today we're going to jump into talking about the many many hats that you wear and of those many hats you are definitely a task and project manager you Wrangle the tasks you Wrangle the projects and if you do not leverage these skills and really develop them you put yourself in a really dangerous position it can create increased stress missed deadlines which can be very consequential for your team for your organization forgotten tasks reduced impact lower value to the organization so this is definitely an area where we want to spend some time this is about being both effective and efficient so effective is about producing a desired or intended result and then efficient is about achieving maximum productivity with minimum wasted effort or expense what we want is both of these things to be true for you as a pace certified professional we want people to say yes those Pace certified professionals are both efficient and effective now you can be one without being the other you could be effective but not efficient so if you're effective it means that yes you are working on the right things and you're achieving the right results but if you're not efficient you're wasting resources in the process you can be efficient but totally ineffective so you might be moving really fast you're efficient you're not wasting any resources your time but you're headed in the totally wrong direction you're not working on the right things then you're efficient but you're not effective we want both these things to be true for you we have a total of eight sections that we are working with here in the task and project management module the first one is project management now project management is a huge topic and this covers it at an extremely extremely high level I've tried to give you the most important pieces and if this really wets your appetite and you're like I want more of that project management stuff we have other resources that are available for you I'm doing a half day workshop tomorrow here on site that's project management it's next level project management who's going to be in that section with me oh we got good stuff in store for you fantastic this is really just the tip of the iceberg so please understand that the big thing here is that you understand the difference between a project and a task because they are different things they are unique and they need to be managed differently so a project is a fixed time frame it is temporary by nature meaning that it has a distinct point at which it starts at a distinct point at which it ends it has a specific predefined purpose distinct results that it's generating projects tend to be high impact and therefore they are higher risk they're multi-step they have a series of interconnected tasks and they require the involvement of others sometimes not always but many times with the project you're going to have a team of people that you're trying to Wrangle in the process a task on the other hand tends to be more ongoing in time frame it's more routine or operational in nature it's got limited impact and therefore limited risk associated with it single step and it's completed by one person so if you are working on a project where you are putting together an international trip so that's a project because there's a specific starting point when you're going to start putting together the travel itinerary for this trip and there's a specific ending point when the person is returned from the trip and you've completed all the follow-up stuff that's the project one task inside of that project might be purchasing airfare so they're different a project and a task they must be managed differently when it comes to project management we really consider Administrative Professionals to be unofficial informal project managers which means it doesn't say that you're a project manager in your title but you are still managing projects how many people do you have a formal project manager someone that that's their title at your organization a good number fantastic so there are formally trained project managers that's their title most of them are pmps which is a certification that's offered through PMI the project management Institute that's the governing body that sets the standard for project managers so it's just important that you're understanding that distinction if you're interested in project management and this is an area that you would like to focus in the future PMI has some really great resources for Education if you're interested in certification there's a few different levels I'm happy to talk with you about what those levels are and find the right one for you it goes so in depth though so once again we are totally high level here but everything that's offered is the the same standard that you will learn through PMI so the the strategies that we're offering the methodology that we talk about is offered through PMI as well they're the ones who set the standard and that's what you're learning important terms to know project owner is the person who's initiating or sponsoring the project and they're defining the high level requirements we have stakeholders who are the people impacted by the outcome of the project we have deliverables which are your specific tangible outcomes produced as a result of the project and then finally we have the scope which is the goals and parameters of the project so for example me up here doing this training this has been a project for me I've been working on this for several months putting this together so I've been managing the project I'm the project manager for this ASAP APC they're my project owner who are my stakeholders bar you're mistake holders you're the people who are going to be impacted by the quality of the work that I've done as a project manager so you're my stakeholders deliverables the tangible outcomes produced so I have delivered slides for you so your slides are a tangible outcome that you have based on my work as a project manager and scope we got 90 minutes to talk about every module that is the scope of what we have here it is beyond the scope for me to go super in depth in project management as much as I would love to it's beyond scope because we've got 90 minutes to talk about this entire module makes sense okay project successor failure is really based on these four questions that you see here was the project completed was the project completed on or under budget was the project completed on time and then finally did the project meet the original goal or the stated business objective so this is how we're evaluating whether or not a project has been successful or if it has failed I will just say kind of as a side note that it's important as an unofficial project manager that you understand that there are factors that may be outside of your control so I always just like to to remind people that some projects are ill-conceived from the start and you can be the world's best project manager and something still is not going to align and we want to recognize what's within our control that we can improve to become a better project manager to ensure success next time but we also don't want to take on too much ownership and responsibility if there's things that are outside of our control in this process so to help put us in a better position for Success we want to follow a methodol a systematic methodology for managing our project these are the five stages as presented by PMI so this is what the governing body for project manager says are the five stages of managing a project stage one is initiating that project so the initiation phase is more than just someone tells you hey you're going to work on this project hey you're going to plan this employee retreat that is not initiation in order to initiate the project you need to ask some questions you need to say okay the employee Retreat uh where do you want to go what's my budget what's the time frame who do I have to leverage you need to find out information in order to initiate this project correctly the number one problem that I see with informal project managers is that they don't ask enough questions they don't take the initiation process seriously this is the most important step of the process initiating the project correctly the second step is planning so planning is when you are breaking down the various steps of the project and you're defining all of the tasks that are involved and you're also defining the order of execution the sequencing of those tasks and we'll talk a little bit more about order of execution in just a minute so that's the planning phase planning can take the longest amount of time in the whole process the third phase is executing this is the actual doing of the work this phase is where you will be communicating to other people what their job is if you need to delegate certain tasks in your projects to others you're communicating to them what you need from them when you need it from them this is typically one of the most difficult parts for Administrative Professionals for us unofficial informal project managers and the reason why is that many people say I don't have direct authority over these people right like I tell somebody that I need something from them but then I don't have any ability to impose a consequence if they don't give it to me right so the important thing here is to note that even though you might not have direct authority over someone to whom you're delegating a task you do have indirect Authority indirect Authority because you're overseeing this project you might not be that person's manager but you absolutely do have authority by virtue of being the project manager you have authority to delegate to people so understand the difference between that direct and indirect Authority monitoring and controlling is just making sure that people are doing what you need them to do you're checking in frequently you're making sure people are on time on task on target and then finally closing up the project this is one that a lot of people tend to kind of skirt around like it's no big deal and closing the project is an essential piece of project management where we're really wrapping things up we're making sure that all of the open Loops have been closed we're doing a formal closing process checking in to make sure that those outcomes that we defined at the beginning have been achieved and we're celebrating and acknowledging and rewarding the people who are involved in our project so those are the five five stages of the Project Life Cycle important terms here around task sequencing so this has to do with your order of execution we have a precedent task so a precedent task is a task that must be completed before another task can be done we have a dependent task which is a task that can only be done after another task has been completed and we have a concurrent task so this is a test that can be completed at the same time as another task so let's say that you are managing a project to implement a new project management software so in order to implement a new project management software you first need to buy a software and before you can buy the software you need to do some research so research is your precedent task the research has to be done first then after the research has been done then you can make a recommendation and you can purchase the software so the recommendation and the purchase is the dependent task now once you've purchased that software and it's in the process of being installed at the same time as that installation is happening you can be creating some training materials to help bring people up to speed on the new system so that's a concurrent task it can be done at the same time while the installation is happening you can be working on the training materials at the very bottom here we have safety margin so safety margin has to do with time estimates and it's additional time that's added to estimates to deal with the unexpected what is that Murphy's Law right anything that can go wrong will go wrong let's account for it in our time estimates if something you expect that realistically it should take you know four weeks add on a safety margin of 50 so half of four weeks is two weeks give them six weeks right add in that safety margin it's your wiggle room it's where you're saying I know that things are going to go wrong I know that my best laid plans are gonna go awry so I've I've worked in the wiggle room for that that's safety margin tools for managing projects we have a variety of different software options Microsoft Project is really the gold standard for official project managers it tends to be overkill for those of us who are unofficial project managers it is not required please don't put it in your mind that you need to be using Microsoft Project unless it is a requirement through your organization it is not required for successful project management it is however the gold standard so it's important that you know that it exists as the gold standard for official project managers Google Docs is a great option because it's cloud-based and collaborative and people can work on things together Microsoft Office with Office 365 you've got the same capabilities base camp is really a SAS option so it's software as a service base camp teamwork there's a whole lot of these kind of online project management systems that are available the important thing for your assessment is just kind of knowing that these are your standard options if any of you are interested in evaluating or talking about options real world come and chat with me because I've got lots of feedback about what the best tools are Gantt charts this is something that again formal project managers are very well versed in Gantt charts you will hear it referred to a lot if you are working with a formal project manager who in here has ever created your own Gantt chart fantastic so they're pretty easy to do you can do them just in Excel yourself a lot of project management systems whether you're using Microsoft Project or some other system a lot of them will create the Gantt chart for you it's a visual roadmap essentially the cool thing about it is that it breaks down your tasks and when you're doing them and it actually shows you how long you have to do the thing it doesn't just show you the deadline when it's due it actually shows you to start in so if you look at you know develop preliminary product designs Item B on that list it shows you you're starting in month one and that needs to be wrapped up by month four so you actually you can see the period of time you can see overlaps you can see precedent dependent concurrent tasks so it's just a great visual Road