It is the beginning of the new year and you know what that means: it is time for personal betterment! Join us in our beautiful new class room facility to further your skills in Project Management, SharePoint, and Microsoft Project while earning some PDUs in the process.
Practical Project Management
Our Practical Project Management course is a great introduction to the Project Management discipline. Long time practitioners of Project Management methodologies use a lot of acronyms and industry specific jargon. We break down these arcane terms and show you how you can use the principles that they represent to improve your productivity and management success.
The methods we teach are well established and are based on the best practices standards from the Project Management Institute’s Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (aka, PMI’s PMBOK).
In this course, we will break up into small groups to take a project from cradle to grave. We supply you with a good deal of open tools and templates to assist you in managing projects which you can take with you, fine-tune to fit your specific needs, and put them to work for delivering immediate ROI.
This course serves as an excellent lead-in to the concepts covered in our Mastering Requirements Gathering course.
SharePoint 2010 for Effective Project Management
SharePoint is a fantastic tool for document management and team communication, but that’s not all there is to it. While SharePoint’s friendly user interface lends itself exceptionally well to standard Project Management practices, SharePoint can be an integral part of any team collaboration – not just project teams. In this hands-on course, we walk you through building sites and exploring SharePoint’s out-of-the box features.
You don’t have to be a Project Manager to find SharePoint a positive influence on your processes. Whatever term you use to describe your role in your organization (Project Manager, Team Member, Executive, Employee, Grunt), SharePoint can help you get your job done.
By the end of this course you will have a strong familiarity with the SharePoint platform and solid knowledge of its application for getting projects done.
Managing Projects with Microsoft Project (2007 & 2010)
We have two versions of the Managing Projects with Microsoft Project course. One is optimized for using Microsoft Project 2010 and the other for using Microsoft Project 2007. The intent of both courses is the same however: to get you inside the mind of the Microsoft scheduling engine.
To do this, we cover in-depth the power of the flexible scheduling approach in Microsoft Project. If you’ve ever been frustrated by Project, you’ve probably found yourself hammering away, trying to force Project to suit a static schedule. We’ll show you how to work with Project to build well formed, dynamic schedules.
With our Mobile Lab, you’ll be able to use Project over the length of this course even if you don’t own it yourself!
Mastering Requirements Gathering
In our Practical Project Management course we’ll introduce you to the concept of requirements gathering, but this course is where you really get to the meat of it.
Often, a successful project is defined as a project that is on time, within scope, and on budget. We take a slightly different perspective. While the standard definition can certainly indicate the potential for a successful project, we define project success as a satisfied customer. And there is only one sure way to get a satisfied customer: requirements gathering.
Learn how to define and document your customers’ needs, prevent scope creep, and ensure project success.
We provide you with tools and templates for your own professional use and walk you through the requirements gathering process and life cycle with a full hands-on simulation.
PMP Prep
If you are preparing to get your Project Management Professional (PMP) certification, this is the course for you.
We walk you through a long list of tips and tricks for taking the exam and passing all of the other necessary requirements. We provide you with an overview of the application process, a tool for collecting the requisite hours, and guidelines for getting certified.
When you leave this class you’ll have a good idea about what to expect from the test, tools to help you get there, and two books in your hands (The PMP Exam: How to Pass on Your First Try by Andy Crowe and PMI’s PMBOK 4th Edition).
Stay up to date!
Remember, you can always find our most up-to-date public course listing on our public class schedule.
Pictured here is Eric Jennett receiving the Jim O-Brien Lifetime Achievement Award from Jim himself. The Award is given annually by the PMI Scheduling Community for significant lifetime contribution to the scheduling profession.
I first met Eric Jennett at the 5th Annual PMI College of Scheduling conference in Chicago in 2008. Eric was the recipient of the Jim O’Brien Lifetime Achievement award.
I had heard of PMP #1, however I was now talking to the man, sitting in awe with Eric following the award dinner. Not only was I talking to the man that started it all, but everything he was now saying to me still made sense, some 40 years later. Eric was a key driving force behind the growth of an organization that 40 year later grew more than 350 times their wildest expectations (that red-line on the chart below is an exponential curve overlaid on 40 years of membership growth at PMI) … Project Managers can sometimes be extremely conservative in their estimates.
This graphic illustrates the exponential growth of PMI over the past 4 decades. This growth was largely fueled by the PMP certification, for which Eric Jennett was officially the first… PMP #1.
Sure there have been thousands of others along the way that have contributed to the growth and development of PMI, however I believe that Eric Jennett is the Project Management equivalent of Henry Ford …. Eric set the wheels in motion and we all got in our cars and followed ….
Doc Dochtermann is a Vice President at Advisicon. Doc is currently the Marketing & Communications Lead for the PMI Scheduling Community of Practice (SCoP). You can learn more about the Scheduling Community by visiting http://scheduling.vc.pmi.org/.
Why wait for a Service Pack when you can save your project managers hours of time now?
Issue – A Project Manager receives a task update from a team member in Project Web App (PWA) and after approving that update, the Project Manager then must go to Project Professional and open and publish each project for the updates to apply to the schedule. This is a very time consuming activity and is prone to error if a project gets accidentally missed.
Solution 1 – Wait for the release of Service Pack 1 from Microsoft where an auto publish feature will be available.
Solution 2 – Following your normal task approval, publish the project in PWA using this tip.
From the PWA Quick Launch, click Approval Center.
On the Approvals tab on the Ribbon, in the Navigate group, locate the History button.
From the History list, click Status Updates
In the list of recently approved updates, locate the recently approved tasks that are showing a Status of Unpublished.
Select the check box next to each Unpublished task and click Publish.
Done!!
Note: This also works if you have configured Project Server for Single Entry Mode.
You can continue working on other activities in PWA as desired and now only use Project Professional for more detailed analysis or additional changes to the schedule.
Hope this saves you time,
Cindy
Cindy Lewis, MCTS, MCITP, MCT, PMP, PMI-SP
Advisicon | Senior Project Advisor
‘Helping You Build A Project Management Culture’
Twitter @LewisCindy
(C) 1.616.446.8569
