Online Project Management Training

Using Soft Skills to Reduce Risk

Welcome to this online project management training course.

Most project management training focuses on technical aspects: structure, roles, work breakdown structures, planning, control, etc.. However, these skills are not sufficient in themselves to minimise risk and ensure a successful project.

One of the major risk areas of any project is people: success can be jeopardised by things such as politics, personal agendas, poor communication or lack of commitment to goals.

Traditional management training can help to address these risks. However, such management training often fails to recognise the unique circumstances often faced by the typical project manager, such as:

• the team is constantly changing in size (growing and then shrinking); this undermines conventional team building efforts and doesn't allow the manager time to build effective working relationships between everyone involved
• team members are often part-time on the project, having other responsibilities and reporting to other managers; this may mean they have very little motivation to support the project and other pressures that seem more important to them
• the role of soft skills may be undervalued, resulting in no time allocation for 'soft and fuzzy management tasks'

This online course provides a range of soft skills tools and techniques that project managers can use to reduce the people-related risks and overcome interpersonal hurdles.

This course has a simple structure, with a number of articles for you to read online, covering various tools and techniques for dealing with people in project environments. These articles 'build' as you progress through the course, but most also 'stand-alone'. If there is a particular topic that interests you, click click on the link and go straight to that page.

Course Structure

The online course contains lots of sections, but these fall into 6 main categories:

• An overview of the Project Management Training Course
• Dealing with Individuals
• Dealing with Small Teams
• Dealing with Team Islands
• Dealing with People in Large Projects
• Putting it all together

Throughout the workshop, make notes of important points as they occur to you. You will find them useful to refer to at the end of the course, when you review what you have learned and decide what you want to put into action.

If you are a trainer, and want to print the articles for use in your own project management training course, then please see details of permissions on the contact page. In summary, that page says the articles can be printed for use as handouts in exchange for a link to our website, but they cannot be electronically reproduced. More details are on the contact page.

Project Management Training:
Soft Skills Part 1: Overview

Project Management Training

Overview

Individuals

Trust and Rapport

Networking

Winning Commitment

Listening

Using Power

Delegation

Conflicts

Small Teams

Group Conflicts

Team Development

Managing Difference

Communication

Team Islands

In/Out Groups

Building the wider team

Large Projects

Project Culture

Putting it all together