Overview:

Appreciative Inquiry (AI) is today’s hottest new change management approach. It is uniquely suited to the challenges and opportunities you face as a Project Manager. AI provides you with a process to engage, inspire, and energize people; all while you are positively impacting your performance results. This is your invitation to join the revolution!

Outcomes:

This 30-minute keynote will ignite your enthusiasm for approaching your work in an entirely new way. It will include an overview of AI and the incredible potential it offers to you, and your organization.

Lead successful projects by mastering the five crucial conversations that matter most!

Everyone has been there. In fact, if you’re like most of us, you’re there right now. You know you need to talk to a colleague about an important issue, but you haven’t stepped up to the conversation. Not really. You may have danced around the issue or sugarcoated your message. There’s no need to be mean, right? Or maybe you relied on hints, sarcasm, or not-so-subtle humour - but the person missed the message completely. Or maybe she did get it and became defensive, so you backed off before the discussion spun out of control. Now when you think about re-entering the conversation, you break into a cold sweat…

Business lives in conversation. And important conversations, handled well, produce results. Yet most of us freeze up or blow up during important conversations because we are not sure how to deal with touchy, controversial and complex issues involving others. As a result we often "settle" on less than our intended result to maintain relationships. Similarly, we often push for our intended result at the expense of relationships. Either way, when we don’t handle those Crucial Conversations well, we don’t get the results we really want.

In this interactive project-management focused presentation based on the Silence Fails research, participants will learn practical, actionable skills for engaging more effectively in these emotionally and politically risky conversations. Participants will learn how to:

Share their ideas and concerns early and often Avoid, identify, and fix problems before they get out of hand Learn to create a safe environment to share information Get ideas and feelings out in the open, and maintain high levels of respect - all without causing resistance or resentment

Overview:

The keynote provided the inspiration! You now see the transformation potential that Appreciative Inquiry can provide to your organization, your team, and yourself. This session will provide the introduction you need to begin applying AI to your work … and your life!

Outcomes:
At the end of this workshop, you will understand the four-D model of Appreciative Inquiry:

• Discover your positive core
• Dream a preferred future
• Design the system architecture
• Deliver the results

This workshop offers proven advice and hands-on-tools to help project managers and business analysts consciously manage their time in the ways that will dramatically increase their personal productivity and effectiveness. It’s about making a conscious attempt to control and allocate finite time resources. As in household budgeting, it’s hard to manage time effectively until you know your spending habits.

The workshop is organized around six sections.

The first section helps you identify and prioritize your goals. If you want to make good use of your time, you’ve got to know what’s important and then give it all you’ve got. (Lee Iacocca)

The second section helps you understand how you spend your time. It's not enough to be busy, so are the ants. The question is what are we busy about? (Henry David Thoreau)

The third section helps you make the most of the tools.

Section four; deals with time robbers and how to protect your time from these bandits. It’s easier to catch the robber if you have a good quality picture.

Section five is a delegation primer. Delegating means letting other become the experts and hence the best. (Timothy Firnstahl)

Section six addresses the personal side of time management. Lost time is never found again. (Proverb)

A discussion amongst project professionals on our real world experiences with Troubled Projects and a methodology for effectively and efficiently planning and executing the entire project rescue process. Together we will discuss the Rescue My Project™ Methodology and its similarities and differences with other methods that are being used. As project professionals, we have often tried all the tricks and tips to bring a troubled project back on track.  However, as project complexity increases, so too does the root causes of the trouble and often a “back to basics” rescue approach needs to be initiated.  As organizations become more receptive to project managers looking for assistance, we need to develop the skills required to assist these same organizations in project recovery to avoid total failure.

Learning Objectives:
Any project at any organization with any team can fail. However, projects never go from being well managed, on-budget and on-schedule to outright failure overnight. There is always a transition period during which time the project is “troubled”. It is during this time that a window of opportunity exists in which the project can potentially be rescued, and is likely the last chance to save the project.

This presentation is for project managers, project sponsors and other project team members who want to understand why projects fail, become familiar with warning signs that a project is in trouble, trigger events and impediments to declaring trouble and be introduced to a methodology to effectively and efficiently rescue projects that are in trouble.

Audience/PM Level – This session will be relevant to:

• Want to pursue a career in project planning and project controls.
• Want to enhance their resume and marketability in the project management job market.
• Work in a project management environment, in any industry or discipline, and want to increase their PM knowledge.

Learn how to create one of the most valuable project management tools: a project schedule. Defining project success often involves completing on time and on budget, and project budgets are often driven by resource costs and the scheduling of those resources. This workshop is based on the PMI-SP and AACE project scheduling frameworks.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

• Scheduler’s Role in Project Planning
• Workshop: Create case study schedule
• Duration & effort
• Analyzing the bar (Gantt) chart
• Adding constraints
• Project viability check
• Workshop: Communicating case study schedule
• Fast-tracking the schedule
• Basic fixed duration tracking

The truth is we all need to be better influencers. Hardly a day passes that we don’t try to influence ourselves or others to do something different. We do our best to motivate our team to demonstrate more concern for the project deadlines. We struggle to complete our projects on time and on budget. We attempt to lose weight or take charge of our tempers. We are continually working on ways to exert our influence, and we regularly fall short.

In fact, in spite of the fact that we’re routinely trying to help ourselves and others alter behaviour, few of us can articulate a model of what it takes to do so. It’s time this changed. By drawing from the skills of many of the world’s best change agents and combining them with five decades of social-science research, Influencer – The Power To Change Anything delivers a powerful and portable model for changing behaviours—a model that anyone can learn and apply.

In this interactive project-management focused presentation based on the New York Times best selling book Influencer – The Power To Change Anything, participants will learn about the award-winning methodology that will help project managers:

• Successfully plan and execute their most important change efforts
• Solve problems within a project team
• Diagnose the causes behind failing projects
• Influence change across their organization with or without formal authority

People with entirely different ways of working, talking, and thinking are being tasked to form productive, collaborative project teams. Understanding the challenges and opportunities of today’s diverse workforce will help you to lead more effective and productive projects. This workshop provides fresh insights and practical solutions for understanding differences, resolving conflicts, and providing leadership that truly ‘bridges the gap’.

Outcomes:
At the end of this workshop, you will understand:

• the key characteristics of the four generations present in today’s workforce
• personality type, and how that impacts your communication
• strategies to create a motivating environment for your team
• how to build a workplace culture that is respectful and inclusive of all

A good project manager can make the difference between a poor and a great investment in a project. Competence development is the most important aspect of career development for any profession. This session categorizes and describes the most common competencies for being a successful project manager. If you wish to develop and improve your performance, you need to understand your levels of competencies in the various skill areas and then take the necessary steps to improve.

After 4,500 years, the Giza Pyramids, an awesome accomplishment made even more dramatic by the knowledge that they were built one thousand years before the wheel was invented, stand tall in the desert near Cairo, Egypt, and are visited by millions every year. How did an ancient civilization move those millions of gargantuan blocks up to the heights necessary to build these lasting masterpieces? Was this accomplished with thousands and thousands of slaves or were the Pyramids really built by aliens visiting planet Earth? Or were they erected by the survivors of the lost continent of Atlantis after it sank into the sea? The debate continues today, as the grandness of these monuments still boggles the mind. Building the Giza Pyramids with today’s tools would challenge the best methods and techniques that modern 21st Century technology has to offer. How could the Pyramids have been built with the construction methods, tools, and techniques available then? This presentation will attempt to answer these questions and discuss how the ancient Egyptians may have managed to address the significant technological challenges of their era so successfully.

Maximize Project Team Productivity Despite an increasing need for speed and efficiency, much of the effort expended by project teams is often wasteful. In many cases, only one hour in a team member’s eight-hour workday is actually spent directly creating value for their customers. The Lean Project Execution workshop is a one-day beginner level Lean Solution that presents a set of leading edge, practical tools that can slash project waste and increase speed and efficiency of project completion.

Influencing is a core life skill; it enables you to effectively manage your results and your relationships. A more streamlined, sophisticated and competitive work environment means that influencing skills are even more important than ever. Whether you have formal authority or not as a Project Manager, artful influence will positively affect your success at work and in your personal life.

Outcomes:
At the end of this workshop, you will understand:

• the meaning of influence
• the ART and SCIENCE of effectively influencing others
• how influence skills help you increase your social intelligence
• five key tips to create common ground and deal with an impasse

Increase the probability of a technology project success by learning techniques to reduce the threat of negative risk and enhance the opportunities associated with positive risk. Learn how to prepare a comprehensive risk plan. Discover different approaches to identify, assess, and quantify risks and their impacts. Learn risk prioritization and response techniques, as well as approaches to monitor, control, and communicate risks throughout the project life cycle.

The importance of strategic planning in a project portfolio management environment cannot be overemphasized. The need to align projects, programs, and portfolios with business strategies is key to effective financial management in an organization. This workshop will focus on how to develop strategic business plans by following a structured methodology and by using rapid structured facilitated approaches.

How would you like to get more creative ideas from your team, organize your projects more efficiently, communicate your progress effectively on a single page and stand out with your innovation and creativity? Mind-mapping is a more intuitive way of organizing projects in a way that encourages creativity, allows your brain more room for original thoughts and increases retention up to 95%! This innovative tool eliminates clutter and disarray in note-taking. It enables you to focus on the big-picture and expand on all of the smaller elements of your projects and allows you to see it all in one neat, organized and attractive pallet!

Learning Objectives:

• Discover simple tools to help you access more of your own create ideas, as well as those of a group
• Encourage original thoughts, enable accelerated learning and increase retention by up to 95%
• Acquire techniques for reporting project planning and status in a more organized and cohesive manner

Maximize Project Team Productivity Despite an increasing need for speed and efficiency, much of the effort expended by project teams is often wasteful. In many cases, only one hour in a team member’s eight-hour workday is actually spent directly creating value for their customers. The Lean Project Execution workshop is a one-day beginner level Lean Solution that presents a set of leading edge, practical tools that can slash project waste and increase speed and efficiency of project completion.

Scope definition is still the key critical success factor in a project. This workshop will focus on how to clearly capture requirements and document project scope using structured agendas in rigorously managed facilitated sessions. JAD has emerged as the most effective techniques in the area of requirements definition in the past thirty-five years.