The first phase in any project management process is project initiation, where the goal is to uncover the project’s scope — the boundaries for resources, expectations, results, feasibility, the team, and your requirements — and produce a project charter.  Now that you know the project’s goals and scope and you have a project charter, what’s next?

Project planning is the second phase of any project management process and consists of developing the core planning elements.  The output of this phase is a set of project management documents, or plans.  The most important one is the project plan itself.  (Figure 1 shows the table of contents for a project plan.)

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There are claims made in so many trade journal articles and web page texts about how to make “training stick.” (Or, in the vernacular – “training transfer”)  In spite of so many claims, really only a small percentage of internal and external learning will be successfully applied to improve work. 

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In our last article we discussed why creating a culture of learning in an organization is important. One reason is that an organization that values learning is very likely to be an organization that more readily embraces change, including improved technologies and methods. Also, while job-related training is important, a broad approach to encouraging all kinds of educational opportunities really promotes a learning culture.

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Question of the month: Under what situations can training be financially justified?

The email articles in August talked about workplace training programs. Highly trained and competent employees are great assets to any company. These employees grow and change as

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Last week we discussed why companies do and do not invest in training programs for employees. We discussed some strengths and weaknesses of training programs, along with some examples of each. This week we will discuss some aspects of “how” to provide good training.

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Part Four of a Five-Part Series

Before we discuss Implementation, let’s do a quick recap:

In Phase I (Discovery), we learned how your organization specifies the project mission, objectives, and effectiveness criteria. Phase II (Planning) entailed setting requirements for project tools, budgets, and schedules to manage your project. Phase III (Development) taught us about identifying and testing processes within the system.

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