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Portland State University: Friends of the Children, January 2019

Title: Project Execution and Management for Friends of Children

Event: Portland State University, Professional Development Training

Date: January 25th, 2019, 2018, 8:00 P.M. - 4:30 P.M.

Speaker: Christopher Dennis

Summary

Non-profits--especially those with high-risk youth programming--are challenged to focus on expansion projects. Therefore we need to emphasize simple basics:

  • Project execution
  • Monitoring and control
  • Project or phase closure

Practically speaking, project planning is over and it is time to implement. Where do we start?  Where do we focus our attention?   

We will start by focusing on the project team, then expand our focus on stakeholder engagement and communications. We review how to procure goods and services we need, and now to help ensure the quality of our team’s work is sufficient. We’ll dive deeply into how to direct and manage the project work. Along the way, we cover how to monitor the work, with special attention to how to handle issues and change gracefully, when stakeholders agree to change.  

We will wrap up our focus on plan-driven project management by covering how projects should be closed.  Endings are often as important as beginnings. 

In the last third of the course, we introduce adaptive project management, with emphasis on Agile / Scrum. We will discuss its similarities and differences from the predictive, plan driven approach.  We will cover the basic elements of this approach and how the project team operates.

We will finish our time together by focusing on project troubleshooting.