Cinda Voegtli of ProjectConnections.com

Morning Session

Strong Project Starts

How you start will make or break the project down the road. This session covers 4 team start-up activities that are a must for any sized project, and why this strong starts approach and mindset is so critical.

• Results-focus for everyone – Ensure your team understands the business goals and scope of your project so that everyone starts out headed in the same direction.
• A strong core team – Understand who must absolutely be involved up front and define their responsibilities strongly.
• The job of the leader and team –  finding the right balance among time-cost-scope objectives to achieve the critical business
• The right way to launch the core team and the work – what a strong team kickoff includes and looks like
• Critical upfront communication and collaboration – Conversations you need to have early with sponsors, managers, vendors, and other project teams.

Afternoon Session

Leading and Managing without Authority  

Whose help, effort, or commitment do you  need?  And how do you get it when you have no authority?  The answers lie in how the project manager specifically leads the team and orchestrates critical interactions at different project stages, coupled with how they leverage their personal credibility, business-savvy insights, communication skills, and more.    

Managing successfully without formal authority requires utilizing both near-term tactical plans for current projects, as well as a strategy for systematically building your influence across your organization over time.   This workshop provides tools and techniques to help you do both.   

We will discuss real-world “managing without authority” challenges in areas such as getting decisions made and honored, getting commitments made and held, and solving problems that require cooperation inside and outside the team:

• Obtaining time from critical but scarce resources and decision-makers
• Resolving conflicts among functional groups
• Getting time and effort from a busy sponsor
• Pushing back on unreasonable completion dates
• Getting team members to make and meet schedule commitments
• Making tough tradeoff decisions that stakeholders buy into
• Getting consistent, truthful status even when the news is bad
• Stopping disruptive changes, even if made by a  powerful stakeholder
• Hearing about risks and issues from team members before it’s too late to act
• Getting action on cross-project issues threatening your team
• Influencing processes and priorities in the organization

Biography:

Dr. Ginger Levin

Morning Session

Changing the Culture from ‘Knowledge is Power’ to ‘Knowledge Sharing is Power”

The goal of this workshop is to describe approaches to best incorporate knowledge management into the daily lives of program and project professionals.  The emphasis often is on thinking that ‘knowledge is power’, while instead the focus should be on ‘knowledge sharing is power’.  Such an approach, though, represents a culture change for most people.  However, we must move in this direction especially with the turnover of staff members on programs and projects, the aging workforce, and the need to be able to quickly access required information for our work as project professionals.  The workshop presents a methodology to incorporate knowledge management into the program and project management life cycles.

  Learning Objectives

• Describe the importance of lessons learned in program and project management
• Define knowledge management and knowledge sharing
• Explain a knowledge management methodology for program and project management
• Provide some guidelines to foster knowledge management and knowledge sharing
• Discuss ways to change the paradigm in your organization

Afternoon Session

Embracing, Adapting, and Exploiting Change:  Guidelines for Success

As project professionals our focus is to minimize change especially in scope, schedule, budget, and quality; however, change is constant in our lives and a new view of it at the portfolio, program, and project levels is required.  While we must be excellent in managing change when it occurs, we also must take a different view of it and embrace and exploit it so it leads to greater benefits and opportunities.  We must change the focus from one who resists change to being a change agent recognizing the business value changes can have in our organization. This interactive workshop describes how we can refocus and implement changes in a positive manner with guidelines for success.

 Learning Objectives:

• Explain why a focus on embracing and exploiting change is necessary
• Identify the performance competencies and personal competencies you need to establish an environment conducive to change
• List and manage the types of changes that can affect your program or project
• Prepare an action plan

Biography:

Dr. Ginger Levin is a Senior Consultant, Author, and Educator in project management.  Her specialty areas are portfolio management, program management, change management, the Project Management Office, metrics, and maturity assessments.  She is certified as a PMP®, PgMP® and as an OPM3® Certified Professional.  She was the second person in the world to receive the PgMP.  In addition, Dr. Levin is an Adjunct Professor for the University of Wisconsin-Platteville where she teaches in its M.S. in Project Management Program, and for SKEMA University, France, in its doctoral programs in project management. Six of her students have won the Project Management Institute’s (PMI) Student Paper of the Year Award.

Cinda Voegtli of ProjectConnections.com

Biography:

Dr. Ginger Levin

Biography:

Cinda Voegtli of ProjectConnections.com

Biography:

Dr. Ginger Levin

Biography: