EXAMPLE OF TWO COURSES

There are over seventy-five meetings I've created for my clients.  Here are the promotional overviews for two of my favourites:

Manage Meetings

This course is designed to help you develop the skills you need to facilitate and/ or organise, efficient, effective and engaging meetings.  Recognising the common reasons why meetings fail to deliver outcomes, you will learn a variety of techniques to ensure your workplace meetings are a valuable use of your and your attendees' time.

Learning Outcomes

•       Prepare and conduct productive meetings

•       Establish a plan and process to achieve desired meeting outcomes

•       Conduct focused and time-efficient meetings

•       Identify processes and issues that help or hinder contributions

•       Facilitate discussions, problem-solving and resolution of issues

•       Develop guidelines for meaningful agendas and minutes.

Meetings take place in families, between friends or colleagues and in small to very large groups.  An average of 35 to 37 percent of your working hours may be spent in meetings. 

In some organisations the amount of time spent in meetings has even been equated with the significance of someone’s role.  (Meaning the more important your role is seen to be, the more meetings you will be in per day.)

Managers, for instance, are estimated to spend up to sixty percent of their time in meetings.

Therefore, the value of learning how to plan and execute a successful meeting cannot be overestimated for your career.  This course will introduce you to proven ways to organise, plan and prepare for a meeting as the facilitator, organiser or participant in line with your organisation’s procedures and policies and best practice foundations.

You will learn how to consider the purpose of your meeting, when, how and where to schedule your meeting.  You’ll learn how to establish rules of engagement and maintain a safe environment for face-to-face and/ or virtual meetings and ensure inclusive engagement of the participants using tools and techniques that foster dynamic and purposeful interchanges. 

Unsuccessful meetings are usually seen as disruptive and unproductive and sometimes result in people being reluctant to attend meetings in the future.  Although holding a meeting seems easy enough, most have experienced meeting failures.  Did you know it is estimated that:

•             From 25-50 percent of meeting time is typically wasted.

•             From 45-47 percent of attendees believe most meetings are a waste of time.

•             Up to 40 percent of attendees admit they’ve dozed off during a meeting.

•             Almost 70 percent or attendees multitask during meetings.

Regarding Work Health & Safety (WHS), the more meetings you attend the more exhausted you feel and your perception of your workload seems heavier.

A meeting is the gathering of individuals for a specific purpose.  It can be formal or informal; spur of the moment/ad hoc, regularly-scheduled or carefully-planned and deliberate.  The purpose can be to inform, discuss, debate, celebrate, recognise contributions or to solve specific issues and make decisions.

Meetings take place in a variety of ways, from the formal conditions of Board meetings to impromptu face-to-face meetings in the hallway.  Many meetings in the working week are conveniently conducted virtually through a variety of technology. 

Virtual Meetings

With geographically dispersed teams, most of us will have experienced a meeting that was entirely virtual or where several participants joined in the discussions using virtual tools.  

These tools may include telephone or internet connections, conference call, using audio/visual videoconferencing technology, desktop sharing such as with Skype and Skype-like tools, WebEx, virtual meeting rooms and a growing number of sophisticated phone-based applications. 

Their great benefit is to offer a cost-effective way for organisations to ensure dispersed teams can share routine updates in real time, discuss and solve problems together during ongoing projects.  

Project Management Fundamentals

There is no lack of project management theories, frameworks, software applications, standards and methodologies, yet projects continue to frequently miss their stated objectives.  One reason is a common practice of ‘force-fitting’ a specific methodology onto projects that would be managed more effectively and efficiently using a less complicated approach.

The Project Management Fundamentals, two-day course is designed to be a practical, up-to-date perspective of the basics of project management and how you can use them to manage a variety of common business (and life) projects. 

The case history used as the focus of your learning experience results in something beneficial for the community, inspirational and galvanises the learning for future use.

Although the principles within the course are beneficial for all types of projects, they do not represent any specific methodology or standard to be applied.  They cover an end-to-end project lifecycle based on the application of the critical knowledge areas of the Project Management Body of Knowledge - PMBoK®.

Within your organisation, this course is especially helpful in managing the 80 percent of projects that typically do not require a specific formal project methodology or standard.  

Once you have completed this course you will be able to scope, plan, lead and manage a project, including scheduling, budgeting and managing risk until the project closes.  You’ll also look at some of the reasons projects fail and how to overcome them.

The course is designed especially for you if you are:

• ·       Needing support as first-time to developing project manager
• ·       Wanting a good review of basics for more experienced project managers
• ·       Looking for a framework of understanding of the tools necessary to manage the parameters and details of projects within an organisation. 

It includes some brief information on what are thought to be the top ten project management methodologies.  If your organisation has not already decided on a preferred methodology there are some high-level details to compare.  This could be beneficial when managing large (budget and scope), high-risk, highly visible, complicated projects.

Learning Outcomes

• •       Brief introduction to various methodologies and guidelines
• •       Understand foundations for planning, justification and assessment
• •       Importance of the business case
• •       Define project scope and boundaries
• •       Planning effective project communications and reporting
• •       Set up and managing project schedules
• •       Controlling scope, budgets, quality and risk
• •       Close and report on projects

Project Types

Up to 70% of projects reportedly do not meet their original objectives, stay within their defined scope, schedule and agreed-to budget.  Nearly 60% of projects fail because of poor project communication and reporting[1]. 

With the changing business environment, knowing how to manage projects is an enviable skill you can develop. 

Critical strengths of successful project managers include: 

• ·       Accurately defining the scope
• ·       Cost and significance of a proposed project
• ·       Employing excellent communications
• ·       Reporting skills
• ·       Being able to apply appropriate guidelines and methodologies suitable to the project at hand.

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[1] Mavenlink Blog, '21 Shocking Project Management Statistics that Cost Business Owners Millions Each Year', 3 July 2017:  http://blog.mavenlink.com/21-shocking-project-management-statistics-that-explain-why-projects-continue-to-fail