APPENDIX

Teaching Others These 10 Steps

When I read a book that makes a strong impression on me, I can't wait to share it with my staff. It usually takes a lot of time to choose and organize the points to share and figure out the best way to do it. In this appendix, I'd like to give you some guidelines for sharing this material with your teams so you can do it with little effort.

Target Audience: Anyone who has to manage projects, especially people who don't call themselves “project managers”

Participant Preparation: Each person being trained should choose one of the projects they are working on when the class is held as a test case. As they work through each step, they'll learn and understand more if they apply the lessons to that sample project.

Your Preparation to Teach the Class:

  Summarize key bullet points for each step and create a PowerPoint presentation for your use in class.

  Build the student guide from a print version of your Power-Point presentation and print out from the CD-ROM a copy of each tool, worksheet, figure, and example you'd like to share.

Agendas: I recommend approaching this information sharing more as a study group than as a training class, but either context will work. For a quick overview, consider the one-hour agenda offered in table A.1. If you can dedicate more time, your colleagues will gain more expertise by going through all 10 steps in a two-day session (table A.2). A third option is to hold six 90-minute sessions, either live or through a synchronous webinar when colleagues are geographically dispersed. For more information about webinars and for free webinars you can attend to see how it's done, check out www.elluminate.com or www.webx.com. Table A.3 presents a six-session agenda.

Signature Mini-Project

1.  Break your group into teams of three to five people and explain that each group will work as a project team.

2.  Write the following project objective on a flipchart or whiteboard: Your project is to get signatures from everyone in the room in five minutes.

3.  Give the teams three minutes to strategize. Don't let them start until the three minutes are up.

4.  Call “Go!” Let the teams gather signatures for five minutes.

5.  Open a discussion about what went well, what didn't go well, and how those aspects do or don't resemble their real-world projects.

Variation: To make this exercise work in a context that's not face-to-face (for example, in a webinar format), use the following project objective: Your project is to get the middle name of each participant in five minutes.

TABLE A.1

One-Hour Session

This agenda focuses primarily on Steps 2, 3, and 4. The idea is to introduce the four-phase management model (define, plan, manage, review) but spend most of the hour learning and practicing how to start a project well.

TABLE A.2

Two-Day Session

This agenda addresses all 10 steps. Each participant applies the steps to a project she or he is working on in the real world. If that isn't feasible, ask participants to work on a project of your choosing. Getting hands-on experience with the steps is the most important aspect of this training.

Note: If you have leadership training available at your company, you can spend less time on Step 5 if you simply discuss the training that's already occurred.?

TABLE A.3

Six-Session Meeting or Webinar

This agenda addresses all 10 steps. Between sessions, each participant will apply to her or his own projects the techniques learned in the preceding sessions.

Note: If you have leadership training available at your company, you can spend less time on Step 5 by simply discussing the training that's already occurred.