The Mastering Project Leadership Seminar: Participant's Handbook

This is the participant's handbook that supplements the learning in the Project Leadership Seminar taught by onTrack Project Services. In Mastering Project Leadership, you’ll learn…

• The importance of managing the project’s team and people, not just the project’s tasks.
• The importance of crafting tools and an approach to project leadership that fits within your company’s culture and your team members’ unique personalities and skill sets.
• Key differences between project management and project team leadership.
• How to coordinate the efforts of members of various teams and have them function as a single, unified team.
• How to use tools for quantifying project risk such that you know which areas to watch more carefully and how to plan for and mitigate those risks.

This seminar focuses on the following topics. First, we establish the foundational soft skills of effective project leaders, including the following:

• Decoding Motivations – Because being able to effectively deal with different personality types is absolutely critical for a project leader’s success, the seminar begins with a discussion of personalities and motivations.
• Corporate Culture – Companies behave in certain ways that form unique corporate cultures. We’ll discuss types of corporate cultures and their impacts on project leadership.
• Project Leadership – It is in leading the project, not just managing it, that project leaders earn their pay. We’ll discuss project leadership and how to accomplish it when managing a group of people over whom one has no direct managerial authority.
• Impactful Communication – Nothing impacts success or failure more than communication. We’ll go over why this concept is so critical and factors that make it successful or a failure.
• Achieving Buy-In – We’ll talk about the importance of achieving this and how to go about achieving it through communication, negotiation, and other key tactics. Ultimately, this is critical to leading teams to make and meet commitments.
• Managing Crises – Crises come in many forms, whether it’s a critical bug, a bad beta site experience, or mandated scope change, they can all disrupt your plans.

We will then apply these soft skills to some tools and actions that can help facilitate understanding, agreement, and conflict resolution throughout the life cycle of the project.
• Project Charters –This simple tool is surprisingly powerful in fostering alignment and controlling scope creep. We’ll discuss the importance of not just their structure, but of the amazing effect that takes place during the negotiation stage of putting these together.
• Position Charters – We’ll use a case study to introduce you to a new tool that helps team members understand each other’s roles better, including their own, while engendering trust and communication, as well.
• Quantifying Risk – All projects come with their share of risk, whether it is associated with the components, the team, or even outside groups, such as beta sites. We’ll train you on an intuitive tool that can do just that.
• Project Audits – Anyone who has ever been assigned to take over an on-going project will appreciate the insights and guidance we give concerning performing a project audit.
• Process Implementation – We’ll discuss a case study of a major new process that was rolled out into a leading software company.
• The Politics of Information – We’ll talk about effective use of tools & how to account for internal politics within your corporate culture.
• Post Project Analyses a.k.a. Retrospectives – We’ll discuss how to perform effective PPAs, how to efficiently prepare for one throughout the lifespan of the project, and how to foster team participation that brings to light the key issues without turning it into a witch hunt.