Advanced Project Stakeholder Management – Course of the Month

Stakeholders in a project make decisions, provide input, deliver work, and impact if your project will be a success. Stakeholders may be the project team, functional management, a project sponsor, and most importantly, the customer. Anyone who participates in the project or is impacted by its results is a stakeholder. Each stakeholder has an essential contribution to make and all stakeholder expectations need to be met. It’s the responsibility of the project manager to understand how to identify, manage and clarify stakeholder direction.

This dynamic course teaches you the ins and outs of project stakeholder management. Roeder Consulting applies cutting-edge science to real-world expertise to deliver tangible techniques for project stakeholder management.

For more information and/or to register for this online course, CLICK HERE

12 Reasons to Select Roeder Consulting in 2012

#pmot #pm  #pdus #pmp #pdu

12 Reasons to Select Roeder Consulting in 2012

1. A Sixth Sense for Project Management® – our proven approach is the foundation for high-impact consulting, training and one-on-one coaching.  Released in 2011, the best-selling book is leading the profession to higher success rates.
2. Thought leadership – we’ve been quoted by The Wall Street Journal, The Project Management Institute, MSN Money, Microsoft Press, HR Executive Online, the Cleveland Plain Dealer and others.
3. Student’s choice – Roeder Consulting has trained over 10,000 students.  We average 4.7 out of 5.0 instructor satisfaction scores.
4. Customer service – Our phones are answered by real people.  Thanks to loyal customers, we’ve won two consecutive awards as one of the fastest growing small businesses in our region.
5. 90% project success rate – almost triple the industry average.  We deploy our tested Balanced Approach to deliver project results.
6. Innovative new courses – from Hiking for PDU’s to 360⁰ Awareness, Roeder Consulting releases fresh new courses on an ongoing basis.
7. Leading Linked In group – Roeder Consulting’s Linked In group is the #1 Community for Online Project Management Training.  Join us today!
8. Ten years leading the industry – Founded in 2001, Roeder Consulting offers open enrollment courses, and customized on-site consulting, training and coaching.
9. University partnerships – in our Boston University research partnership, we study the future and bring it to you today.  Many of our courses use case studies from the Kellogg School of Management.
10. Global webinars – Averaging over 750 attendees per month, MSN Money highlighted our innovative and entertaining webinars.
11. State-of-the-art learning – live streaming video, breakout groups and new age visual effects grace our online learning platform.  In-person courses feature cutting edge research and global best practices.
12. We give back – Roeder Consulting sponsored the Project Management Institute’s Leadership meeting three consecutive years.  We also sponsor local PMI® chapters and other not-for-profit groups.

The Future of Project Management

#pmot #pm #survey

Strategy, Project and Program Management, and Organizational Change.

This is a Research Project run by Boston University and Roeder Consulting, to investigate the convergence of Strategy, Project and Program Management, and Organizational Change.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/TheFutureofPM

This Questionnaire will pose a number of questions in six different areas. The intention of this survey is to gather data to investigate the effects on the future of Project Based Management.

As a professional with an involvement and interest in Project and/or Program Management, your participation and contribution as an opinion former and thought leader in this sector makes your participation important to the outcomes of this study.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/TheFutureofPM

If you would like a copy of the ‘Summary of Key Findings’ from this study, you can enter your email address on the final page of the survey. This will not affect the anonymity of your participation or opinions.

Thank you for your time and input to this important research project, which will help to determine the future direction of the Project Management and Change Management domains.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/TheFutureofPM

Roeder Consulting in the Wall Street Journal

#pmot #pm #wsj #pmp #india

 

 

 

 

 

 

Roeder Consulting is mentioned in today’s (Thursday, Aug 25^th) Wall Street Journal.  We thought you might be interested in reading it:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904787404576528451448313010.html?KEYWORDS=roeder#articleTabs%3Darticle

Leading without Direct Authority

An excerpt from ‘A Sixth Sense for Project Management’ by Tres Roeder

One of the major causes of project failure is the team lacks authority or decision-making ability.  In Roeder Consulting’s training programs, we have asked the following question for years, “Do all of the stakeholders in your projects report directly to you?”  I have never met a project manager who answered that EVERY stakeholder reports directly to him or her.  We ask another question as a follow-up, “Do ANY of the stakeholders in your projects report directly to you?”   Data from several of Roeder Consulting’s free monthly global webinars, representing 776 respondents, showed that 76% of the audience did not have ANY of their project stakeholders reporting directly to them.

Project management is a profession of people who must accomplish results through other people.  We need other people to approve our budget.  We need other people to sign off on the scope of the project.  It’s not that we aren’t capable of doing it.  It’s simply that this is the way the project management role is typically structured.  Other people need to make decisions.  Learning how to have other people support us is not a skill that we traditionally learn in project management training.  If we are going to reduce project failure, we need something more than what we are currently doing.  We need A Sixth Sense for Project Management. ®

Selling Soft Skills to the Boss

By Tres Roeder, President, Founder of Roeder Consulting

Projects often are not worth the journey. Numerous research studies show that anywhere from about 35% to 70% of projects fail. Why? Project managers with underdeveloped people skills are a leading cause.

We’re talking about communicating, earning buy in, team building and leading (yes, you are a leader!). According to “Researching the Value of Project Management”, a multi-year study on the drivers of project success, firms that support people skills training are more likely to deliver project value. This point is so important it’s worth repeating … statistically valid research shows that firms that invest heavily in people skills training are more likely to have projects that succeed. It’s directly correlated.

Yet, soft skills training is often the first line item to go when budgets are tight. Ironically, the human side of project management is often more difficult when times are tough. Nerves are frayed as employees become more concerned about their jobs, families and responsibilities. The stakes of project success are elevated as profit margins decline and competition heats up. The result is often a wide range of difficult human behavior. Such behaviors can only be managed with effective people skills.

So, how can you convince the boss that people skills are worth the investment? Well, you could sit down and explain the research linking people skills to project success. You could point out the increase in emotions during difficult times. This might work. However, research shows that decision makers are much more likely to adopt an idea if it’s their own. In other words, telling the boss the answer is a lower probability route to buy in than guiding the boss along a path towards the answer. Fascinating new research shows people receive a chemical rush similar to adrenalin when they figure out the answer.

Here’s what the savvy project manager can do to sell the boss on people skills:

1. Tell a story about someone who saved the day with their people skills. Everyone can relate to a good story. Maybe the boss will say, “hmm, people skills are important so I need to get people trained.”

2. Highlight a recent situation where someone’s emotions got out of hand. Point out that traditional project management technical skills do not address how to deal with these emotions. Ask the boss for some ideas on how to better equip project managers to deal with these types of situations. How about some people skills training?

Be creative in how you plant the seeds of understanding. Also, be patient. It may take time for the seeds to take root. Along the journey, be encouraged by the fact that this very exercise of selling the boss is making you better at managing the human side of change. Now, there’s a journey worth taking.
About the Author
Mr. Roeder helps organizations change successfully. He has deep industry, consulting and training experience and leads major engagements in areas such as corporate strategy, operations improvement, process improvement and implementation. Industry experience includes serving as Director of Business Process Improvement at American Greetings with prior positions at RR Donnelly and Toyota Motor Sales USA. A former consultant with Booz Allen Hamilton, he founded Roeder Consulting in 2001.

May 2010

Are Project Managers Ready to be the New Change Leaders?

 Monthly Newsletter Article from May by Steve Martin, PMP, CSM

 As the economy shows signs of picking up, I am hearing more from clients that they need Project Managers not only who have the technical skills, but who can also lead people through significant change initiatives. When pressed for more detail, clients tend to say that “big change programs” are being queued up. All they need now is a PM to step in (sometimes in a few days!) to launch the effort. I often get a shocked, wide-eyed look, similar to one getting caught with their hand in the cookie jar, from clients or executive sponsors who can’t answer these 3 follow-up questions:

 • How does this new “big change program” fit in with your organization’s strategy and goals?

 • How do you know your business and people are ready for this change?

 • How do you know your selected Project Manager is ready to deliver the change successfully?

This got me thinking: what are the expectations of project managers to lead significant change? Are we setting up our Project Managers for success? Upon performing a research literature review, several interesting themes about Project Managers and change management arose. These are best represented as:

 • “Organizational changes are often achieved through disciplined project management. Change management and project management are two disciplines that draw upon different theoretical frameworks but rely on each other to achieve an organizational goal. While organizational change deals with stakeholders, relationships, and strategy, project management is focused on achieving tasks through a linear, logical process.”1

 • Although successfully managing change is “accepted as a necessity in order to survive and succeed in today’s highly competitive and continuously evolving environment”, there is an estimated failure rate of “70% of all change programmes.”2

  According to a survey of 93 companies, failures of change management programs can be attributed to criteria such as “absence of dedicated and fully resourced implementation teams, lack of structured methodology and project management, failure to plan and manage quick wins, failure to fully mobilize change champions, lack of sympathetic human resource policies, use of an outsider to transact change, and failure to monitor and evaluate outcomes.”3

 Pulling these three concepts together, this tends to support an assertion that Project Managers need to have what Roeder Consulting calls a balanced approach, especially for successful change initiatives; this requires an integrated dance between 3 skills sets: technical skills, business acumen, and people skills. Those who can seamlessly navigate through these 3 skill areas should have better outcomes implementing change through projects, avoiding common pitfalls, as the research shows.

 To me, successful project execution falls beyond only the responsibility of the Project Manager – that is the purpose of the 3 questions mentioned in the introduction, which gets the entire project team to focus on a balanced approach. There are no universal answers to these questions that guarantee a successful project. However, the answers do need to be reasonable and have accepted concurrence, to help the group determine if they should move forward with the change project.

 One step further, to ensure our PMs are ready to lead major change initiatives, perhaps there is something to learn from the literature about organizational behavior, change and project failures. Since we are a profession of getting things done through others, it behooves us to understand human behavior. In my personal observations, there is an abundance of methods to prepare PMs technically. However, we don’t do a thorough enough job on the people skills side. Organizational change projects require people to change behavior. Those PMs who truly understand and demonstrate effective use of “soft skills” in their change projects tend to have greater success.