Workshops and Sessions

We offer live training workshops and seminars with several project management topics. Seminars are one-hour overview sessions. Workshops are one day and include training with in-depth exercises and examples, and may be specific to your project or your organization, developing the processes and deliverables to give you a jump start.

SeminarWorkshopTraining Description
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Is your portfolio of projects actually providing strategic value to the organization? Many don’t know... Understanding the organization’s goals and how projects support these goals will contribute to the success of the project, project managers, a PMO, and ultimately the organization. See an introduction to PMI’s new Practice Guide to Governance of Portfolios, Programs, and Projects, along with simple techniques to quickly assess project strategic alignment and measure the overall value and alignment of the portfolio, and see where the investment really goes. In our workshop, we can additionally facilitate a session to start planning and defining strategies and goals, methods for project/portfolio alignment, and project selection and prioritization.
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Have you ever been given an unreasonable deadline before the project has even started? Not enough resources? Unclear charter or objectives? This session will cover methods to manage stakeholder expectations using risk management techniques to raise awareness and plan the project for success. See how to apply Risk Management tools and techniques from the PMBOK Guide to influence and plan with stakeholders, including risk agreement, best and worst case estimates, simulations, and contingency planning.
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Most projects don’t do any risk assessment, or just identify a list of risks but don’t do anything about the risks. This is an in-depth session with a practical approach to identifying risks, analyzing, planning responses, and enacting plans, and securing contingency budget and schedule. The result is a Risk Management Process that you can use for your own project, or implement for the organization.
  • Understanding uncertainty and probability, Risk and corporate cultures, and setting Stakeholder Expectations.
  • Risk Identification
  • Risk Questionnaires, Checklists
  • Qualitative and Quantitative Risk Analysis
  • Decision Making Techniques
  • PERT
  • Monte Carlo Simulation
  • Risk Responses
  • Contingency Planning
  • Negotiating Contingency Budget and Schedule
  • Contingency Scheduling (Mitigation Steps, Buffers, Delays, Plan B)
  • Scheduling Workshop Example if MS Project is in use
  • Controlling Risks
In our workshop, the focus is to plan how to implement with your project, and hold a risk planning session for your actual project with your project team.
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Project Managers negotiate all through the project: deadlines, resources, scope, budgets, and much more. This session will cover the many aspects where project negotiation is crucial, and ways to help you get the best possible decisions and outcomes. Learn how to use tools and techniques from the PMBOK Guide, personal influence, and body language tricks along with video and picture examples, to help you and your project be successful. In our workshop, we’ll go into more details, examples and techniques to organizing and managing projects, personal influencing, negotiating and facilitating techniques, plus an in-depth look at sending and receiving body language.
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Many of us don’t conduct lessons learned sessions, and when we do, the document usually gets lost and others don’t get to learn from your valuable experiences. Hear about the challenges we all face with lessons learned and how we might do better: why lessons sessions are difficult, techniques to encourage participation, methods to capture and share results, and how to organize lessons and other vital project information, for ALL projects, with a knowledge and learning system - so you can truly learn from past lessons and experiences. In our workshop, we’ll additionally facilitate an actual lessons learned session, and develop your plans and responses from the lessons learned.
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A crash course primer in the fundamentals of Project Management. Based on PMI’s Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge, you’ll learn the basics of project management with examples of processes and deliverables for planning and managing projects.
  • Introduction to Project Management
  • Introduction to PMI's Project Management Body of Knowledge and the knowledge areas of project management
  • Work Breakdown Structures
  • Estimating
  • Risk, Issue, and Change Management
  • Project Scheduling
  • Project Execution
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We all work on projects - not just the project managers - as a team member working on assigned to a project, involved and affected by the project outcomes, as the customer or sponsor, as a functional or resource manager, and sometimes need to manage a project ourselves. This session introduces the basics involved in planning and managing a project, and shows what you can (or should) expect from the project as a stakeholder, and essentials needed to manage your own projects.
  • Introduction to Project Management
  • Project Planning
  • Risk, Issue, and Change Management
  • Estimating
  • Contingency Planning
  • Scheduling
  • Execution
  • Monitoring & Controlling
  • Identifying and Resolving Problems
  • Lessons Learned
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An introduction to Agile techniques and how Agile and traditional Project Management come together. Includes various agile methodologies and practices, and several techniques in how a typical project manager can works with an agile while still fulfilling the organizational project management needs. Includes perspectives of how traditional PMI techniques can be applied with an Agile project.
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There are a few simple tricks to using MS Project effectively that most people don’t know. In this session, you’ll get an overview of project management scheduling concepts, disciplines that every project should use, and how to effectively plan and manage a project using MS Project.
  • Introduction to Project Scheduling Concepts
  • Hands-on exercises using MS Project to define, schedule, & execute a project
  • Getting Familiar with MS Project
  • Developing a Schedule
    • Task Estimates, Dependencies, Resources
    • Task Types, Milestones, Constraints, Baselining
  • Updating and Reviewing Progress
    • Tracking Progress, Baseline vs. Actual, Variance
  • MS Project Tricks & Customization
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Most people think Microsoft Project and Agile Project Management don't go together. Microsoft Project includes some new features specifically to plan and manage Agile projects. See how to use Microsoft Project to structure an Agile Project or Program, use the new built-in agile planning and organizing features, and tricks to measure and predict sprint performance and velocity.
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Resource leveling with Microsoft Project can be confusing and intimidating, often unexpectedly shifting dates and extending a schedule, sometimes by years.  By understanding the principles and options Microsoft Project provides to level resources and predict a schedule, resource leveling is helpful toward realistic and accurate schedules, efficient and reasonable resource allocations, and in some cases even accelerating schedules.  Live examples will show how to determine the number of resources needed, resolve resource over-allocations, and predict finish dates.
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Just the mention of Earned Value tends to scare everyone, thinking it’s just too complex to implement and too difficult to comprehend. But if there’s a silver bullet in project management, Earned Value Management is it. It allows us to monitor schedule and budget performance at any time in the project, analyze trends, and give forecasts. Microsoft Project has earned value techniques already built-in - there are just a few tricks to enable and make it work. See how you can use Microsoft Project for Earned Value with your project.
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An overview and demonstration of Microsoft Project Server/Online, including portfolio, resource, and project management, project collaboration sites, risks and issue management, task assignment and progress updates, and reporting options.
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An in-depth demonstration and discussion of the portfolio management features with Microsoft Project Server or Online, including strategic alignment and portfolio optimization.
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An in-depth demonstration and discussion of the resource management and forecasting features with Microsoft Project Server or Online, including the enterprise resource pool, resource demand from projects and from high-level resource forecasting, resource assignments and allocations, and capacity/demand planning.