Discussion and collaboration area for recorded speeches at alexsbrown.com.
- The story of how a company was able to implement its strategic goals through projects. This one-hour speech describes the basic processes used, and the unexpected benefits the company gained.
“Strategic Project Management” was presented to a packed lecture hall on October 24, 2006 at the PMI North America Congress. The presentation was selected as one of the top presentations of the Congress, and an encore presentation was made the following day.
Projects are about plans, but they are also about change. Inexperienced project managers try to prevent change, to hold to a fixed project plan at any cost. Experienced project managers have learned that change is natural, good, and necessary. You cannot prevent change, but you can manage it.
Most project management methods call this process "change control", but it is not "control" in any conventional sense of the word. There is no way to control all the changes that happen in your project. It is possible to identify them, assess them, decide how to respond to them, and manage them.
This session will help you see that you always have choices, no matter what happens to you on your project. Unexpected opportunities and horrible events may happen at any time. What never changes is the fact that you are left with choices about how to proceed. You cannot control outside events, but you can control your choices.
We will look at change control from the point of view of
Senior managers
Your team members
Your project objectives
You as the project manager
You as a human being
How do we decide what to track? What is important to you? What should you report up to senior management? What matters to you and your project?
- The charter is a project’s best marketing tool. It is created at the very start of the project, when the selling of the project’s goals and ideas needs to begin. It is an ideal place to document the relationships between the project and the organizational strategy. Yet the charter is one of the least talked about deliverables in project management. Scheduling and communication have generated far more attention.
This program will help you understand how to write a project charter and how to use it to better communicate with your senior management. These skills will help you sell your project ideas and proposals to the decision-makers that can fund and authorize the work.
Learn how project charters successfully bridged cultural gaps when making decisions among a community of Japanese and U.S. executives. Establishing a clear chartering process was the key to project management’s success at the company. The presentation will include templates and overviews of the processes established.
This speech was delivered and recorded live for the PMI New Jersey chapter on International Project Management Day, November 2, 2006.
