Scaling the Training to Accommodate Hectic Schedules

‚“We want a comprehensive project management workshop to teach the entire PMBOK, and we ‚ d like to do it in one six-hour class. ‚½ Hmmmmmm, sound familiar? (Actually, in one case it was one four- hour class!) As you begin to develop your project management workshops, you will almost certainly encounter requests for compressed timeframes. We are in a world where everyone expects to do more with less. Balance your desire to meet your training audience ‚ s schedule constraints with the realities of what you can actually deliver. If time is the most critical element, you may need to bargain for scaled-down learning objectives, alternative delivery methods , or a ‚“mini-series ‚½ approach consisting of several half-day sessions each focused on some aspect of project management. Unless you have powerful high-level management support (and enforcement) of your training effort, beware of approaches that assume homework or other off-site effort by participants. Far too often, participants arrive with the homework unread, unexamined, or unfinished . You may even hear the modern version of ‚“my dog ate it ‚½: ‚“a virus corrupted it. ‚½ Generally, you ‚ ll obtain better results by having the work done within the timeframe of the workshop.