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I work in IT, and their is absolutely no proper project management where I work, no one is trained, knows how to plan or report a project. I want to go on a 1 week course to lean the basics. What course should I do?
MSP ?
Or was that just coincidence ??
MSP my username = MonkeySpacePilot
Not aware of other meanings
MSP is also Managing Successful Programmes, a recognised methodology.
And of course, Micro(S)oft Project, a tool for managing projects.
Anyway, it's all Agile now, innit.
It depends what you want to get out of it. To learn about managing projects I'd say APM foundation for two days then use the knowledge and go back for either Agile or PRINCE2 if you want to learn a methodology, or APM-PMQ to learn more about managing projects.
Can you:
Ignore technical advice?
Nit pick over half an hour on a timesheet whilst burning a day over it?
State in a project meeting with clients you don't really understand anythign being discussed?
Book holidays for all significant deadlines?
Have you poor communication skills?
If you answer yes to more than half there is no further training required.
What's the issue? Delivery or Governance?
If the former, something Agile based particularly for IT.
If the latter, might be better with something from APM like their Project Management Qualification, or if more broad Governance MSP mentioned above (noting the project level Prince2 as a PM methodology is falling out of favour).
PRINCE2 Agile 💪
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I am joking
It depends on lots of things, size of org, who your customers are, how you work with them, what audit requirements you need, how grown up your leadership team is, budget, what happens in other parts of the business....
But as a BA you probably know this.
Outside the UK, PMI/PMP.
Back in the day (don't want to think how long ago now), I did a course with the Open University on project management. It was over a few months but wasn't too onerous and it covered quite a bit of things I've been glad to know about since.
Quick look online, I think it was something like this: Open University Link. It is several decades since I did it so I can't vouch for how it's held up in the intervening time.
It sounds like you're better of paying for a project management consultant to come in and review things and make suggestions etc., there's a lot to be said for experience rather than just what you learn on a course in a week - especially if it's to try and change the culture within an org. Ofc that's likely to be a lot more expensive and might not end up with the results you need...
I've recently been through a day's training a a few days worth of follow up workshops as introduction to PM (for someone who's main job isn't as a PM) with a company called Provek. Our trainer was a guy called Greg and I, surprisingly, got quite a lot out of the sessions. Think he may have also been doing some work with people within the company to help guide their general PM process and tool set up
Make a list of stuff to be done. Check it gets done.
Ignore technical advice?
Nit pick over half an hour on a timesheet whilst burning a day over it?
State in a project meeting with clients you don’t really understand anythign being discussed?
Book holidays for all significant deadlines?
Have you poor communication skills?
This sums up all the PM's that I have come across in the past 20 years.
Just finished working on a project, delivered 1 year late, just had to be dispatched with Carry Over work for 'somebody' at site.
Even senior management was appalling.
The PM could not GAS, now even less so, although still things to finish and ship in 1st week of April.
Personally, if you have the right brain for it, it's just organising and communication. Some people have those skills naturally, some don't. A training course might result in people knowing more but still being terrible at applying them.
So yes, depends on what sort of work you can do, but also whether the actual work suits what you like to do.
Our PMs (on IT projects) are mostly pretty decent, it must be like herding cats sometimes trying to get various IT teams talking to each and coordinating things. Most of our projects (generally under 3 months) just have a kick-off meeting, maybe a weekly update meeting and very high level (mostly in Excel) tracking. It's only the big, long-running projects where MS Project gets used, finances are tracked a bit more closely (I do the effort estimates on projects in my technical area and sometimes get it wrong or there's a major unforeseen issue etc.).
We have very strict change control and PMs are supposed to write the non-technical parts of RFCs (with the technical resources filling in the technical sections), which can cut down on the admin overhead technical resources have (they also arrange permits for datacentre visits etc.).
We've got a decent resource demand system running now to (PMs fill in a spreadsheet with their demand for each resource type across upcoming weeks and it all gets collated into a fancy master spreadsheet where people get allocated to the roles etc.), we are generally under-resourced (on-boarding someone takes 6+ months for security checks, even if they already have DV clearance so it's hard to respond to sudden surges in demand). If there's no PMs feeding this information back for the program managers/delivery directors to understand the bigger picture I think things would fall apart pretty quickly.
Does anyone know any decent online courses for APM foundation? Preferably something I could study at my own pace for a couple of months rather than a dedicated 2 day course.
APM are the default organisation (love them or hate them). Of the courses they run, I would aim for anyone to go straight to the APM PMQ. This can be completed as either a 5 day course or over single days over several weeks with exam at the end. It teaches the generic APM project management process that can more or less be picked up and transplanted into (most) organisations, irrelevant of size.
From Reading your needs, my experience would direct you to this course.
Providers- a list is provided on the AMP site.
Leeds Uni used to run a selection of APM courses, I did a couple as a night school thing through my previous work. They were really good, and gave you the ‘why’ behind the processes at different stages, rather than just a buzz word named ‘what’ like you get in a specific methodology. For me, I found it gave actual useful tools, with options to choose from, rather than a mapped out process that you follow rather than understand.
MSP my username = MonkeySpacePilot
Not aware of other meanings
Ah, I've always wondered - Member of the Scottish Parliament is what I see with those initials and it would have fitted quite nicely with the opening post 😉
Make a list of stuff to be done. Check it gets done.
There's a bit more to it than that. Understanding the order stuff needs done in, how likely stuff is to be delayed, what could be done to mitigate that delay, where the project killing risks are versus the frustrations and delays issues. I always liken our projects to being like building a house, because even though people have never built a house people seem to get that it needs architects, structural engineers, foundation work, budgets, etc and that there's no point getting the painters to turn up if the brickies are still building the walls, but you should be talking to your interior design people so you order the light fittings in time for them being required etc. If you want a 4 bed house with a double garage its usually best to start with that in mind rather than a two bed terrace with a shed and try to upgrade it regularly, and so whilst agile approaches might be better in many ways they shouldn't be an excuse for not understanding the end concept properly.
What’s the issue? Delivery or Governance?
If the former, something Agile based particularly for IT.
Introducing Agile to an organisation that doesn't have it / do it (or do it seriously) is not something 1 employee can do with a 1 week course. Its a massive cultural change across an entire team.
Ignore technical advice?
My technical teams don't like it when I point out that if the PM (its not me) didn't act on their technical advice its probably because they have failed to properly communicate the problem/risk/challenge. If this is regularly happening in your projects then look inwards - often technical people are dreadful at communicating, and if you analyse it properly aren't really playing on the same team as the PM.
In terms of the OP's question:
I work in IT, and their is absolutely no proper project management where I work, no one is trained, knows how to plan or report a project. I want to go on a 1 week course to lean the basics. What course should I do?
What is it you hope to do? Do you want to become a project manager? As you'll see from the comments above its a thankless task. If you already have chaos a newly qualified but inexperienced PM is not going to make a big impact. What you need is a cultural change. That's much harder to introduce but I'm pretty sure (having seem people try and fail in 3 different organisations) that coming back from the training course with some magic new tool/spreadsheet and not enough experience to know when it can/can't be flexible and still work or adapt to this business is destined to failure. In my experience, the worst PMs are the ones who have been on some "brand name" training because they only think the way they were taught to think and use the tools they were provided religiously. Its almost unavoidable on a training course to present the solution you are advocating as being "the right" answer but the best PM approach for your bike club time trial race, building a website for a MTB magazine, integrating DVLA and the Passport office datasets, converting a farmhouse or building HS2 can't all be the same!
If your organisation is excel centric then its probably easiest to start with some simple project tracking in a s/sheet. What needs done, in what order, by who, what might go wrong with it or get in the way (and how will you mitigate that), what else depends on this being done. You can then start to see the critical path, and communicate the priorities. In my experience one of the challenges with software is seeing the progress - defining "done" is hard. Getting people to stick to the same definition of done is harder. Understanding whether 80% there means completing that part will only take 1/4 of the time it took to get here is painful. Its made worse by a lot of the sort of people who work in IT who don't see a conversation about that as constructive but rather as a challenge or accusation about how it took so long to get here or if they've really understood what's left to do.
If you use Jira or some other IT system for tracking progress then you need to know if its the inputs or the reporting thats the issue. Getting Jira admins to help fix reporting, workflows etc is only marginally less painful than getting developers to update their tickets. The latter is a culture / mindset issue.
If you are thinking of doing this stuff in your own time or small chunks there's bound to be stuff on udemy or skill share etc. Unless you want a certificate that is recognised "everywhere" I'd personally avoid the brand name training places. IMHO most of them are not far off a Ponzi scheme.
In general the best (development) teams I have worked for have done agile, but done right. ITs not easy and requires buy in and its not just the PM who need to have knowledge.
Anyway, it’s all Agile now, innit.
Over my dead body.
Mild thread hijack.....
25 years a teacher and I'm done I think so casting about for something to do for my last 9 years full time work and maybe part time after that.....
I'm told by others who know me that apparently I might make a good a project manager. Once I've stopped punching them for their rudeness (1 rung down from HR in most unwelcome addition to the company aren't they - or is that the H&S manager) it might work.
As we all know if you can't do, you teach; so clearly I'm a clueless eejit. No idea which industry would want a burnt out 51 year old teacher as a project manager but someone must be desperate......
I'm guessing some AMP courses under my belt might make me a tiny (tiny) bit less clueless.
There's some good advice up there ^
I wouldn't discount Agile training, but it requires a significant amount of 'buy in' across teams to make it work, and there are many types of projects that will not be suitable to using it.
PRINCE2/APM are very similar. I've got both (and Agile), and have worked in companies who claim to be a 'PRINCE2 organisation', whilst others stick the APM badge on. The main point I'd make is that the PM is just one person in a project team, so it does rather rely on some senior management buy-in to get them to understand that they 'own' the project, not the project manager.