This workshop is geared for project managers who need to make fact-based decisions throughout the lifecycle of the project and effectively communicate the rationale for their decisions to customers, senior managers, and other stakeholders. The primary emphasis is on practical applications of certain statistical tools that are relevant to project managers and the project environment. It is designed to help professional project managers who want to take their skills to the next level by having the tools necessary to objectively answer such questions as these:

• How much margin for error is in the schedule as planned?
• What are the critical risks and how have they been factored into your estimates?
• Why did you choose Vendor-X since Vendor-Y submitted a lower bid?
• What is the cost-recovery outlook for this project?
• What is your best estimate of when this project will be completed?
• How confident are you with this new estimate? What is it based on?
• What is the current risk profile at this point in the project?
• What metrics, other than cost and schedule, should you monitor?
• What criteria were used in establishing the “action points” for these metrics?
• How will this particular change request impact the project, for good or for bad?

Here are the topic areas that will be addressed in this workshop:

• Survey of statistical tools relevant to the project environment
• Evaluating cost-benefit tradeoffs when making project decisions
• Calculating schedule buffers – methods, options, and practical considerations
• Tracking and controlling variance in project metrics
• Identifying trends and establishing action points
• Measuring the degree of agreement among project stakeholders
• Evaluating the relative strength of cause and effect relationships
• Applying Six Sigma in a project environment
• Using Bayes Theorem to revise estimates
• Understanding and applying the Monte Carlo technique for risk analysis

Take-Aways: Each participant will receive a set of course notes and a CD containing helpful templates and other files, including a Monte Carlo modeling tool.

Prerequisites: Participants should be familiar with the basic terminology and concepts of project management as well as basic statistical concepts such as mean, median, mode, variance, and standard deviation.

What To Bring: Each participant should bring a laptop computer with MS Excel (2000 or later) installed. The participant should also ensure that the Analysis ToolPak add-in has been installed in the version of MS Excel that he/she will be using during the workshop.

This workshop deals with a difficult reality as more and more organizations have become geographically dispersed: How to effectively work with teams and projects that are spread across time, space, and cultures.  The participants will learn practical skills for communicating, coordinating, and collaborating on complex projects when co-location is not an option.  Furthermore, the "distance manager" will learn how to manage so-called "distributed projects" given little, if any, direct control over resources, work habits, or individual job performance.  Please note that this is a content-focused workshop that deals with topics and challenges beyond the general principles of managing people and projects. It can also be customized to deal with challenges that are unique to the client's organization.

 Topics

• Critical success factors for distributed projects

• Secrets of managing with limited control and visibility

• Anatomy of a distributed project team

• Getting off to a strong start with the distributed team

• 3 dimensions of separation and the challenges of each

• 7 roles of the distance manager – the critical skill set

• What does and doesn't work with off site employees

• The critical inverse principle of managing distributed teams

• How to motivate others at a distance

• How to encourage collaboration and cooperation within distributed teams

• Bridging cultural chasms – critical dos and don'ts

• How to ensure maximum productivity with minimum control

• How to get and give feedback over space and time

• Overcoming the law of communications entropy

• Strategies for reporting and communicating over space and time

• Cloud-based and social networking tools to support communication and collaboration

• Safeguards and rules of conduct for using social networking tools

Who Should Participate? This workshop will benefit anyone who has to work with or on a distributed team, either as an individual contributor, project team leader, or program manager.  This may include members of product development teams, project implementation teams, sales & marketing teams, business development teams, as well as the managers of such teams.

• The Report-Generation Team 
• Using Concept Maps in Planning the Project
• Parkinson's Law Applied to the Research Documentation Project
• Establishing the Milestones for the Project
• Creating a Gantt Chart Based on the Timeline
• Assigning Tasks and Responsibilities to the Timeline
• Style and Structure of the Research Report:

• 3 Types of Research Reports Based On Outcomes
• Templates and Formatting Options for the Research Report
• Establishing the Objectives and Intent of the Research Report
• Abstracts, Keywords, and Executive Summaries
• The Body of the Report
• 3 Critical Validity Issues That Must Be Considered
• 16 Tips on Writing Research Reports That Get Read
• 21 Graphical Formats to Enhance Visual Integration of Data
• Tabular Formats for Displaying Grouped Data
• Conclusions and Recommendations
• Footnotes, Endnotes, References, and Bibliographies
• Glossaries and Acronyms
• What To Place in Appendices
• Sanity-Checking the Report

• Document-Control/Change-Control Considerations
• Monitoring and Controlling the Progress of the Project
• Reviews and Sign-offs
• Computer-Based Tools to Assist in Developing Research Reports
• Using the Internet to Display and Disseminate Research Reports

Topics

• Special Challenges of Contractor Projects

• Determining the Project Scope & Requirements

• Demonstrating Contract Compliance

• Organizing the Project

• Planning the Project

• Risk Analysis & Risk Management

• Estimating & Budgeting Techniques

• Tracking & Controlling the Project

• Project Communications Tools

• Managing Multiple Projects

• Interfacing With Customers, Suppliers, & Subcontractors

• Negotiating Skills Applied to Contractor Projects

• Templates for Contractor Projects

• Communicating Skills (listening, dialoguing, empathizing, tact, decorum, presenting)
• Motivational Skills (energizing others, leading change initiatives, gaining trust and respect)
• Strategic Thinking Skills (setting goals, managing priorities, staying focused)
• Decision Making Skills (exercising judgment, anticipating consequences, evaluating alternatives)
• Personal Efficiency Skills (organizational and multitasking skills)
• Conflict Management (pinpointing sources of conflict, resolving disputes, how/when to intervene)
• Interference Management (managing external interference, dealing with difficult customers)
• Team-Building Skills (engendering cooperation, measuring and rewarding performance)

• What do effective sales engineers do? Lessons-learned from the pros

• How "life-cycle sales" differ from "transactional sales" – it's a different game

• Making the transition from engineer to sales engineer

• Critical communications skills of effective sales engineers

• The sales engineer's role as a consultant, advisor, and problem solver

• Translating your products/services into business solutions for your clients

• Analyzing the competition – proactive countermeasures to edge-out the competition

• ROI calculations – speaking the customer's language of money and investments

• Helping customers sell your products/services "up the line" within their organization

• Suggestions on conducting site surveys

• Estimating techniques and considerations

• Negotiating skills for selling large-scale systems and services

• Managing risks and requirements

• Proposal development and the sales project plan

• The sales engineer's role as a project coordinator

• The sales engineer as a "bridge" between the customer and your company

• Working the supply chain within your company – the sales engineer as a leader

• Relationship management – building and sustaining customer loyalty

• The sales engineer's role in providing after-market support

Audience
This workshop is intended for prospective sales engineers as well as current sales engineers who wish to enhance their skills and effectiveness. Participants might include sales professionals, applications engineers, technicians, technical managers, and sales managers.

• Understanding the psychology of persuasion

• Formulating an outcome-driven Persuasion Plan

• Mastering the 9 Laws of Persuasion

• Recognizing the games that skeptics and cynics play

• Avoiding mistakes that will diminish your persuasion-power

• Using motivational factors to your advantage

• Enhancing your personal credibility and likeability

• Gaining commitment to move from acceptance to action

• Seeing the situation from the other person’s perspective

• Understanding and exploiting the “power curve” – how to influence when lacking authority

• Using the Aikido Technique of Persuasion to handle attacks & win support of opinionated people

• Generating plausible alternatives for framing your argument and defending your position

• Presenting your case with confidence while avoiding the appearance of “shysterism”

• Marrying logic with emotion – using “appeals” to your advantage

• Identifying and understanding your personal negotiating style

• Reading and adapting to the style of others

• Reading body language and behavior patterns

• Exercises, toolkit, & skill practices for applying personal persuasion-power

Duration:      1-day

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Exploring the practical basis for win-win negotiations
Understanding the psychology of negotiations
Critical mistakes that are often made during negotiations
Pre-negotiations - gathering information
Establishing your goals, objectives, and BATNA
Identifying and understanding your negotiating style
Reading and adapting to the style of others
Dealing with win-lose type personalities
Negotiating in impersonal situations, such as e-mail
Negotiating from a weak position
Establishing your negotiating strategy
Assessing the interests and motivations of the other party
Expanding the pie and building integrative agreements
Team negotiations - important dos and don'ts
Primer on inter-cultural negotiations
Keeping the situation under control
Giving and taking concessions
Effective negotiating tactics - tips and techniques
Recognizing and defending against negotiating ploys
Negotiating job priorities and task assignments
Breaking deadlocks and avoiding impasses
Competitive bidding - some important dos and don'ts
Bring the negotiations to successful closure
Skill practices and exercises

This workshop deals with negotiating skills and strategies from the buyer's perspective. It is specially geared for professionals who are charged with procuring products and services from vendors and contractors while representing the "best interests" of their companies and internal customers.  While the workshop is based on the win-win philosophy of negotiations, it is tempered by the fact that one-in-four people will assume an adversarial or competitive style of negotiations.  The workshop also deals with contemporary issues, such as team-based negotiations and negotiating via e-mail.  The principles covered in this workshop are reinforced through skill practices that simulate realistic negotiating scenarios from a buyer's perspective.

Topics

• Exploring win-win negotiations from the buyer's perspective
• Working with internal customers to clarify requirements and expectations
• The art of diplomacy as an intermediary between suppliers and internal customers
• Games that sellers play
• Understanding the psychology of negotiations
• Critical mistakes that buyers make during negotiations
• Ploys used by sellers that can put you at a disadvantage
• Tracking and improving the negotiating process ― honing your skills
• Pre-negotiations ― gathering information
• Pre-assessing the total cost of ownership (TOC) from your company's position
• Establishing your goals, objectives, and BATNA
• Identifying and understanding your personal negotiating style
• Reading and adapting to the negotiating style of others
• Dealing with competitive and "hard nose" negotiators
• Negotiating in impersonal situations, such as e-mail
• Negotiating from a weak position
• Establishing your negotiating strategy
• Reading and assessing the interests and motivations of the other party
• Expanding the pie and building integrative agreements
• Team negotiations ― important dos and don'ts
• Primer on inter-cultural negotiations
• Keeping the situation under control
• Giving and taking concessions
• Assessing the relative value of concessions
• Effective negotiating tactics ― tips and techniques
• Recognizing and defending against negotiating ploys
• Breaking deadlocks and avoiding impasses
• Competitive bidding ― some important dos and don'ts
• Using a simple scoring system to compare offers/bids
• Bring the negotiations to successful closure ― formalizing the agreement
• Skill practices and exercises geared for buyers

Important though experience may be, there is a better alternative than the trial-and-error method of solving problems and making decisions.

Problem Solving & Decision Making is a 12 module program that builds individual and team skills in avoiding mishandled problems that cost companies millions of dollars every year while eroding their competitive advantage in the marketplace. Participants acquire the practical know-how to "frame" and isolate problems and then make sound decisions in effecting their resolution.

The program merges the strengths of both intuitive and rational problem solving while taking advantage of recent discoveries of how the human mind acquires, organizes, and processes information and solves problems creatively. Three decision-types are covered - including a model for ethical decision making that overlays virtually every business decision. In addition to applying these skills to practical situations and scenarios, participants are given the opportunity to work on job-specific problems. Emphasis is placed on developing and improving team problem solving abilities.

Problem Solving Style Assessment
The Problem Solving Style Assessment Instrument (PSSA) is administered to each participant to reveal his/her personal strengths and developmental areas by profiling the individual's propensity to use or avoid each of five problem solving modalities. It is also demonstrated how and where each problem solving modality contributes to the problem solving and decision making processes and why a balanced set of styles is essential to effective problem solving and decision making.

12 Module Program

1. Introduction to Problem Solving & Decision Making

2. Problem Solving Styles

3. Mind Tools

4. Problem Solving Traps and Barriers

5. Performing Cause-and-Effect Analyses

6. Problem Solving Strategies

7. Rapid Problem Analysis Techniques

8. Individual and Team Problem Solving Tools

9. Decision Traps and Barriers

10. Formulating a Decision Strategy

11. Generating and Testing Solution Alternatives

12. Individual and Team Decision Making Tools

The concepts covered in this workshop are applied throughout to case scenarios and job-related applications provided by the participants. The participants break out in small teams to study the cases and to consolidate their ideas.

Topics

• Acquiring a Systems Perspective
• The Open-Systems Model
• Law of Unintended Consequences
• Identifying the Customer
• Identifying the Process Owner
• Establishing an Organizing Principle
• Complicating Factors in Integrated Processes
• Garbage Can Processes
• Defining the Process Boundaries
• Theory of Constraints
• Process Mapping Techniques
• Using an N x N Matrix to Define Interfaces
• Using a Correlation Matrix to Identify "Cover Errors"
• 2 Types Processes
• 3 Types of Value
• 2 Classifications of Coupling Between Process Elements
• Process Metrics & Controls - Selection, Trade-Offs, Potential Pitfalls
• Using C_p and C_pk to Manage Process Stability & Variance
• Paying Attention to Your P&Rs
• Employees as "Case Workers"
• Team Tools for Process Improvement & Reform
• Process Management in a Turbulent Environment

Topics

• Causes and Consequences of Job Performance Errors
• Assessing the Cost of Errors and Rework
• Tools and Techniques for Error Detection and Prevention
• Special Challenges When Communicating By E-Mail and Voice-Mail
• Curtailing Inevitable Errors—Examining Your Policies, Processes, and Practices
• Fostering a Culture of Advocacy and Cooperation for Eliminating Errors
• Dealing With Disruptive Interruptions
• Staying On Track, On Task, and On Time
• Minimizing Change-Induced Errors
• What Your Style Says About You and How You Get Your Point Across
• Formulating a Personal Plan of Action for Reducing Errors

Who Should Participate?
This is an intensive skill-building course that can benefit knowledge workers at every level in the organization. The subject matter is especially relevant to environments in which individuals work under intense time pressure, where precision and accuracy are of utmost importance, or where human error can result in costly consequences.

Establishing Rapport

Recognizing and understanding customer's lack of trust
Creating a climate of trust
Thinking from the customers point of view

Questioning/Listening

7 Effective questioning techniques to get to the real issues
10 Barriers to active listening
2 Easy techniques to break the 10 barriers & become an active listener
Buyers motivations

Silent Signals

Learn to interpret actions as well as words, “the real message”
Learn the signals you can send to project openness, confidence and trust

Bridging the Gender Gap

Special considerations when selling to women
How to avoid conflict and confusion when selling to couples and teams

Recommending Solutions

Solution strategies
Managing concerns (objections)

Closing Strategies and Techniques

Managing your fears
Recognizing buying signals
4 Powerful closing techniques

 Supporting the Customer

Living up to the commitment after the sale
Managing dissatisfaction