Are you an effective project manager?

Have you got to the stage in life when you are confident that you can manage any project for your organization, big or small? If so, you might be getting a bit frustrated. You might find yourself wondering: Where does my project fit into the bigger picture? Why did the powers that be decide to embark on this project in the first place? Alternatively, you might have proposed a project idea of your own and have had it shot down for no apparent reason – why did this happen?

Here in Velopi, we found the answers to these questions (and many others) when we were preparing our Program Management course. As we came to grips with the five performance domains that make up program management, we learned about strategy and how decision makers choose different projects to charter. We also learned about benefits and the language the decision makers use to justify projects or other work. Not only that, we realized the importance of governance and why it is needed to provide oversight of all work being done in the organization. We also had to dive deeper into stakeholder management, in particular into convincing stakeholders that the change we are planning will be in their best interests, or provide more benefits than drawbacks.

Along with the mechanics of managing a program – a large scale initiative, involving many projects, designed to achieve a strategic goal – we realized that our Program Management course brings our students to a higher level of thinking, effectively teaching them the language that senior executives speak.

Going back to our opening series of questions, we are offering a course that takes project managers to the next level. We introduce them to how senior executives think and how they decide which work to do and how they ensure that work gets done.

While learning about strategy, benefits, governance and change management is extremely useful to senior project managers, we are aware that those of you who are already experienced at the program level might like to obtain an internationally recognized credential in program management. Thus our Program Management course offers additional support for those interested in pursuing the Project Management Institute’s PgMP^® (Program Management Professional) exam.

Does this sound interesting to you? If it does, please get in touch.