The full story
At the beginning of my career I worked in a highly structured Project Management industry. This consisted of a formal work breakdown; work preparation, procurement/ expediting, work packages, material validation, scheduling, tight progress control, labour variance (time/rate) and was brought together by the operations control team. Each function had people trained to perform the tasks and was it regimented. The level of task demarcation was too high and flexibility was low, however people knew what they had to do and in the whole it worked. Jumping forward into the world of FMCG, Chemical and Service Industries, it can be a very different picture. It seemed that employees who were functionally good in their roles, were “chosen” to manage projects with often little or no guidance. From this frequent scenario, The Incidental Project Manager was born.
- • Incidental – An event that occurs that is secondary to the main activity.
- • Project Manager – is a professional responsible for planning, organizing, and overseeing a project from start to finish involving managing the scope, timeline, budget, resources, and team to meet the objectives.
There is a huge disconnect between that of a secondary activity and a professional. Our intention is bridge this gap in a simple, demystified yet in a concise manner. By trying to simplify the jargon into plainspoken language that people can understand and relate to irrespective of their background or experience.
To manage most small projects, the level of control described above is often too much and many just require the basic fundamentals of project management. On larger projects companies tend to have in-house/ centralised specialist resource, formally train their staff (Prince 2/ PMP/ APM) or engage a specialist Project Consultancy.
The Incidental Project Manager specifically targets people who have worked well functionally who are identified as a person who can manage a project (great operatives, engineers, supervisors, front line managers, recent graduates and other “Incidentals”). Often these people are highly motivated, functionally strong or a potentially high performing employee. Often these people have been given a project to show case their skills and due to not being equipped with the basics, it has resulted in the polar opposite.
This 2 day, short course aims to deliver enough of the basic skills to manage a project whilst acting as a foundation to later develop more formal skills and qualification a base of if required. In essence it is meant to help bridge the beginner to expert gap by delivering knowledge to allow the delegate to enable them to have the tools and techniques to run a project. The 2 day course balances giving enough detail to equipment the delegate with the correct tools without having them out for a whole week. We can work with potential clients to tailor the course content to specific sectors or industries, thus making it more effective for the candidates and organisation.