I am offering a brand-new FREE vocational style IT Project Management training course, which I will deliver via Microsoft Teams, which I think you get a better experience than a classroom setting. So, you can attend the training via fort of your own home. The 5-day course can modate 12 delegates. There is no CATCH, I will send out a meeting invite to kick-off the training engagement on a e first serve basis until I get the required number of delegates to run the course. At no point will I be asking for any payment pre or post the free training.

You will need access to Microsoft 365 apps: Word, Excel, PowerPoint. If you don’t have these then you can access free on-line versions of these apps via office . You will also need a Microsoft Project app, which is a scheduling tool. You can buy this app for £5-£10 via digitalstores.xyz, they will email you a product key and then you will download the app over the internet to your laptop. It doesn’t matter what version it is it can be 2010, 2013, 2016 or 2019, standard or professional e.g. I use MS Project 2010. You will now have all the apps you need plete the course. Don’t worry if you are not au fait with using the apps as I’ll be going through these to get you up to speed. Below is an overview of what the course is all about. Note the course will run from Monday to Friday, 09:00 to 17:00, with coffee breaks at 11:00 and 15:00 for 30 minutes and a lunch break from 12:30 to 13:30. So, I need you to be able mit to this for the duration of the course.

Flexible IT Project Delivery Management (FlexiPD) Methodology training will allow Project Managers to deliver the ever plicated IT systems that we need to deliver quickly and globally in today’s fast-paced digital world. It will allow Project Managers to manage all types of IT projects from the very large to the very small. Project management is about managing change, getting from A to B in the most optimal way possible, with minimal resources, with minimal budget, delivering a cost-effective solution, delivering what the customer asked for and that it is fit-for-purpose. FlexiPD is not rigid as other project management methodologies and is intuitively tailorable (flexible) to suit a particular project, at the heart of it is keeping the project documentation to a bare minimum, which will allow delegates to fast-track the project delivery.

The 8 projects on the course are actual real-life IT industry projects that I have managed previously. The projects cover software development, provisioning infrastructure, migrations, upgrades, and testing. To learn the techniques and skills required to use FlexiPD delegates need to practise, it is like riding a bike or learning to drive a car for the first time it just takes time and perseverance, and hence delegates need to practise, practise and practise some more.

The 5-day Microsoft Teams vocational training course bucks the trend of conventional project management training courses and delivers something useful, which delegates can build on for the future. The course simulates a real-life IT working environment, emailing project requirements and updates over the 5 days of the course:

o There are 12 delegates per course, split into 4 teams of 3, each person will be responsible for leading, creating, and presenting 2 projects and supporting their colleagues on the other projects.
o Delegates will use their own laptops, which requires to have Microsoft Office and Microsoft Project and templates will be available plete projects and presentations.
o Within Microsoft Teams there will be a main meeting and 4 breakout rooms, which will allow screen sharing, whiteboarding, audio/video calls, announcements, and chat between the host and delegates whilst working on their projects.

During the 5-day course delegates will spend more time doing things rather than listening to lectures, which normally occurs on conventional PM training courses and doing meaningless exercises, which bears no relevance to their day jobs and does not cover key aspects of project management: planning, project lifecycles and testing. More importantly, I will spend more time supporting delegates on how to use the FlexiPD skills and techniques to allow them to deliver the projects assigned to them during the course.

pletion of the course delegates will automatically be accredited FlexiPD, Level 0, Beginners and will be keen as ‘mustard’ to use their newfound skills, techniques, and templates to make a difference on future projects, because they have used them in anger during the course. Whoopee!

As delegates practise their skills and techniques and deliver projects using the FlexiPD approach they can progress through the accreditation levels, 0 to 8, via an annual review and assessment, primarily based on pleted and other factors. To reach Guru, level 8 status, requires delegates to have pleted a total of 10 projects, across many industry sectors and different project types, showing a good breadth and depth of managing a wide range and variety of projects.
Accreditation will provide delegates several benefits:

o Verifies they have attained an acceptable level of training, experience, and professionalism, which will be recorded in a global contacts database for verification purposes by anyone who needs to know.
o They will be more attractive to their employer and others.
o They will benefit from a higher remuneration (e.g. skills in demand).
o It will clearly define them from the cowboys (and there are many of them out there).

A day-in-the-life of a practising Guru would be someone operating internationally across many types of industries (not just tied to a specific one e.g. Banking), shaping very large programmes of work plicated projects, whilst creating a key set of project deliverables: a delivery strategy; a high-level schedule; a control log (data repository) of all key data and information over a period of 8-13 weeks, then handing this over to other less skilled FlexiPD professionals plete the project delivery, before flying off to their next assignment.

We need to improve the quality of IT Project Management professionals everywhere and get them operating at a consistently high-level, which will panies to deliver quality projects more quickly, whilst minimising costs. This course is the first step in changing how to manage projects effectively and consistently for everyone and truly provide a profession that people will be valued for what they can deliver.

Ian O'Neill