Have you ever experienced working on a training project without a project manager overseeing it? One of the lessons I’ve learned from past experience is the importance of keeping on top of a training project, and the best way to ensure that happens is to have someone clearly responsible for project management. Regardless of the size of the project, effective project management can be the deciding factor on how successful a training project is. A good project manager will manage project communication, resources, budget, timeline, and deliverables to ensure the project runs smoothly and the product meets or exceeds the stakeholder’s needs and expectations.

Here’s how project managers bring value to your training project and support a successful outcome.

From the perspective of the project team, the project manager is the person on the team that manages and tracks the high level project activities so that team members are free to focus on the job of analyzing, creating and designing the instruction rather than having to juggle their job AND the management of the project.  Stakeholders also benefit from a project manager overseeing their training project; they have one clear go-to person when they have any questions or issues and can feel comfortable knowing that the project manager is looking out for their best interests.  A project manager can coordinate resources, quickly identify risks, manage the budget and oversee and keep on top of the many other project tasks and challenges that will arise while providing a clear path of communication with the stakeholder throughout the project.

A Project Manager‘s responsibilities for a training project can be broken down into three phases:

1. The project kick-off, which includes such activities as facilitating the kick-off project team meeting with the stakeholder, developing a project plan, creating a timeline, organizing resources, communicating team responsibilities and deliverables and finalizing the project budget.

2. Ongoing project activity, which includes such activities as providing regular project updates and communication with stakeholders, managing issues, risks and roadblocks, tracking the project budget and tasks, organizing stakeholder reviews and sign-offs of deliverables, managing contractors and managing changes to the project scope.

3. The Project Wrap-Up, which includes such activities as delivering the final product(s)/service(s), getting stakeholder sign-off on the project, conducting a post-mortem of the project and ensuring stakeholder satisfaction.

As you can see, having a project manager as part of your training project can provide many benefits to your organization. Above all, the improved efficiency in delivering products or services that is spearheaded by good project management leads to increased stakeholder satisfaction, which ultimately results in meeting or exceeding your stakeholder’s expectations - and we all want that!

What project management strategies have you successfully implemented for your training projects?