In-Class Group Exercises

Come prepared to learn from colleagues, instructor, and course materials by participating in interactive class discussions and individual and group exercise workshops. You and your peers will examine reasons for your current results, explore strategies and tactics for improving your outcomes, and practice using specific hands-on concepts and techniques that you'll be able to apply immediately on the job to increase project and process effectiveness.

Specifically, you will:

• Develop insights about what you need to know
  
• Relate what you need to measure to know it
  
• Refine your measures based on reflective analysis
  
• Define your current process for doing things
  
• Recognize your REAL process and how it differs
  
• Identify points for directly measuring your process
  
• Explore measures to provide credibility
  
• Measure work in terms of relevant size attributes
  
• Define work tasks, resources, and effort measures
  
• Calculate ROI and use it to guide project actions
  
• Use measures to reliably shorten project duration
  
• Assess quality process effectiveness
  
• Manage with buffers
  
• Refine your metrics as you go and post-project

Measuring is key to managing projects and processes that deliver successful results

Effectively managing projects, processes, and managers requires meaningful measurement of the right things at the right times in the right ways. Statistical calculations are important for helping understand the bases for decisions, but even more important is recognizing the appropriate uses and limits of such calculations. In this interactive workshop, you'll learn how to avoid the common mistakes that make most measurement programs fail; you'll define measures for your REAL development process and spot ways to improve it; and you'll learn a value-modeling process for identifying the workable minimal set of valid and reliable real-world metrics you need to guide confident decision making. Techniques are suggested for overcoming resistance when getting started. This course fills the gap where most courses leave you hanging Every management course says you can't manage what you can't measure; but they seldom tell you what to measure, how to measure, or how to use the measures to manage. This course fills that gap, helping you identify what you need to measure and why, practical ways to obtain reliable and valid measures you need, and how to use your measures to guide informed decision making and actions. In this 2-day INTERACTIVE workshop, you practice techniques you can apply in your real world Class exercises enhance learning by allowing participants to practice applying practical techniques to a realistic case situation. (An information technology case example is used, but technical knowledge is not needed — concepts apply across multiple disciplines.)

21 Immediate Benefits of Participating in this Workshop

1. Position yourself to manage with facts rather than wishes
   
2. Increase your own and others' confidence in your decisions
   
3. Literally and figuratively know what you are doing
   
4. Measure and interpret the right things in the right ways
   
5. Recognize how measures are essential for credibility, and how lack of credibility can impact your effectiveness
   
6. Overcome resistance to measurement
   
7. Recognize and address the REAL process, not the presumed
   
8. Use process measures to predict and produce results
   
9. Push back on impossible deadlines and budgets (at least more than you're probably able to now)
   
10. Credibly estimate realistic task plans that get the work done
    
11. Avoid creep by identifying REAL, business requirements
    
12. Link solutions to value measures with ROI Value Modeling
    
13. Calculate and guide actions based on financial ROI
    
14. Spot problems as they develop and are easiest to fix
    
15. Reliably identify and address quality and risk
    
16. Evaluate effectiveness of the processes you rely on
    
17. Target improvement actions that will make a difference
    
18. Prevent more problems so you don't have to react to them
    
19. Report with facts that gain attention and influence
    
20. Reduce time, effort, and aggravation — yours and others'
    
21. Gain recognition and influence as a peak performer

Your Course Materials
Imagine material that describes using metrics in the real world to guide multi-million-dollar decisions as well as moment-to-moment actions. To complement your learning experience, you'll receive very valuable and comprehensive Participant Guide containing copies of all slides, supplemental material on specific tools and techniques, and a complete set of all project case exercise materials. This exclusive set of course materials can be used outside of the classroom environment to smooth workflow and use as a handy reference.