When HR becomes a true business partner, along with that comes the responsibility to understand project management methods when working on projects. These days a huge role of HR Management is managing projects and vendors. All kinds of projects. Sometimes HR manages a project via a third party vendor; other times a cross-functional team that could span other locations, time zones, even countries. One aspect of today’s projects is they often include technology and people considerations that cause projects to grow increasingly complicated.
The purpose of good project management assists every area of a business from methods of increasing customer satisfaction to budget management, all the way to linkage of projects with business strategic outcomes. Good project management outcomes increase timeliness and efficiencies of scale, savings and/or speed of their projects making a good idea even better.
Everyone has good ideas; the key to success is being able to implement ideas. To achieve maximum benefits from good project management all members of the team need to be on the same page; using the same methodology, tool-sets and documentation and understanding what their team members are doing regarding analysis, planning, design and evaluation. These days it is common for a team’s critical members to not even be your employees, instead they are a vendor’s employees.
However, people is at what HR excels. Good project managers do not fail to understand or underestimate the effects of people on projects. A good project manager needs to manage the psychology of the project just as well, if not better, as managing its other resources. Even the best-planned project will not come to fruition if the people are not on board, or worse, have secret agendas. Most projects bring about change of some sort, and/or have some sort of uncertainty and uniqueness inherent to them; all factors with which people are historically uncomfortable. So even in the best of project plans, people do not always act the way one plans for them. Compounding the problem is that the people affected by projects and those who are influencing the outcome of a project are often the same persons(s). These people working on the project can even create their own aims, which may or may not be in line with the project’s purpose. Additionally that same diversity of ideas and knowledge seen as beneficial for a cross-functional team are often the same that create its conflicts.
Documentation is also critical to project management but the documentation needs for projects may be very different from what HR is used to producing for employment related matters. Timelines and other appropriate project management tools need to be chosen and maintained. Instructional documentation may need to be generated and documentation that documents the project history is required.
Managing projects and vendors requires the organization of people, equipment, resources and procedures in an appropriate way to get a project completed within a set time-frame and budget. While traditional organizational skills are helpful in any project, today they are not enough, and those skills
Learning Objectives:
At the end of this seminar, you will
- Be able to plan and manage effective projects from start to finish
- Be able to establish and build business cases for projects
- Have a good understanding of project management methodology
- Manage projects that accomplish their project goals
- Keep project teams’ motivated, even through conflicts and changing goals
- Manage vendors, third parties and work effectively with IT
- Experience better overall project outcomes
Who Should Attend
- Human Resources Vice Presidents
- Human Resources Directors
- Human Resources Specialists
- Human Resources – Generalists
We recommend CFO’s, Senior Managers and any officer with a reporting team to attend the Seminar because they are the ones who get the request for time-off and how they manage these requests can often determine whether the company will be liable for discrimination, leave retaliation or leave interference.