We customize this class so it adds the most value for your company but here are some preliminary ideas.

This is much more than a class on Microsoft Project features. This is about taking a team approach to break down barriers between functional groups, to get projects done better and faster than before and to have fun doing it. It works best if you get the whole team together. You then end up with team work product (a company Work Breakdown Structures (WBS), schedule templates, checklists, reports, views, etc.) as well as an education. We’ll also demonstrate which Microsoft Project features NOT to use!

We get rave reviews for these classes using our own class materials. We also use the Project Management Institute (PMI)^® Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK^® Guide). We combine the best of theory, tools, and practical outputs and it’s a lot more interesting than just the theory. With a little more study, the students in this class will have a great start towards passing PMI’s Professional Project Management (PMP)^® exam.

In 1992, Microsoft Corp. asked us to put our mainframe PM Software (PVS) into Windows as a companion product to Microsoft Project. Since then we’ve been using Microsoft Project on real projects and customizing it for our clients and ourselves. Before that we used PVS and Primavera. We'll help you to avoid a lot of the pain and lost time that we went through and to manage time, resources, cost, risk, scope, contracts, communication and quality more easily.

Establishing a standard WBS and reports for the company saves a great deal of time as your project managers can then click on the weekly or monthly report series. In addition, senior management always sees reports in the same format, regardless of project and you can easily roll up projects to see the overall effect on company resources.

These project management tools and techniques can dramatically increase your ability to add value and compete. We suggest that you get your senior people and everybody interested involved for the two-hour overview class. It's very important to get senior management to buy into these new methods and to promote practitioners quickly. They need to realize how these tools can be used in defense, offense and marketing. See the Project Management – An Overview outline.

Our approach will help you visualize your whole project; see cause and effect, resource level, and increase productivity, profits, pride, predictability and protection. It also allows you to set priorities, kill less important projects quickly, free up resources and leverage off previous projects. Our clients have been amazed at the benefits when they started using these new tools and techniques.

Please contact us for a class outline. We suggest we concentrate on Time, Resource Loading and Cost and touch more briefly on the other subjects. We ask the students for their input to the agenda as we go, but we try to customize as much as possible before the class.

Our costs are generally very competitive if you have more than ten people and we do the class in-house. You save the time, cost and disruption of travel.

We give you one free day of consulting after the classes and our favored client rates for any additional consulting or mentoring. We sometimes break the class into two sessions of two days. This can be less disruptive and the information sometimes sticks better, particularly if we set some homework assignments and critique project schedules between classes.

You'll need a computer projector, flip charts, lots of "post-it" notes and a few computers, preferably one for each two students. We will customize the class on the fly using break-out sessions. Some groups may want more PMBOK ^® Guide theory. Others way want more Microsoft Project, Earned Value, Risk Management, etc. The idea is to have everyone good at the Critical Path Method (CPM) foundation work and to start educating experts and mentors in more specialist areas. This approach also helps those taking the PMP^® certification exam to pass it.

This class is much better than the normal button pushing classes and it can make a huge difference to your company. We can help later with mentoring, proposals, joint ventures, etc.

We will customize the class to your needs as much as possible. Please contact us if you have any questions or suggestions.

“PMI”, “PMP”, “CAPM” and “PMBOK”, are registered trademarks of the Project Management Institute, Inc. registered in the United States and other nations. For further information see their web site at http://www.pmi.org