About

Executive Assistants and Personal Assistants often play key (but unrecognised) communications roles in the gaps between project teams, sponsors and their organisation.

Project Management for Executive Assistants & Personal Assistants is a practical and hands-on course where you will come to understand the structure and typical issues a project team must overcome. Throughout the day, you will be actively engaged in discussions, challenges and debates whilst working on practical exercises that will help you build your confidence in managing projects successfully.

Outline

Introduction: Challenging our Thinking and Learning

• Challenging our thinking about projects, diversity, teamwork and leadership
• Understanding collaborative behaviours that can grow highly proactive and effective teams
• Beyond management - leadership for agile projects in living organisations

Project Fundamentals

• Customers, sponsors and other stakeholders – tools to get their buy-in
• The project management process – outputs are different from outcomes
• Projects’ cross organisational boundaries – tools for avoiding matrix conflicts

Turning an Idea Into a Project

• Learning fast before deciding to start – doing a feasibility study
• Case Study: A business case that scopes a project to get approval or funding
• Tools for prioritising multiple projects

Planning a Project

• Develop a work breakdown and drawing an implementation roadmap
• Working out timelines and deadlines – identifying the critical path
• Assigning resources to tasks - delegation of responsibility for work
• Risk and opportunity analysis - what is the probability and impact

Controlling a Project

• Setting a baseline to monitor progress – milestones and budgets
• Implementation –  new techniques to improve quality, time and cost
• Project meetings - learning while doing – past risk to growing opportunities
• One page/exception reporting - keeping it simple and effective

Closing off a Project

• Post project review : Recapturing project lessons
• Project evaluation – has it delivered the outcomes specified?
• Individual evaluation – did this project (seminar) help grow my capability?

Facilitator

Harvey Calder

Harvey is a project director and management consultant with over 30 years of international experience in ICT. He has a background in both Telecommunications and IT, and has been at the forefront of bringing the two disciplines together - crafting some of New Zealand’s earliest and largest true ICT convergent solutions.

Harvey has extensive knowledge and experience in leading successful IT projects. He has managed offshore developments, remote project teams, and delivered mission critical systems in tight timeframes. His understanding of project management, applications development, ITIL, operations management, and business change allows a holistic perspective and when combined with his experience in recovering projects, provides a pragmatic approach to the successful delivery of ICT projects. His clients include NZ’s blue-chip companies, public sector, World-bank and APEC.

Harvey Calder is also facilitating:

• Essential Skills of Successful Project Management

In-house Training