IvyBay has recorded a set of previously held webinars on practical project management.
The can be found on our YouTube channel (along with our 'Stuff that Helps' shorts), or from the links below.
The Basics
What It Is: Basic concepts of project management (in plain English)
What You Get: By the end of the session, you'll
- Understand the terminology and translate it successfully
- Walk through the major steps of creating a project plan
- Understand the need for goals and the guidance they provide
- See the danger of unstated assumptions (and know how to draw them out)
- Know the roles and responsibilities of the players in a project
What It Is: The building blocks to create a project schedule
What You Get: By the end of the session you'll
- Know how to break a project into tasks
- Understand when sub-tasks are a good thing
- Be able to identify resources for your tasks
- Understand how dependencies work
What It Is: The meat of creating a project plan - scheduling, percent complete, new news
What You Get: By the end of the session you'll
- Be able to put a schedule together from your tasks and dependencies
- Understand how and when percentage completion is useful
- Have a guideline for dealing with changes in the project
What It Is: Major project dimensions (4 Dials), Change management, and contingency planning.
What You Get: By the end of the session you'll
- Understand the four main parameters of any project and how to identify them
- Know the basics of managing the inevitable changes to a project
- Be able to identify the need for contingency planning and provide it
What It Is: Explore some of the tools available for documenting and tracking a project plan (traditional methodologies - a list of Agile tools will be provided for those who are interested but they won't be explored in the webinar)
What You Get: By the end of the session you'll
- Have a list of possible tools
- Understand what the tools look like and what they will do for you
- Have options for picking a tool that works for you
What It Is: Set up and run an entire project from beginning to end
What You Get: By the end of the session you'll
- Understand how all the project pieces fit together
- Have a working model for your own projects
Advanced
What It Is: Identify and manage key relationships
What You Get: By the end of the session, you'll
- Understand why one unhappy person can ruin your beautiful plan
- See the need for establishing and managing relationships within the project team
- Have techniques at hand for establishing and maintaining project relationships
- Understand the basics of learning styles and their application
What It Is: Risk analysis, assessment, and management
What You Get: By the end of the session you'll
- Know where and how to look for risk to your project
- Have a handle on how to report risk
- Understand the need for (and value of) risk mitigation and contingency planning
What It Is: Project communication including stats reporting and effective meetings
What You Get: By the end of the session you'll
- Have formats for different kinds of reporting - to the team, to management, to stakeholders
- Be prepared with strategies for communicating among distributed teams, even across multiple timezones
- Hold effective meetings no matter what the subject
- See the finer points of nagging
What It Is: Root cause analysis - the need for it, riggers, timing, and methodologies
What You Get: Know when to perform a RCA and who to involve
- Be able to work through your own RCA using tools and techniques presented
What It Is: There's always room for improvement. How to recognize the opportunities, determine process improvements, and roll them out
What You Get: By the end of the session you'll
- Know the best way (and time) to run a retrospective review (AKA post-mortem)
- Recognize opportunities for both wholesale change and minor process tinkering
- Understand the flip side - knowing what's working
- Have options for documenting and rolling out improvements
What It Is: Concepts, tools, and uses of systems analysis to understand how multiple systems interact and what effect changing one will have on another
What You Get: By the end of the session you'll
- Understand what systems analysis is all about
- Know how business and process analysis work with systems analysis
- Be able to identify/build a data flow diagram and know why it's useful
What It Is: Standard, traditional project management techniques have very specific rules. We'll cover the basic Waterfall model and a few Spiral modifications in this webinar. These techniques are in widespread use and are particularly helpful when trying to adhere to a strict set of requirements.
What You Get: By the end of the session you'll
- Be able to identify the steps in a standard Waterfall model
- Know what a Spiral Waterfall model looks like
- Be able to apply both models easily
- Know the rules of the game
What It Is: Agile project management techniques grew out of software development but are hugely useful for any kind of project where the requirements are changing and evolving.
What You Get: By the end of the session you'll
- Understand how Agile project management differs from more traditional methodologies
- Know when Agile is a good fit for a project
- Be able to apply the basics of Agile project management