When you make a group booking for the online Project Management Concepts course, we provide a special free support service.
Organisational context
Project Management is an organisational discipline.
One of the prerequisites for the successful implementation of Project Management is that the organisation should be (or become) a Learning Organisation, as described by Peter Senge and others.
A Learning Organisation has five characteristics. One of these characteristics is team learning.
The challenge
All of us who have been through normal school and further training have experienced unhealthy competition as part of our education. Some of us have also been exposed to soul-destroying groupwork, where some people do most of the work and others drag down the team.
Project Management requires independent thinking, but it also requires that we understand each other. The danger with traditional independent, competitive study, is that we lose each other along the way. This ends up in further misunderstandings and ineffective competitiveness in our projects and other work.
Addressing the challenge
When you sign up people for the Project Management Concepts course, we work with you to support your team members to help each other study and to grow.
Understanding the purpose
We begin the process by gaining an understanding of how this course fits into your organisation’s overall strategy. (This typically includes discussions with people in senior management.) The goal is to ensure that we administer the course in a way that feeds into those goals.
The Learning Coordinator
Your organisation designates some one as our primary contact person for the administration of the course. (This may be an HR officer, a secretary, or anyone else who can fulfil the role.) We call this person the Learning Coordinator.
Preparation for the course
Before participants commence with the course, there are preparatory tasks for both the participants and the Learning Coordinator.
We collaborate with the Learning Coordinator to make sure that the most suitable people are selected for the course.
Together, we decide on a suitable start date.
The Learning Coordinator provides the names and contact details of all the participants, and notifies them to expect our preparatory mail, after the content of this mail (customised to the organisation’s goals) has been approved.
The Learning Coordinator also liaises with the senior decision-makers in the organisation, and with the person responsible for payment.
Support during the course
Once the course is underway, we provide regular reports to the Learning Coordinator. If we see participants falling behind or needing peer support, we chat about what to do.
We also talk through the options for study group activities to be undertaken and coordinated by the team members in the organisation. We explain the rationale that underlies the tasks in some of the test series. Throughout the course, we talk about team behaviour in the context of executing projects.
Outcome
The outcome is that team members acquire not just an understanding of key Project Management Concepts and the changed personal behaviours for which the course has been designed, but also a greater awareness of how to work together in a team context in Project Management, based on experience.
