The Learning Game

Craig is based in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada and has worked with ProjectManagement.com for the last six years developing the various HEADWAY processes (Project, Change and Portfolio). He has hosted a series of webinars and is a business intelligence subject matter expert.

  Career Development   Communications Management   Risk Management   Talent Management  

Many years ago, I was working for a small consulting company that offered a number of courses on a variety of project management topics. In one of those years, I was attending a small, local project management conference and I was having a really interesting conversation with a colleague.

"Tim" was a senior project manager who was managing a Project Management Office and was responsible for a number of junior project managers. Tim was frustrated by the educational options that were being presented at the conference. He felt that the courses being offered mostly dealt with basic, introductory project management-related topics. Three statements highlighted his frustrations:

• "My project managers know how to plan. They don't need another course to tell them the importance of planning."
• "I want project managers to attend a presentation or a course and get more out of it than simply getting PDUs."
• "Most of the time, you have a person talking about a basic topic with little or no real world examples and no discussion of the application of the topic to the attendees in the room."

In part, he was right. There were not a lot of presentations that actively engaged the advanced project manager. His comments had an impact on me. From that point, I was always on the lookout for a course that met those criteria: A …

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