Projects drive renewal and innovation but often face delays and budget overruns, affecting both careers and organizational performance. This isn’t due to incompetence, but because projects are inherently difficult to manage and govern.
Drawing from extensive research in project studies, this course explores essential practices and challenges in project management. Ideal for those looking to enhance their ability to participate in, lead, or govern projects effectively and strategically, the course provides valuable insights for anyone curious about how projects operate and how to work with them more successfully.
Your take aways
After taking this course, your will be able to:
- Evaluate various project management models and assess their relevance to your organizational needs.
- Analyze project-related challenges from multiple perspectives, particularly those of a project leader and project sponsor.
- Critically reflect on different interpretations of project success and their implications.
- Define and examine challenges associated with key project practices, such as goal-setting, coordination, adaptation, and collaboration.
- Reflect on the impact of uncertainty in both individual projects and multi-project environments, and develop strategies to address it, including but not limited to risk management.
- Assess and evaluate alternative governance structures and strategies for effectively managing multiple projects.
- Analyze project capabilities and reflect on how they can be applied within your organizational context.
Central themes
The first day will focus on practices related to the management of a project, where we will
· Vision and success: Explore different approaches to develop and implement project visions and goals, and its implications to motivation and commitment and project success.
· Coordination and collaboration: Projects are highly interdependent and with that comes the need to coordinate work, we discuss practices and approaches to coordinate complex work across several people and organizations..
· Adaptation and learning: Projects create futures, and are hence intrinsically uncertain, and dynamic. We will examine approaches to foresee, react and adapt to project’s drifting context, for example, how to understand and manage uncertainties, risks and ambiguities in projects.
The second day with the management of multiple projects, focusing on:
· Project Capabilities: We explore learning within and between projects, highlighting both the benefits and challenges. It also focuses on how organizations can embed project learning and develop company-wide capabilities and competencies.
· Governance and strategy implementation through projects: we focus on how to organize multiple projects. We discuss different approaches on how organizations generate, select, control and structure their many projects, and connect them to strategy.
