Overview
The attitudes and skills of the people who deliver projects can play a major role in the successful completion of any project. A ‘Master’ project manager knows that successful project management is more about soft skills than it is about hard skills – projects don’t fail because someone did the PERT analysis wrong, but because of a lack of leadership and communication! As a project manager, ‘what’ you do is of course important, but ‘how’ you go about doing it is absolutely critical.

It is often said that project management is both an art and a science. Mastery of the soft skills, the ‘art’ of project management, will enable you to navigate the challenges of working with others on projects.

Programme Objectives
This seminar focuses on the practice of project management soft skills, providing a range of soft skills tools and techniques that can be used to reduce people problems and overcome interpersonal barriers. The seminar will demonstrate some ‘critical’ habits that will help you manage projects more successfully. Through gaining insight into various people issues, such as time management, personality types, understanding building and motivating and developing teams, developing leadership skills, managing conflict, and negotiation skills, better management of project can result.
Seminar attendees will learn:

• What makes a person a ‘Master’ of Project Management
• The 7 habits of a highly effective Project Managers
• The importance of knowing who the stakeholders are
• How to define the objectives of a project
• The importance of planning and the planning process
• How to gain and maintain commitment
• The importance of handling uncertainty on a project
• How to set up and operate systems to monitor and control projects

Core Competencies

• Selecting and leading project teams
• Leading a team in preparing and executing a project plan
• Identifying and analyzing project risk
• Personal effectiveness
• Ability to influence people over who you have little or no authority
• Dealing with changes to a project
• Measuring results against goals

Training Methodology
This seminar will utilize a combination of traditional style lectures, interactive syndicate work, case studies, exercises, group discussions, videos, and discussions of real life examples.

Programme Outline

DAY 1

Introduction to Projects

• What is a project?
• What is project management?
• How to become a ‘Master’ of project management
• Why do project managers have to be leaders
• Leading a team
• The 7 habits of a highly effective project manager

Organizing and Planning the Project

• Who are the stakeholders?
• What are the objectives?
• Defining project success criteria
• Planning issues
• Project planning
• Handling uncertainty (project risk management)

DAY 2

Leading a Successful Team

• Human behaviors that impact project success
• Motivating individuals and the team
• The keys to gaining and maintaining commitment
• Effective influence and persuasion
• Effective delegation

Taking Action and Keeping Focused

• Influences on decision making
• Problem solving
• Staying focused and avoiding distractions
• Handling changes
• Updating the plan

DAY 3

Monitoring and Controlling the Project

• Knowledge management
• Integrating project scope, time and cost
• Collecting, storing and managing data and information
• Measures and indicators to monitor performance
• Managing the inevitable conflicts that occur
• Lessons learned
• Creating learning organization