What a training organisation can do for a client

By Susan Tuttle, Associate Trainer.

Earlier this year I was commissioned with the development and delivery of a bespoke Project Management course to a specific client. After running the series of courses successfully (there have been nine issues), I thought of sharing a summary end-of-event assessment with you.

The delegates – who ranged from never having been on a project to leading projects (especially events) – were open to the ideas and principles of the client’s own Project Management framework, as well as a generic PM approach. The three hours spent on each of the courses seemed enough time for them to try out important aspects of PM on a fictitious case study, as well as bring up ideas and issues of using a methodology/framework on real-life projects.

The course opened with a brief overview of the client’s own PM framework and how it could be applied to projects using a matrix of project categories. Most delegates understood this concept, but wanted more clarification on the categories and how exactly this would affect their current and future projects.

The client divides its framework in four phases: ‘Consider’, ‘Organise’, ‘Realise’ and ‘Close Down’.

The second topic of the course covered the ‘Consider’ phase, which concentrates on exploring options and justifying the project investment. Again delegates understood the value of a Business Case, but questioned the practicalities when the “decision had already been made” to do the project or pursue a certain option. No one had experienced comparing the project option with the “do nothing” option on 'real' projects.

The third topic, ‘Organise’, involved critiquing and adding to a Project Initiation Document. This was consistently met with apprehension from the name of the document to the level of detail required for a PID.

During the ‘Realise’ portion of the course, the delegates were asked to deal with risks, issues and changes, based on their scenarios. Information previously defined (or not) in the PID helped the delegates understand the importance of the information from the PID to assist them in managing the execution of the project.

Finally, when working on ‘Closing Down’ and evaluating the case study project, delegates made several connections to identifying, confirming and agreeing the information from the PID in order to achieve a successful outcome at the end of the project, especially in the three areas focused on during the PID exercise – Risks, Communications and Product Descriptions.

As it’s clear from this example, tailoring well-known Best Practices methodologies to the needs of each specific client is something that can be done – and in the case of Maven Training, that’s where we excel!