PMP Exam Prep is designed for Professionals who wish to pursue for PMP Certification. Making Project Management Associates indispensable for business results.
It is a paradigm shift for some people and it is a life challenging reminder for me. It reminds me to continue work for the desire outcome in my strategies.
Unexpectedly, this course is quite similar with Strategic Profit in some ways. The concept of Organizational Strategy approaches and techniques are very similar. Portfolio strategic management and Project alignment with strategies as well.
Organizational strategy is where the strategy fits. This is where we are establishing Vision, Mission, Objectives, Strategy and Tactics. The strategy requires a lot of attention for implementation and tracking. Without any risk analysis and performance management, it just cannot develop into a mature organization. Important considerations for strategy development effectively are the 5 C’s - Credit Card, Cash, Car, Condominium, and Country club. To make sure you are on track, the 5 C’s should be
Culture - what if culture resists change? think about it!
Competition - what if people copy your ideas?
Change - it is always constant, doesn’t method you like it or not.
Constrains - so much you can do!
Customer - we are talking about real business here.
All the above is not going to be profitable if we do not have strategical portfolio management to check and balance the BIG ideas (strategy). This is the mechanism to ensure our investment is making profit or loss, it is a crucial approach.
We also require project management to align with the BIG ideas so that we can re balancing the Portfolio, in summary, just do the project on time and on budget. In the project not forgetting organizational strategy.
This course is conducted by ESI, Howard Vaughan (highly recommended). Excellent speaker and he provides great content with his many years of working experiences in the marketplace. Thank you Howard for the book “The Project Manager’s MBA” as a gift.
Review
“This book touches on issues that are critical to a project’s success but are frequently ignored by project managers. I consider this a must-read for anyone who wants to manage projects effectively.” –Judd Kuehn, senior project management consultant, Chevron USA Inc.
“Dennis Cohen and Bob Graham, two pioneers in the development of project management education materials, produce a book that further enhances their status as icons in the field. This book provides the knowledge and skill project managers need to integrate their projects into the total business enterprise.” –Paul C. Dinsmore, author, Winning in Business with Enterprise Project Management
“Cohen and Graham have presented a provocative view of the project manager’s role that will stretch, expand, and challenge skill-sets and perspectives. It will prompt project managers and their teams to not only manage their projects well, but to look beyond to the larger organizational and financial contexts in which their projects reside and contribute. This is a critical mindset and paradigm shift for tomorrow’s successful project managers!” –Robert Storeygard, project leadership specialist, 3M Learning Center-Business Acumen-Project Management and Teamwork Group
“This book is both timely and informative, a must-read, as the project manager evoles from a project-centric focus to a business focus. Bob and Dennis use an easy-to-read style with lots of examples to transform abstract financial concepts into something less intimidating.” –Gregory M. Willits, project management process champion, Motorola
Product Description
Project managers are no longer judged by the technical success of their projects alone. They’re also held accountable for their contributions to the company’s financial goals. Yet most project managers don’t have the business knowledge necessary to make project-based decisions that lead to bottom-line success. In this book, Dennis Cohen and Robert Graham, both former university professors and experienced project management consultants, provide the skills that, until now, could only be gained through a graduate degree and years of hands-on experience.
Cohen and Graham walk project managers through basic business concepts such as value creation, accounting and finance, strategy, and marketing. They connect these concepts to the decisions project managers face every day. And they make it easy to apply the resulting solutions on the job through a unique business systems calculator. Readers can use the online calculator in conjunction with the book to understand how different project variables affect business outcomes, to determine the overall impact of proposed project changes, and to evaluate the economic results of many decisions they make.
Cohen and Graham’s principles apply equally to projects in business, non-profit, and government organizations. And each one is illustrated through case studies drawn from a range of industries, including pharmaceuticals, the technology sector, even the winemaking business. Whether the mandate is to get new products to market, improve the infrastructure, or better serve customers and clients, this book teaches project managers how to make day-to-day decisions from an upper-management perspective. And it provides a blueprint for planning and pitching potential projects that demonstrates a higher level of business savvy.
A Work Breakdown Structure is a results-oriented family tree that captures all the work of a project in an organized way. It is often portrayed graphically as a hierarchical tree, however, it can also be a tabular list of “element” categories and tasks or the indented task list that appears in your Gantt chart schedule.
Large, complex projects are organized and comprehended by breaking them into progressively smaller pieces until they are a collection of defined “work packages” that may include a number of tasks. A $1,000,000,000 project is simply a lot of $50,000 projects joined together. The Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) is used to provide the framework for organizing and managing the work.
In planning a project, it is normal to find oneself momentarily overwhelmed and confused, when one begins to grasp the details and scope of even a modest size project. This results from one person trying to understand the details of work that will be performed by a number of people over a period of time. The way to get beyond being overwhelmed and confused is to to break the project into pieces, organize the pieces in a logical way using a WBS, and then get help from the rest of your project team.
The psychologists say our brains can normally comprehend around 7-9 items simultaneously. A project with thousands or even dozens of tasks goes way over our ability to grasp all at once. The solution is to divide and conquer. The WBS helps break thousands of tasks into chunks that we can understand and assimilate. Preparing and understanding a WBS for your project is a big step towards managing and mastering its inherent complexity.
The WBS is commonly used at the beginning of a project for defining project scope, organizing Gantt schedules and estimating costs. It lives on, throughout the project, in the project schedule and often is the main path for reporting project costs. On larger projects, the WBS may be used throughout the project to identify and track work packages, to organize data for Earned Value Management (EVM) reporting, for tracking deliverables, etc.
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To make sure you are on track, the 5 C’s should be
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