensive and time-consuming changes.
Project benefits and justification	How to determine why a project is being done. What are the benefits and why are they important to the project manager?
Work breakdown	Defining activities: How to create a comprehensive work breakdown structure. Learn an easy technique to ensure that you have defined all the activities and not missed any.
Defining dependencies	How to link activities with dependencies and what errors to avoid. Understand the differences between soft and hard dependencies and how to use them in planning the project.
Estimating	How to prepare valid estimates and create a budget. Have confidence in your project estimates. Understand how to apply the difference between cost and price. Learn how to estimate when the scope is not clear.
Resource leveling	How to plan the best use of people. Learn techniques for leveling resources and reducing schedule pressure on your most valuable people.
Scheduling	How to prepare the schedule. Learn the importance and role of milestones--internal and external.
Risk planning	Learn the four steps to managing risk and how to identify the risks that are most dangerous to your project. Learn two approaches to reducing the riskiness of a risk.
Aligning the plan	How to align the schedule and budget when they exceed what the customer expected. Learn how to plan the project when the customer wants it in March and you can't deliver until July.
The project plan	Learn what a complete project plan should contain. It's more than a Gantt chart or project schedule. How to get approval for your plan.
Organizing the project	How to organize team members and stakeholders for maximum success. Learn techniques of good organization both downwards to the team and upwards to your customer and your management.
Communications	How to plan for communications, both within the team and externally. Learn the different types of communications and when and how to apply each one.
Ensuring quality	How to build quality into the project. Understand the difference between quality and grade: why quality has nothing to do with price, exclusiveness, or superiority.
Managing the budget	How to manage the project to meet the budget. Learn techniques to track the budget and danger areas in project execution.
Tracking progress	Tracking progress using the Estimate At Completion. Learn formal and informal ways to track progress. Understand what a complete tracking system should contain and how to set one up for your project.
Scope changes	Learn the three steps to managing scope changes. Learn how to set up a scope change mechanism and how to ensure that it is used.
Managing risks	How to keep track of risks and identify when risks have become riskier or new ones have emerged.
Schedule slippages	The four steps to deal with schedule slippages. Handling incidental vs. systemic schedule problems.
Status reporting	How to report project status. Learn the most common mistakes in status reporting and how to use status reports to get customer acceptance.
Issues management	Building and making use of an issues log. How do issues arise? How should they be assigned and tracked?
PM deliverables	Understand the basic set of crucial project management deliverables. Improve your project management success with proven tools.
Initiating the project	The right way to initiate projects (and some wrong ways). Learn the steps to ensure that all projects are properly approved and authorized.
Closing the project	How to close a project and get customer approval and signoff. Learn why customers are sometimes reluctant to close a project and how to overcome their resistance. Learn how to conduct post-project and post-implementation reviews.

Advanced Project Management Topics

Course Name	Course Description
Justifying the project	How to justify projects and why it is important to do so. Learn what belongs in a benefits statement or business case and what does not. Learn how to quantify "intangible benefits."
The project context	Learn what to look for in understanding the background to a project. Learn to identify and avoid the traps that come from a poor understanding of how a project came to be.
Stakeholders	How to identify the participants and rank the most important ones. Learn how to use stakeholders to create acceptance and enthusiasm for the project.
Expectations	How to uncover and manage the customer's expectations. Learn how to determine what hidden requirements the customer has and how to shape them.
Project politics	A primer on project politics vs. project sociology and how to manage both. Learn when to negotiate and when to defend yourself and your team.
Defining deliverables	How to ensure that all project deliverables have been defined and identified in the project scope statement.
Advanced scope	Learn techniques of advanced scope management. Understand the four types of scope change and how each must be handled. Learn why "scope creep" is different from "scope change."
Review and approval	How to ensure that the customer properly reviews and approves project deliverables. Define a clear and limited process that will avoid endless repetitions of reviews and delayed approvals.
The customer team	How to manage the customer's team. Learn how to use the customer team to promote the advantages of the project and to ensure that the project is on the right track.
Sub-contractors	How to managing sub-contractors to ensure timely delivery. Learn how to ensure that sub-contractors are on schedule and how to identify the risks that sub-contractors entail.
Micro managing	When and how to micro-manage. Learn when to stand back and let the team members manage themselves and when to require daily, and even hourly, updates.
Effective teams	Seven tips on building effective and powerful teams. Learn how to build teams that are committed to the project and will work to ensure its success.
Project information	How to ensure project information. Learn what material should be in a handoff to the project manager. To a support group. Understand the use of project archives. Learn how to keep crucial information quickly available.

Management Skills for Project Managers

Course Name	Course Description
Setting goals	How to set realistic goals and properly frame outcomes. Learn how to set goals and plan for them to be achieved.
Managing your time	A simple approach to managing your time. Learn how to make sure that you are working on the highest-priority items. Learn how to define what those are.
Effective meetings	Learn how to run meetings that people will enjoy and that produce tangible results. Learn techniques to control the meeting and keep it from going off track.
Effective writing	How to write memos and reports that people will read. Learn simple techniques for ensuring that your written communications actually convey what you intend.
Effective presentations	How to prepare and deliver presentations that will energize and inform your audiences. Learn how deliver presentations that people will want to attend.
Gathering information	How to listen and ask questions for maximum information-gathering. Learn when to question and when to listen. Learn how to gather realistic information.
Bearing bad news	How to bear bad news without losing your job. Learn how to enroll your management in resolving problems rather than blaming them on you.
Dealing with conflict	How to manage conflict, both internal and external. Learn how to identify conflicts before they fester. Learn techniques to defuse conflict and even to use it constructively.
Negotiation skills	How to enter a negotiation. The elements of good negotiating. How to determine when to walk away and what constitutes a good result.

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Kudos From Our Participants

"Tremendous. This was the right course for me"

"Jolyon is a very experienced project manager, and I am glad I took his course."

"His personal experience stories make the course really enjoyable."

"Thanks. It was a blast!"

"This has been a very educational and worthwhile course."

"The exercises were extraordinary and very ‘hands-on,’ realistic situations making them useful to be applied in real work"

"This course was excellent. [A] comprehensive and scientific approach to project management. Wouldn’t change a thing."

"Exercises were creative and interactive."

"Materials and exercises were perfect."

"Mr. Hallows did a fantastic job—kudos to him."

"I … appreciated your enthusiasm. You’re terrific."

"I feel like I now have the framework to effectively manage a project."

"…an excellent class and the instructor had excellent examples which helped you to understand the topics better."

"[The training] will have an immediate impact and I can apply what I learned to my projects I am working on now."

"Now I know where to begin and how to plan it out."

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This web site last updated February 24, 2010