Arguably software development projects are run by the project leaders and team leaders: the team leaders do the detailed estimating, planning, tracking and reporting which is summarised up the management line by the project manager.
Whether it is the project leader, development team leader, test team leader or user team leader, many project management tasks will be delegated to them by the project manager or project director. The I.T. Project Management training course has 'project management' in its title but this does not mean it is a course only for project managers. It is a course for team members, teams leaders, users (and project managers) who want to find out how to run IT projects. For details of the course please click here: project management courses in UK
Some team leaders are sent on courses which teach how to use Microsoft Project or another planning tool in the mistaken belief that they will have received project management education and will therefore now know how to run projects, large or small, application development, maintenance or indeed any other kind of IT or non-IT project.
Equally, project managers or career managers sometimes send their staff on courses which teach a project management method, methodology if you prefer, such as Prince. Or developers go on courses which may be mainly aimed at getting them through the exam at the end. However, these courses may not actually teach how to run projects: how to define them, how to ensure a disciplined application development lifecycle is followed, how to estimate, how to build a plan (schedule), how to report status, etc.
The I.T. Project Management course covers project management specifically in the context of software development projects: it trains team leaders, aspiring project managers, etc how to run these projects. It does not teach dry PM theory, nor how to use a planning tool, nor how to do mathematical critical path analysis (though that can be covered offline if you wish), nor how to pass a PM exam, nor even does it teach the administrative impositions of a particular project management system. The course teaches how to run software development projects: what the team leaders, business users, project manager and anyone who will have a leadership role should do to make it more likely that their projects will succeed. For details of the course please click here: project management training
The course is aimed at aspiring team leaders and project managers and is suitable both for IT people and for users involved in IT projects. Although the course covers the systems development lifecycle business people have no fear: it's done in a jargon free way so you know what you should do and what you should expect IT to do at each stage (requirements, design, etc.) of the lifecycle. Since the course covers the principles upon which project management methods are based it is applicable whatever project management method your organisation uses. Participants will exercise personal skills during this training course: teamworking, making presentations and the ability to work to tight deadlines.
Experienced project managers who are new to software development projects will also find the course useful. Project Directors, Programme Managers and Programme Directors may wish to consider having a private course run for their project managers and team leaders as this is an effective way of establishing a common programme-wide project management culture - and affords an opportunity for valuable team building.
Similarly, anyone charged with the task of improving an organisation's project management skills will find that this course is an effective way of changing the culture and of ensuring that more disciplined project management methods are actually used.
Project reporting is often a task for the team leader. The course shows how the team leader or project leader should track status, control progress and how the team leader should report status. Sample project status reports are shown and illustrations and case studies demonstrate how factual, numerical reporting data can be an effective management tool. For course dates and locations please click here: project management courses
Estimating software projects - in hours or money - is not easy. The course describes techniques for top down estimating and shows how estimates which are uncertain at the start of a project should be refined at later project phases. Bottom up estimating techniques are covered. Although only one of the course modules is entitled Estimating, you cannot be a good estimator without understanding the software development lifecycle, how to do project definition, how to construct a schedule, how to do effective time recording, how to factor in risk contingency, etc. I.E. you need to understand just about all the topics covered on the course to know how to be a good estimator.
The course will also help explain some basic IT jargon to non-technical business people. The training will certainly provide business people involved in managing IT projects with ways of establishing project status without having to understand IT jargon and will make it harder for IT people to hide behind technobabble!
The course shows how quality management principles as enshrined in terms such as Total Quality Management - TQM - are applied to IT software development projects and also how non-technical managers can monitor and control the quality of software during development, rather than waiting for User Acceptance Test to find out if quality is excellent or not. However, quality management is not something you can isolate: it is not just about doing inspections or producing quality measurements (and it certainly isn't all about testing). Software quality will only be good if the project is properly defined; if the team understand the "manufacturing process" (i.e. development lifecycle); if estimates are good; if the plan is sound (otherwise there can be chaos which is not usually a recipe for good quality); if change is controlled; if progress is monitored and controlled, etc. In other words you could say the whole course is actually about managing quality and could equally well be titled "software development quality management".
Roles of sponsor, project manager, project leader, team leader, quality leader and many others are discussed and sample role descriptions are given.
If you want to find out what you should be doing as an effective project leader or team leader, or indeed as a user manager or project manager, to ensure yours is a good software development project then this is the course for you.
The I.T. Project Management course is run by Mike Harding Roberts. Mike worked for IBM for 30 years as a team leader, project manager, manager of project managers, project assurance manager and project management consultant helping companies large and small in UK and Europe improve their project management skills.
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Please click here for details of the
Project
Management Course.
Assessing and Managing Risk in IT Projects
Project Management Book - free!
Quality Management in IT Projects
The Tale of Three Project Managers
Towards a Project-Centric World
Project Management Proverbs, Saying, Laws and Jokes
So You Want To Be A Project Manager?