Managing and Steering Complex Projects

Introduction:

In today's business landscape, companies recognize the critical importance of effective project management for driving business growth and facilitating organizational change. While many organizations actively seek to enhance their project management capabilities to tackle increasingly intricate and innovative projects, only a few have managed to effectively align their strategic objectives with their project goals.

Course Objectives:

By the end of this Managing and Steering Complex Projects program you will learn:

• To manage and steer complexity and change
• Incorporate the science of complexity into project management strategies
• Manage complex projects involving strategic risks
• Apply a complexity assessment model and adaptive process
• Minimize uncertainty by leveraging best practices from Critical Chain, Agile, and Lean approaches
• Upgrade from traditional PPM approaches
• Identify the new generation of projects and program types 
• Develop your own personal project management style 
• Grasp the advantage of the latest cutting-edge research 
• A valuable overview of the current state and future trends in project/program management.

Who Should Attend?

Managing and Steering Complex Projects program is ideal for:

• C-suite and senior-level executives seeking an overview of project management as well as insights on choosing the most appropriate project approach based on their strategic objective.
• Highly experienced PMP-certified project managers looking to go deeper than traditional PMP courses and develop their leadership skills in project management.
• Consultants who need the skill to articulate the case for projects and influence multiple stakeholders.
• The programs lessons are applicable across most major industries, including banking and finance, consulting, government, infrastructure,

Course Outlines:

Introduction to Steering Complex Projects

• The project initialization
• The project planning
• Design of project plans, cost estimates and budgets
• Planning of project quality, personnel deployment and communication channels

 Projects as Strategic Change

• Understand the strategic goals of the organization and articulate what the project outcomes will contribute to the strategy
• Understand the political process of creating project goals, including negotiating and seeking win-win coalitions
• Translate high level strategic goals into project goals

Execution Projects

• Identify the key characteristics of execution projects
• Understand the managerial relevance of the critical path and limitations
• Identify uncertainties and take mitigative or responsive actions

 Novel Projects

• Identify the key characteristics of novel projects and the technical steps of managing them
• Articulate steps to follow when encountering unforeseeable uncertainty
• Understand pivoting/iterating and parallelism, and how to incorporate them into project planning and monitoring

Change Projects

• Identify the four methods for managing a change project
• Generate guidelines for managing the social dimensions of change
• Author a template for stakeholder management

 Managing People and Teams

• Identify and apply ingredients of goal clarity and three criteria for them
• Articulate competency-driven values for a project
• Analyze how to deal with rule-breakers and high-performers and establish related guidelines

Governance

• Understand the role governance plays in maintaining strategic alignment in projects
• Identify the five elements of well-designed governance structures
• Build a framework for managing the governance structure with accountability measures

Partners

• Understand what contracts can and cannot do, and identify the four different types of contracts for an appropriate fit
• Understand the role that co-location can play in project management
• Understand how renegotiation must be built into the contract from the beginning

Project Communications 

• Channels & Models
• Communications Management Plan
• Manage Communications
• Monitor Communications
• Solutions 

Learning and Integration

• Identify the tools for each project type, and how to deploy them
• Make informed choices from the portfolio of tools to ensure projects encourage learning within the organization
• Apply established methods of knowledge exchange and learning tools in a way that is appropriate to the challenges of a project Monitoring and control of project risks, contract management