Successful Project Management
State-of-the-Art Principles & Practices
Coming Fall 2020
COURSE DESCRIPTION
To establish and sustain a competitive advantage, organizations depend on projects as vehicles for innovation and change. Project success requires careful planning, the ability to manage uncertainty and changes in scope, dealing with behavioral aspects of project team members, and securing support from multiple stakeholders, who almost always have conflicting interests. Course participants will learn to identify the main factors leading to project success, and effective project planning and execution when task durations are uncertain and team leads control their efforts based on other obligations and private information. Participants will also learn advanced stakeholder management methods by actively participating in a novel simulation, based on a sophisticated model of stakeholder behavior validated by academics and industry experts, and proven to be a powerful tool for learning by doing.
The course will be interactive and experiential, relying on case discussions, breakout sessions, in-class exercises, and the aforementioned web-based simulation. Participants will acquire robust frameworks to help them apply the learned lessons in the real world, resulting in sustained stakeholder relationships, and improved implementation of organizational changes, strategic initiatives and major projects.
TOPICS COVERED IN THIS COURSE
- Managing projects in fast-changing markets
- Understanding the causes of overall project success
- Scheduling time-critical projects, and expediting key tasks to meet deadlines
- Projects with task time uncertainty (PERT and Monte Carlo simulation)
- Managing projects with effort controlling team leads (Critical Chain Project Management)
- Developing state-of-the-art stakeholder analyses
- Balancing the conflicting interests of multiple stakeholders and influencing their actions
BENEFITS
This course will teach participants how to:- Identify potential organizational problems and the differences between a production (process) and innovation (project) mindset
- Schedule projects, manage uncertainty in task durations, and time-critical project when team leads with private information control their efforts
- Identify who are a project's stakeholders and how to perform advanced stakeholder analyses
- Find out how to make managerial decisions that balance conflicting stakeholder interests for project success, using networks to influence stakeholder support
WHO SHOULD ATTEND?
Mid-level executives and managers regardless of functional expertise or industry, project and program managers, innovators, aspiring entrepreneurs, managers and owners of startup businesses, project team members, consultants, account managers, and anyone who manages projects and/or needs support for his or her initiatives from multiple stakeholders.INSTRUCTOR
Sergio Chayet Director of the Master of Science in Supply Chain Management Program; Director of the Operations & Supply Chain Management MBA Platform; Senior Lecturer in Operations & Manufacturing Management at Washington University's Olin Business School
