Project management consulting and training for social change organisations.
Last week I took the train to Machynlleth, Wales to spend two days talking about Scrum with Tincan, a conscious business specialising in the design, development and hosting of websites for not-for-profit arts organisations (like the National Theatre). They're also the makers of PHPList!
Tincan have offices in the UK and in Argentina and invited me to talk with them about how they might make their already-Agile development practices more effective by using Scrum on some of their larger and/or more product-based projects. Because their office in Machynlleth is at the southern end of Snowdonia National Park, Francesca came with me so we could spend the weekend hiking in the hills there — highly recommended if you're ever in the area :)
Thanks for having me, Tincan!
agile, importantprojects, nptech, projectmanagement, scrum, tincan, training
Last Friday I travelled to Woodstock, Oxfordshire to spend the morning talking about Scrum with a dozen or so representatives of OLM Group, the UK's largest independent supplier of social care products and services (including Bettercaring, which I believe my friends at Enable originally built — nice one, fellas).
One of the divisions of OLM Group is already using Scrum, so the morning was really an opportunity for me to acknowledge the good work that group is already doing, honor their courage for undertaking such a cultural/paradigmatic change, and to reinforce the organisational/business value Scrum can help teams deliver by agreeing to follow just a few simple rules (i.e. make everything visible, frequently inspect outcomes and adapt the process as necessary).
I love simple rules because as chaordic visionary Dee Hock once said:
Thanks for having me, OLM!
agile, importantprojects, nptech, olmgroup, projectmanagement, scrum, training
Last Thursday I took the train to Charlbury and spent the day talking about SMART objectives and Scrum with the project managers and account directors at Torchbox, a 25-or-so person conscious business specialising in the design and development of websites and Internet software for socially and environmentally progressive organisations. They've built a few Drupal sites in the last little while as well and are extremely lovely people to boot!
Thanks for having me, Torchbox — I had a fantastic time meeting and speaking with you and hope to see you all again soon! Hopefully tomorrow at the second installment of Drupal for NGOs ;-)
agile, importantprojects, torchbox, nptech, projectmanagement, scrum, smart, training
Great morning on Tuesday of this week — I was invited by my good friend and colleague Dr. Dan McQuillan to deliver a half-day training on Agile Project Management to the folks at Make Your Mark here in London. It was really interesting — many of the projects going on there are non-technical and it was the first time I'd presented Agile concepts/methods to a non-technical crowd. We spent the first half of the session talking about Agile basics, principles and practices and the second half discussing how the three might be applied to Make Your Mark projects. It might be difficult for Make Your Mark to release versions of an event iteratively, but we did identify opportunities for them to "institute learning and adaptation" :)
Thanks again for having me, Make Your Mark — I had a great time meeting you and hope to see you all again sometime!
agile, importantprojects, makeyourmark, nptech, projectmanagement, training
Next month I'm heading home to Toronto to participate in Social Tech Training, a three-day, hands-on, Web 2.0-oriented learning intensive for people working in the social change sector, presented by members of the Web of Change community in partnership with MaRS.
A whole bunch of people I really admire and respect are going to be there, I get to present on what I'm really, really into at the moment and I expect to meet dozens of people doing amazing and interesting work — it should be awesome :)
Hope to see you there!
importantprojects, MaRS, nptech, socialtechtraining, STT, toronto, webofchange
Next week I'm heading to New Orleans! I've been invited to present at NTC 2008 so I'm making the long haul and staying for just under a week. I've invited Jenn Sramek of CivicActions to co-present with me — we're going to talk about how we worked together on amnesty.org last year. Here's a description of our session, Project Management for Techies: Delivering on Time and Budget — hope to see you there!
To deliver nonprofit technology projects in a fixed amount of time and for a fixed amount of money, project scope – the work to be performed by the project team – cannot also be fixed; the product of projects with fixed timelines and budgets must be determined up-front or over the course of the project, given project constraints.
In this session, we’ll take a look at two fundamentally different approaches to managing this challenge – the waterfall method (sometimes referred to as "traditional" software development) and Scrum (an "Agile" method), and talk about the implications of each on project management in a nonprofit context.
08NTC, civicactions, conference, importantprojects, jennsramek, nptech, NTEN, projectmanagement, softwaredevelopment, training
Great day on Friday last week — I was invited by my good friend and colleague Phillip Smith to deliver a project management lunch & learn to the folks at the New Internationalist communications co-operative in Oxford. Really interesting to speak with such a tight-knit, structurally-flat and financially-independent organisation beginning to think about making changes to how it operates after 30 years of producing an award-winning publication.
If it ain't broke don't fix it, sure — but when endeavoring to do something new, something you haven't done before, something involving risk by definition, it makes good sense to set SMART objectives, explicitly assign roles and responsibilities (even — especially? — in flat organisations; see The Tyranny of Structurelessness for more on this), define requirements and formally communicate with all team members on a regular basis (i.e. consciously and intentionally manage the project).
Thanks again for having me, NI — I had a great time meeting you all and hope to see you all again sometime :)
communitybandwidth, importantprojects, newinternationalist, nptech, phillipsmith, projectmanagement, training
Photo by gokubi, September 2006
Tomorrow I'm heading to Vancouver for the 7th annual Web of Change conference. I've been twice before — once in 2004 and then again in 2005. Totally excited to go back :)
This year I'll be leading a session called Values-based Project Management where I'm hoping participants will be as keen as I am to:
I'm also hoping to have some time in the day-and-a-bit leading up to the conference to post an update on Project IMPACT! Things are going well there but I've been too heads down to write about it. More on that ASAP :)
importantprojects, nptech, projectmanagement, values, webofchange, webofchange2007, woc2007
Next week I get to present at SANGONeT's third annual "ICTs for Civil Society" conference in Johannesburg, South Africa!
I was scheduled to be in Johannesburg to deliver my Project Management for NGOs training for the African members of the APC later the same week, Matthew de Gale of SANGONeT was looking for someone to present on how NGOs can benefit from using RSS, someone from the APC mentioned me and I'm in! And my good friend Katrin Verclas of NTEN will be there as well! Magic. I'll be sure to report back with my photos and learnings :)
africa, apc, ICTs, importantprojects, johannesburg, nptech, rss, sangonet, southafrica, training
Just this past Sunday, the Web Activist Collective and GreenNet put on Reclaim the Web at the Development House in London — a free Web 2.0 conference (and vegan potluck) designed specifically for NGO volunteers (i.e. those working for social change but who haven't necessarily received training in the use of social software/Web 2.0 tools).
Just like Take Back the Web last October, the day combined practical workshops for online activism with open space discussions around emerging technologies and social change, and just like last October, a group of really amazing people showed up (like the inimitable Mamading, pictured above) — the best thing about organising these events for me by far is the people I get to work with and meet, so thank you WAC, thank you Anna and GreenNet, and thank you everyone who came out on a beautiful Sunday to spend the day (mostly) indoors to take part :)
activism, conference, grassroots, importantprojects, NGO, nptech, reclaimtheweb, training, web2.0
Yesterday I got to deliver another installment of Project Management for NGOs for members of the APC — this time at a European regional staff meeting in Barcelona, Spain. About 10 of us spent the day talking through some basic project management theory and practice, working through a couple of group exercises (that's Maxigas participating in a WBS workshop above) and discussing the ways in which all of the above could be appropriately applied to projects undertaken by APC member organisations (i.e. small NGOs). I had a great time — thanks again to everyone involved in making it happen and to all the participants for making it fun :)
One note: with the help of the APC, I've found an open source tool for creating WBS diagrams I think is quite a bit easier to use (and more powerful) than the Draw program in OpenOffice — it's called Dia, and you can grab the latest release (for Windows) here or my new template here. Enjoy!
apc, barcelona, dia, importantprojects, nptech, open source, projectmanagement, softwaredevelopment, spain, training
I'm still at the Stanford Valley Guest Farm — I delivered a day of project management training and facilitated a day of workshops for the APC here over the weekend, stayed today for some follow-up meetings this morning and basically kicked back this afternoon. Tomorrow I'm heading to Cape Town to check things out there until Wednesday night when I fly back to London. Really looking forward to wrapping up the Greenpeace UK CMS project and immersing myself in Project IMPACT when I get back, but before I leave here I'm determined to swim with the penguins and climb Table Mountain :)
One of the things that came out of the training this time around was a request for a step-by-step guide to using the project management methodology I follow — a kind of HOW TO explaining which-tools-to-use- when-and-in-what-order. I've agreed to take a crack at producing something along those lines and will share it here when done :)
apc, capetown, importantprojects, nptech, projectmanagement, softwaredevelopment, southafrica, training
Landed in Cape Town this morning, caught a ride out to the Stanford Valley Guest Farm this afternoon and am in complete awe this place is so beautiful. Tomorrow I deliver my "Project Management for NGOs" training to a group of 20 or so APC staff, on Sunday I facilitate a more advanced "Tools & Techniques" workshop for a slightly larger group, and although my plan was to go immediately back to Cape Town first thing Monday morning, I'm thinking now I might stay here for an extra day or so if possible. It's just such an unbelievable place — I'm uploading my photos as quickly as I can :)
apc, capetown, importantprojects, nptech, projectmanagement, softwaredevelopment, southafrica, training
Photo by the Kalense Kid, March 2006
In early February I get to deliver another installment of Project Management for NGOs for the APC — this time at a regional staff meeting about an hour outside of Cape Town, South Africa at the Stanford Valley Guest Farm. There'll be a number of APC folks at the meeting who received the same training last year, so I'll get to spend a day with them as well, talking through their experiences as they've applied the processes and tools covered in the training to their actual project work, and about how those processes and tools might be "integrated" into the project management tool the APC is currently building in Plone.
Needless to say I'm giddy with excitement once again!
More on my return :)
apc, capetown, importantprojects, nptech, projectmanagement, softwaredevelopment, southafrica, training
Been back from Montevideo since Tuesday and it's taken me until now to blog on the trip (went straight into a day-long Drupal training with EchoDitto and Greenpeace UK on Wednesday and spent the rest of the week teaching at the university and chatting with various people about very exciting potential work for next year).
Delayed blog entry notwithstanding, the trip was awesome: Montevideo is beautiful, the Latin American APC members I met are lovely, and the project management training I was there to deliver — translated in real time from English to Spanish and back again — was a totally new and mind-blowing experience for me (two translators sat in a box at the back of the room, those of us who required translation wore headphones and spoke into microphones, the translators translated and presto! we all understood each other).
Thank you once again, Anriette and Estelle, for the opportunity; Valeria, Vanessa and Vivienne, for coordinating everything; and the fabulous Danilo (pictured above), for being such an amazing co-facilitator — you are all a pleasure to work with :)
Oh — and as I mentioned previously, the APC very kindly had my presentations and templates translated into Spanish, which you can now grab along with the English versions here or directly here:
Materiales Españoles (465 KB)
Enjoy!
apc, importantprojects, montevideo, nptech, projectmanagement, training, uruguay
Photo by Libertinus, October 2006
Two weeks from today I'm flying to Montevideo, Uruguay to deliver a repeat of the Project Management for NGOs training I gave in Prague in September, this time at an APC regional meeting and this time in Spanish! Once again, the APC folks have been amazing to work with, arranging to have my training materials translated and for translation services on the day. I'll be co-facilitating the training with APC member Danilo Lujambio, whom I met in Prague and who has generously offered to work with me to adapt the structure and content of the training to ensure its cultural relevance for the South American APC members taking part — thank you for all your help thus far, Danilo :)
Stay tuned for photos of my own (thanks for the unrequested use the one above, Libertinus), and for a complete set of Español templates and presentation materials!
apc, importantprojects, montevideo, nptech, projectmanagement, softwaredevelopment, training, uruguay
Thanks to everyone who came out for Take Back the Web yesterday at the Friends' Meeting House in Brighton! I hope you got as much out of the day as I did :)
A big thanks as well to veteran blogger Dave Walsh for his workshop on blogging (and for describing what it was like to blog on his most recent expedition aboard the Greenpeace Esperanza), to conference co-organiser Chris Anderson for his workshops on wikis and podcasting, to Francis Irving for presenting on the many powerful tools that mySociety has developed and made available for others to use through open APIs, the participants of my workshop on RSS for putting up with the references to grease, vaseline and all things lubricatory, and to EVERYONE for contributing to the amazing vegan feast we enjoyed — sharing (and mashing up) the dishes we all brought really added something to the event, don't you think?
I hope that people will continue to add their notes to and benefit from the conference wiki, and it'd be great if people could share their photos by adding them to the Take Back the Web Flickr group! I see Jeremy Keith has uploaded and tagged a few photos "takebacktheweb" — if other people have more, please add them to the pool!
And finally, thank you, Chris, Helen, Sara and Tim for being so easy and fun to work with this on this event. Let's do it again some time :)
activism, blogging, brighton, conference, grassroots, importantprojects, NGO, nptech, podcasting, RSS, takebacktheweb, tbtw, training, vegan, web2.0, wikis
Back in May at Web 2.0 for Good I met Chris Anderson of Animal Aid and Tim Street of Campaign Against Arms Trade, two great guys who enjoyed the conference but were hoping for something slightly different (*cough* more activists, less suits). We kept in touch, joined forces with Helen Close of War on Want, and are now announcing Take Back The Web, an open space (+ practical workshops) Web 2.0 conference for grassroots activists — Saturday, October 28, at the Friends Meeting House in Brighton.
I'm quite excited about the day — the event is free, I've heard the venue is amazing, and lunch is a vegan potluck! (I'm thinking maybe I'll bring my vegan gado-gado but I haven't decided for sure.) The conference wiki is here (and still coming together), the upcoming.org listing is here and registration is limited to 40 people so act now!
activism, brighton, conference, grassroots, importantprojects, NGO, nptech, takebacktheweb, tbtw, training, vegan, web2.0
I was in Prague last week for the first time — amazing place, highly recommended (photos here). I was there to deliver project management training to a group of 20 APC managers, staff and board members, which happened, was well received, and may be repeated in other APC member countries as part of a larger capacity-building programme already in progress across the organisation. I'm extremely excited about the prospect of continuing work with the APC, and also of having the templates and other training materials I use translated into other languages (which I could/would then post as resources here).
And incidentally, I'm working on two things as a result of the training last week:
More on both of these points very soon!
apc, importantprojects, nptech, prague, projectmanagement, softwaredevelopment, training
Just confirmed: I'll be delivering a 1 day project management process and methodology training to a group of APC leaders at their retreat next month in Prague! I've never been to Prague but have heard lots of good things — I'm quite excited :-)
As exciting as going to Prague will be working with members of the Association for Progressive Communications, an international network of civil society organisations using information and communications technologies to fight for social justice. Thanks, Rolf, for recommending me to APC and thank you, Estelle and Anriette, for the opportunity. I look forward to meeting you all!
projectmanagement, training, softwaredevelopment, nptech, importantprojects, apc, prague, rolfkleef
Alright — Phillip, Rolf and I have been having a conversation about whether personal time management training is more important for not-for-profits than project management training, given that (to quote Phillip):
Initially, I thought we were debating this in terms of whether not-for-profits could or should put (to quote Phillip again) "traditional, top-down project management processes into practice." Red herring! Turns out we're debating whether personal time management training is more important than project management training for not-for-profits given that (again, says Phillip) "...many people don't have an accurate picture of their available time." Ahem. Alright, then!
I agree that understanding available time is critical to getting things done, especially when you're working on a number of things at once (and as not-for-profit staff always are). And I do recommend looking at David Allen's book — at the very least, his time-management-as-martial-art metaphors are very cool ;-)
The point I'll make in this post is this: very often, when folks working for not-for-profits are overextended and/or unable to manage their time effectively, the root cause is organisational (i.e. cultural), not individual. Culturally, not-for-profit organisations need to understand and value the concepts fundamental to good project management before individual staff are even in a position to manage their time effectively. It's ironic, but many not-for-profit organisations working for sustainability often do so in a very unsustainable way.
An example: when work is planned, effort estimates for individual tasks should be provided by the people who are going to perform those tasks, and not by the individuals/ teams/sponsors who may need the work done.
projectmanagement, timemanagement, training, nptech, importantprojects, community bandwidth, phillipsmith, rolfkleef, webofchange
Back in August of 2004, I met and became friends with Phillip Smith, founder of Community Bandwidth, organizer of Social Tech Brewing and co-convenor of Web of Change. Since then, we've had quite a few great, really enjoyable conversations over pints about project management and the not-for-profit sector — about whether or not project management processes are "lightweight" enough to work with social movement projects, whether or not "traditional" project management makes sense on community/volunteer-based and/or open source projects, and so on.
Now Phillip has posted a piece on project management vs. time management, arguing that for not-for-profits, training in the latter is more important than the former because few not-for-profits are in a position to put "traditional, top-down project management processes into practice." Ahem.
While I don't disagree with Phillip on the value and importance of personal time management training in the not-for-profit sector (very different from project time management training and a topic for another post), I'd like to address the whole "traditional- project-management-is-heavy-weight-and-top-down" thing briefly.
When Phillip says "traditional project management," I think what he really means is "bad project management." Not-for-profits do not have the time or money to apply project management processes inappropriately (and nor do/should other types of organizations). But "traditional" project management does not suggest that they do so — according to the PMBOK, "project management is the [appropriate] application of knowledge, skills, tools & techniques to project activities to meet project requirements." If the project management processes being used on your project are too heavy-weight or inappropriately top-down, they are not being applied correctly. And that's bad project management, traditional or otherwise.
projectmanagement, timemanagement, softwaredevelopment, nptech, importantprojects, community bandwidth, phillipsmith, socialtechbrewing, webofchange
I spent the day on Friday of last week co-facilitating an offsite meeting of the Greenpeace UK web team with team manager (and fellow Canadian), Tracy Frauzel. Great day, fantastic group of people, and in my books, a really good meeting — we met to define the objectives, high-level requirements, and critical success factors for a web project the team plans to undertake, but made sure to spend some time talking about (and mapping what we came up with onto) the strategic objectives of Greenpeace as an organization as well. This is an often skipped but important step in the project planning process given the fact that organizations always and only undertake projects in order to achieve strategic objectives (and that, in this sense, strategic planning is always done for project management — see Kerzner's Strategic Planning for Project Management for more on this).
Tracy — thanks again for the opportunity to work with you and your team, and Andrew, Bex, Jamie and Joss — it was great meeting you and I look forward to seeing you again soon :)
strategicplanning, projectmanagement, nptech, haroldkerzner, greenpeace, importantprojects, ecampaigning
The third session of the LEF Project Management for Foreign-Trained IT Professionals program wrapped up today — a hearty congratulations to all participants on a job well done!
In this session, 2 more open source technology projects were successfully completed for 2 more Toronto-based not-for-profits — a PmWiki implementation for the Metro Toronto Movement for Literacy, and a Drupal CMS implementation for Flemingdon Neighbourhood Services. So again, not only did the program help participants develop their English language proficiency and cultural skills, prepare for project management certification through the Project Management Institute, and obtain direct, North American workplace experience, it exposed them to the importance of the voluntary sector by pairing their teams with not-for-profits for the practicum component of the program :)
I want to take this opportunity to thank LEF, ITAC, Ajilon Consulting and Outset Consulting for putting together such an amazing program, Margarida Almeida and Shawn McArthur for being so fun to work with, and most of all, the class — it was fantastic getting to know you all and I wish you the best in your personal lives and on your future projects.
Keep in touch!
I'd like to say a quick thanks to Djwa Strategies and to the 35 not-for-profit leaders who participated in the Knowledge Green Project Management for Not-for-Profits workshop at the SFU Harbour Centre yesterday. I really enjoyed meeting you all, and appreciated your active participation throughout the day :)
Please feel free to follow up with me (rob AT importantprojects DOT com) if you have any questions or need help troubleshooting any issues as you put the tools we discussed into practice. And Phillip or I will be in touch when the additional materials and group contact information you requested have been made available. All the best in your work and lives :)
Tomorrow I'm off to Vancouver to deliver a project management workshop to a group of not-for-profit leaders as part of the Knowledge Green lecture series at the SFU Harbour Centre. Thanks in advance to Phillip Djwa and the people at Djwa Strategies for putting the event on, and to those of you who've registered for the day — I look forward to meeting you! And for those of you who haven't registered yet, but are thinking about it — I believe there are still a few spots open :)
I'd like to say thanks to the Allocations and Health Promotion Department of the CBCF-Ontario Chapter for bringing me back to deliver another day of Microsoft Project training today! Alysha, Magali and Sylvia — it was great to meet and work with you three, and Beth, Joanne and Vince — really good to see you again.
And as always, please feel free to contact me with any questions you may have as you put your new/improved skills into practice :)
Back in August, I delivered a three-part training in Microsoft Project to the staff of the Allocations and Health Promotion Department of the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation (CBCF) here in Toronto. Since then, they've hired new staff (dedicated to the management of special projects), and I've been asked back this week to provide additional training to these new employees, onsite at the Ontario Chapter.
While there, I'll have the chance to visit with the participants from the training in August, check in on how their planning has progressed, and help them troubleshoot any issues they may have come up against. Should be a great day :)
I met Phillip Djwa of Djwa Strategies at Web of Change this year — we got to know each other a little bit, he attended the workshop I delivered with Rolf and Shannon, and we got to talking about the possibility putting on a project management workshop for not-for-profits in Vancouver at some point after the conference. I'm very excited to report that this workshop is now officially a go — the date has been set for December 8 (9:30am — 4:00pm), the location is SFU Harbour Centre (515 West Hastings Street, Vancouver), it will be part of a larger lecture series designed for not-for-profits, and the rest of the details are to follow shortly :)
Phillip and the good people at Dwja Strategies plan to have a site up promoting the event/series in the next few days or so — as soon as it's live, I'll let you know :)
UPDATE: the site is live; register now at The Knowledge Green.
The third session of LEF's Project Management for Foreign-Trained IT Professionals is now underway. I've been asked to continue supporting program participants and LEF staff for this session, which I'm very happy to do :)
The last session was a huge success — of the 23 students who completed the program, 2 have received PMP certification through the Project Management Institute (and several more are currently studying for the exam), and 50% have since found jobs in their fields. Congratulations, people!
Rolf, Shannon and I delivered our workshop to a roomful of amazing Web of Changers yesterday afternoon here on Cortes. One of the interesting things we learned in developing the content for the workshop was that the debate I think Phillip Smith thought would be created by pairing a couple of project managers with a community development facilitation expert didn't actually happen. Instead, we agreed with each other — for Rolf, Shannon and I, project management tools and techniques, "traditional" or otherwise, can be applied to community development and/or open source projects because project management is about just that — the appropriate application of skills, knowledge, tools and techniques :)
Phillip — care to argue otherwise?
Greetings from Vancouver! I'm out here for a few days in advance of Web of Change, visiting friends and collaborating on a workshop I'll be co-facilitating at the conference with Rolf Kleef of drostan.org and Shannon Roy of Thinkhive. I lived in Vancouver for a couple of years after finishing university, and it's great to be back and spending time walking through my old neighbourhoods, eating at my old favourite restaurants, seeing old friends and meeting their new babies :)
The workshop I'm working on with Rolf and Shannon is called "Getting things done: managing software, people, and projects," and will focus on how project management tools and techniques can be applied to open source software and/or community development projects. It should be interesting — I get the sense that Phillip Smith hopes to set up a bit of a debate around whether or not what he calls "traditional project management" can be effectively applied to community/volunteer-based projects, and has put Rolf, Shannon and I together as co-facilitators for that reason. More on this as our collaboration progresses :)
The project management training participants I've been working with at the LEF are in the middle of their 6 week practicums right now — 7 teams have been paired with 7 not-for-profit organizations to manage 7 different technology projects, 4 of which are open source content management system implementations. Because the 4 CMS teams are doing all of this for the first time, and because their timelines are as tight as they are, they've all decided to use the same CMS so they can share learnings and divide up work where possible.
The teams have chosen Drupal as the CMS to standardize on, and this morning, we brought in Derek Laventure of the Annares Working Group, a worker co-operative providing open source software development and training services to not-for-profits and NGOs, to take them through a 3 hour tour of Drupal and get them started. Derek presented a really well defined set of step-by-step instructions for configuring Drupal, modifying themes, installing contributed modules and performing advanced customizations. Highly recommended if you need to take a group through Drupal training yourself!
I'd like to say thank you to the 20 CBCF-Ontario Chapter staff who participated in the three-part Applied Microsoft Project training I delivered over the last 2 weeks, and to Polar Bear Corporate Education Solutions for providing us with a charitable organization discount while using their facilities at 20 Adelaide Street East yesterday.
I look forward to hearing about how using Microsoft Project helps you gain visibility into resource usage and availability within the Allocations and Health Promotion Department — please feel free to contact me with any questions you may have as you put your new skills into practice :)
I'm very happy to report that Important Projects has been selected by the Ontario Chapter of the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation (CBCF) to deliver a three-part training in Microsoft Project later this month.
Designed to meet the specific needs of the Ontario Chapter's Allocations and Health Promotion Department, this training will take participants through an applied, experiential education in Microsoft Project, and will result in a set of centrally-linked Project schedules the Allocations and Health Promotion Department can immediately use to more effectively manage its ongoing operations, and to determine resource availability for special projects within CBCF.
I've worked with the CBCF before, and am thrilled to have been asked back to provide this training. Thanks in advance to Vince Bowman, Associate Director of Allocations & Evaluation at the CBCF-Ontario Chapter, for the opportunity, and I look forward to meeting and working with the rest of the Allocations and Health Promotion Department in just a few weeks!
Back in February of this year, I was invited to sit on the advisory committee for a program developed by the Learning Enrichment Foundation (in partnership with the Information Technology Association of Canada, Ajilon Consulting and Outset Consulting) to provide project management training for foreign-trained IT professionals. It's an amazing program — designed to help participants develop their English language proficiency and cultural skills, prepare for project management certification through the Project Management Institute, and obtain direct, North American workplace experience, the program also exposes participants to the importance of the voluntary sector — following a six week classroom-based course in project management, participants are placed within not-for-profit organizations and given the opportunity to apply their training to the management of open source software development projects.
For the second session of the program, I've been asked to provide coaching and support to students of the program as well as LEF staff — today was the first day, and it was great.
I'm very excited to be working with you, Margarida and Shawn, and with each of the 23 program participants :)
Just a short note to let people know I've filed the presentation I gave at the Tools 2005 conference last week under /resources/project management in case anyone wants to download and reuse it (see "What is Project Management and Why is it Important?" under Presentations on the Project Management page).
I enjoyed the conference and look forward to participating again next year :)
I'd like to say a quick thanks to the Sustainability Network and to the 25 environmental NGO leaders who participated in Project Management Fundamentals at the 215 Centre for Social Innovation last week. I had a great time meeting you all, learning about your programs and projects, and discussing the ways in which taking a more disciplined, structured approach to project management can help you meet your organizational objectives.
Please feel free to keep in touch as you apply the tools and techniques we covered to your day-to-day project activities — I'm anxious to hear your success stories :)
I've been invited to present at Tools 2005, a one-day conference for not-for-profit organizations to be held Tuesday, May 31 at Ryerson University. My workshop is one of the morning sessions — hope to see you there!
What is Project Management and Why is it Important?
Tuesday, May 31, 2005
International Conference Centre
Ryerson University
240 Jarvis Street (north of Dundas)
9:15am — 12:15pm
Register for the conference before May 18 and save $25!
As I mentioned in a previous post, I'm delivering a two day project management process and methodology workshop to a group of environmental NGO leaders at the 215 Centre for Social Innovation next month. The details have been posted on the Sustainability Network site, but I'll post them here as well:
Project Management Fundamentals
Thursday, May 26 and Friday, May 27, 2005
215 Spadina Avenue (just north of Queen)
9:00am — 4:00pm, $120 per person
This training is designed for new project managers and for project team members. The workshop introduces participants to the discipline of project management and provides them with a set of practical project management tools and techniques they can immediately apply to the management of any project. Participants are taken through the complete project management process — from project initiation, to project planning, project execution, monitoring and control, and finally to project closure — and are instructed on the use of more than a dozen practical project management tools and techniques.
A binder of training materials is provided to each participant, including:
To register, send an email to Paul Bubelis and mail a cheque for $120 per person at least two weeks before the session. Please make cheques available to Sustainability Network and mail them to the Sustainability Network, 215 Spadina Ave. Suite 128, Toronto, ON M5T 2C7.
Attendance will be limited to representatives of environmental nonprofit organizations. Travel subsidies are available but must be arranged in advance with Paul.
Hope to see you there!
Important Projects has been selected by the Sustainability Network to deliver a two day project management process and methodology workshop to a group of environmental NGO leaders in May of this year (exact dates TBD). To be held at the 215 Centre for Social Innovation, this training will be designed to help leaders of Ontario-based environmental NGOs develop their project management skills and capacity.
A description and outline of the training will be posted here and on the Sustainability Network site in the next few weeks; training participants will have the opportunity to suggest/influence refinements to each in advance of the workshop (details to follow).
Thanks in advance to Paul Bubelis and the Sustainability Network for organizing and hosting this event, and I look forward to meeting and working with all workshop participants in May :)
I registered for the 2004 Web of Change conference today — a four day retreat at the Hollyhock learning centre on Cortes Island in B.C. (September 16th to the 20th). The theme this year is "Connecting Networks and Movements" — our focus will be to explore the impact technology has had/can have on social movement networks (where the health of the networks is a determining factor in the vitality and power of the movement itself — see this paper for more).
I also had lunch with Mark Surman of the Commons Group and Phillip Smith of Community Bandwidth today, two people involved in coordinating WoC, and I may get the chance to lead a WoC workshop on the need for "lightweight" project management frameworks/methodologies for use on progressive sector/social movement network projects (and if I do, I'll post my workshop materials here).
Are conventional project management tools and techniques too "heavyweight" to be useful to social movement networks, and if so, a) how so, and b) how should the projects these networks undertake be managed instead?
