Explore the General Decision Support Model, a framework to guide effective decision-making during the analytics process, which helps ensure a sound business strategy based on facts. You will practice developing the questions, understanding stakeholder needs, identifying risks and uncertainties, and analyzing plan components, and will determine how to gather and analyze data to evaluate and communicate alternatives to upper management for decision-making. Examples, relevant discussions, and the use of Microsoft Excel will provide you with value that can be transferred back to the real-world environment.

Develop skills to build project teams, manage common dysfunctional and disruptive behaviors, reach consensus, and lead productive facilitated events through a five-step facilitation process. You will practice the facilitation process through discussions and exercises with scenarios that represent the types of events you lead in the project environment. Additionally, you will practice solving the unique challenges you face in planning for a broad audience, achieving participant engagement levels and collaboration, and obtaining stakeholder consensus for your project events.

Learn to plan for requirements activities, manage project stakeholders and use a requirements management lifecycle to ensure that the project’s solution accurately aligns with the stated needs. By implementing the requirements management lifecycle, you will gain skills to achieve stakeholder engagement, tailor requirement tools and techniques to match the project need, write requirements, establish traceability, perform verification and validation, establish, and maintain a requirements baseline. You will return to your workplace with best practices for managing requirements throughout the project lifecycle.

Discover how successful project leaders proactively manage stakeholder relationships and apply leadership and communication skills that propel a project forward with confidence. You will learn to develop skills to optimize your team’s effectiveness by assessing and tailoring your personal leadership style. Examine how to develop a high-performing team and discuss what motivates team members. Learn to identify and remove barriers to team performance, including conflict management, and explore factors and techniques for making timely and appropriate decisions. You will gain hands-on experience applying the proven methods of leadership and communication that work best for your environment and project team.

Develop core competencies in interpersonal skills such as fostering self-understanding, team building, motivation, and conflict resolution to better manage teams. You will gain a better understanding of what drives team performance and how to build and sustain your high-performing team through team assessment, role-play activities, and discussions designed to encourage self-reflection.

Gain insight into the challenges associated with balancing numerous projects, acquire the tools and techniques that support project success, and learn how to prioritize project work. You will also learn to multitask, plan and schedule projects, analyze schedules, and more through hands-on, project-based exercises.

Learn to improve your project or program processes to achieve higher quality products, services, and results. You will examine how leading thinkers approach quality and performance with a focus on fundamental quality management tenets.

Learn the strategies needed to meet the unique challenges associated with complex projects and how to apply proven techniques and best practices in a specific and systematic way. This course will introduce you to a recommended complex project management process based on research. You will apply project management principles and techniques by working in small groups and reflecting on possible approaches to managing real projects within your organization.

Discover ways to deliver a project within the promised timeframe (schedule), allocated budget (cost), and agreed-upon features (scope). You will gain insight into potential risk areas and learn how to take corrective action to keep the project under control. With exercises that focus on managing scope, schedule, and cost, you will be ready to apply best practices to your project.

Examine how to effectively build and manage stakeholder relationships through planning and monitoring engagement. You will practice using tools designed to discover and manage stakeholder and team expectations. You will leave class with a Stakeholder Engagement Planner to record specific plans to apply to your projects.

Benefit your career and further your organization’s goals through an exploration of business analysis (BA) techniques. In this course, you will examine the BA knowledge areas, including strategy analysis, elicitation and collaboration, business analysis planning and monitoring, requirements analysis and design definition, and more. You will leave equipped with the foundations and practical skills to conduct business analysis activities using either Agile or predictive approaches. This will propel both your career growth and your organization's ability to respond quickly to change.

Learn to formulate a strategic make-or-buy decision, prepare an effective procurement management plan, and use outsourcing for maximum benefit. The four project procurement management processes will provide step-by-step guidelines for working with proposals, contracts, and sellers. You will also learn best practices from negotiating theory.

Explore methods to estimate project cost accurately and effectively throughout the project management lifecycle. You will understand the project areas that must be estimated and use tools and methodologies best suited for the estimates you prepare. You will be challenged through exercises where you practice using different cost estimating techniques in an experiential classroom environment.

Learn the basics of project management through a focus on terms and definitions, class discussion, and exercises that challenge you to develop the collateral often used in managing projects. Designed for those involved with projects in a non-managerial capacity, this course will help you use sound project management principles, including interacting with stakeholders, managing and mitigating risk, and following the project lifecycle.

Gain a thorough understanding of how to practically apply project management concepts that will equip you to effectively and successfully define, plan, manage, and close out projects. Through informative content, hands-on activities, class discussions, and a threaded case study, you will explore the tools, techniques, and working practices associated with successful project management. This comprehensive foundational course focuses on the project management principles aligned with A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide) and many of the GAO guides.

Turn project management theory into real-world application as you synthesize and apply your skills to common project management scenarios. From creating a work breakdown structure to generating a schedule to analyzing risk, you will complete every step of the project management process, using tools, templates, and project management software.

Explore risk management best practices to ensure that projects adhere to timeframes, budgets, and quality requirements while mitigating risk. You will learn different approaches to risk management, including how to rank and respond to risk, monitoring and controlling risk, and communicating risks throughout the project lifecycle. Risk is inevitable—but it doesn’t have to completely derail your project’s success.

Gain knowledge and skills needed to customize development approaches for achieving project success. Through informative content, hands-on activities, class discussions, and case studies, you will discover tools, techniques, and working practices to tailor the critical aspects of these approaches to specific project requirements and organizational contexts. This course encompasses project management concepts aligned with A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide) and many of the GAO guides.

Learn the most effective ways to design, charter, and utilize an Integrated Project Team (IPT) to increase the project’s production of acceptable deliverables for stakeholders and end users. While IPTs have become a standard requirement for many federal government project and program environments, some audits have shown that many IPTs are in name only. Discover techniques to ensure the proper implementation of an IPT to meet both statutory and regulatory requirements. The concept of deploying IPTs covers both IT and non-IT programs/projects and can, if properly implemented, provide significant benefits to federal agencies and departments.

Learn how the application of Agile methodologies to federal projects is more than just changing product development or contracting practices—it is a mindset. This course addresses strategies, practices, and quality concepts that help facilitate a transition to effective Agile practices that will transform and empower your organization thereby providing maximum value to the customer and contributing to the long-term success of your organization’s goals.