Programme Management: Essential Skills for Your Portfolio's Success

You Will Learn How To

Lead and manage multiple projects as a programme manager to achieve project portfolio success
Align and prioritise project goals to your organisational mission
Optimise project methodologies and communicate to stakeholders and team members
Monitor and assess the health of your project portfolio
Successfully allocate resources across competing projects
Apply Continuous Process Improvement strategies to your project portfolio

Course Benefits

Programme managers of multiple projects must balance the diverse demands of competing interests. An effective manager will leverage the organisational mission to resolve issues and maximise results. This course provides the critical skills to effectively align organisational and project interests. You learn to apply practical templates that enable you to define, measure and achieve project portfolio success.

Who Should Attend

Anyone who manages or is learning how to manage multiple projects while balancing resources across an organisation. Operational experience at the level of Course 296, "Project Management: Skills for Success", or Course 340, "Project Management for Software Development", is assumed.

Through an immersive, multimedia-enhanced and simulated case study, you gain the skills critical to successfully manage multiple projects. Experiential activities include:

Building a matrix of portfolio goals
Analysing project financial rationale
Identifying best-case and worst-case scenarios within a project portfolio
Selecting appropriate methodologies for several distinct projects
Creating a portfolio dashboard
Identifying headlight vs. rearview mirror metrics
Applying an issue reporting chart to projects
Allocating resources to specific ongoing projects
Chairing a human resource allocation meeting
Building an action plan for a red flag programme
Integrating case study lessons into your multiple project world

Course Content

Introduction to the Multiple Project Environment

Defining a project portfolio
Identifying the unique challenges of multiple projects
Outlining the best practices that support the management of multiple projects

Anchoring Project Goals to the Organisational Mission

Articulating project goal statements

Developing a project goal comparison matrix
Writing consistent goal statements across multiple projects
Creating an organisationally-based foundation for prioritising diverse projects

Applying common industry financial assessments to prioritise multiple projects

Comparing projects competing for resources based on investment parameters and risk
Performing a financial analysis of multiple projects including best- and worst-case scenarios
Ranking projects based on goal, mission and financial analysis

Measuring Project Portfolio Progress

Selecting and communicating process strategies in a multiple-project environment

Selecting appropriate process strategies based on complexity, requirement uncertainty and criticality
Analysing the strengths and weaknesses of common process approaches
Communicating portfolio process decisions to stakeholders and team members with templates

Monitoring and assessing project portfolio health

Adapting a practical dashboard approach to monitor, assess and control project health on an ongoing basis
Demonstrating ownership of the projects
Allocating your assessment time across the project portfolio
Communicating to stakeholders and team members with an issue reporting chart

Optimising Limited Resources across Multiple Projects

Allocating human resources

Resourcing within standard organisation models
Applying effective resource planning tools
Comparing functional, matrix and project-centric organisations

Increasing the organisational benefit

Successfully chairing a resource planning meeting
Emphasizing leadership in personnel decision making
Benefits of a Project Management Office within your organisation

Achieving Project Portfolio Success

Applying leadership skills to facilitate change

Meeting the challenges of leading multiple-project teams
Contrasting the attributes of management vs. leadership
Bringing red-flagged projects back on track
Building concise leadership action plans to deal with issues in a multiple-project environment

Implementing a Continuous Process Improvement culture

Fast-forwarding lessons from one project into phases of other projects
Applying lessons learned to your portfolio
Implementing leadership skills in your role as a change agent in a multiple-project environment

Creating a Personal Action Plan

Establishing goals for your project portfolio

Identifying short-term action items
Determining long-term strategies
Employing resources for further development: URLs, journals, books, conferences, experts