Today's safety practitioner is expected to excel at managing complex projects. As such, project management has become a critical skill for every safety professional. This session will review the key elements of the project management process and will provide attendees with a useful Toolkit of templates, forms, and checklists they can use immediately on the job. Using a workshop approach and real-world examples selected from your jobs, you will learn how the task of project management can be made a lot simpler and more professional by employing a variety of available tools. The purpose of this session is to enhance the safety professional's project management skills to:
Deliver more projects on time, on budget, and meeting stakeholder expectations,
Increase the consistency of practice and ease of communication among colleagues,
Reduce the time spent reinventing the wheel, and
Provide a more consistent professional approach to project work
In previous sessions, we discussed the principles of project management as well as the Project Management Process itself. By way of review, let me provide a basic review of some of the major topics and set of guidelines from those sessions.
Managing projects is riskier than everyday management. The characteristics that make project management unique are that something must be done which may not have been done before. There are more specific expectations to be accomplished in a specific timeframe, with limited resources. Others, who may have different priorities, are involved as the need arises. These individuals may have diverse backgrounds and functional loyalties. This requires the project manager to be a motivator, a coordinator, a leader, and an integrator.
Whether you work for a billion-dollar corporation or a one-person shop, sooner or later, you will find yourself in charge of a large project. The project may be extremely complex or relatively straightforward, but regardless, you will need to plan and manage it carefully in order to achieve high-quality results on time and within budget. If you have never managed a large project before, the prospects may be somewhat intimidating.
But the good news is that recently the field of Project Management has emerged as a distinct profession with a set of consolidated standards and practices that can be applied by anyone for virtually any kind of project.
The bad news is that it can take a lot of time to learn these standards and practices. And in today's downsized, competitive business environment, it may be difficult, if not impossible, to set aside your other responsibilities to dedicate time to learning about project management. That is why we created this session. We hope to provide you with a set of skills and tools to help you, as project managers, ask the right questions and do the right things to get the job done. Let's start with some basics.
