PM^Coach™ - Project Manager Mentoring

Introduction

PMComplete Pty Ltd can provide professional, independent, confidential and specialist mentoring for both groups of Project and Programme Managers from within a single enterprise as well as individuals.  Mentoring can also be provided to project teams.  Mentoring is the provision of assistance and support by one person to another to make a significant transition in knowledge, work or thinking.

Many very capable managers find that managing programmes and projects to be a critical transition from their previous roles.  New procedures and ways of thinking demanded by governance directives, unfamiliar tools and techniques, are often faced. Many enterprises under-estimate the magnitude of these challenges.

It is at these times that an expert mentor can commonly offer significant assistance:

• Rapid transition to new processes and procedures
• Critical decisions need to be made
• Overcoming issues and blockages
• Governance problems and politics
• Career change and adjusting to a new role or requiring skills and experience not previously gained or unavailable through participation at training courses
• Project initiation and planning
• Project recovery

A professional mentor will allow you to realise the following benefits:

• Knowledge and capability transfer
• Best practice suggestions
• Risk reduction
• Improved decision making
• Increased confidence
• Access to a wealth of business and project knowledge and experience from someone who has been there and done it
• Sharing of relevant and wide-ranging experiences
• A valuable source of contacts and networking opportunities
• Improved productivity
• Improved focus
• Improved morale
• Improved personal effectiveness
• Improved motivation

While formal training can go some way to addressing these issues, it can rarely be specific or timely to the individual's circumstances.

Mentoring can be provided in the following ways:

• Face-to-face, one-on-one
• As an expert member of a project or programme steering committee
• By ad hoc or regular telephone support
• Mentoring for a specific project or programme
• By reviewing key project and business work products
• Through capability transfer
• Provision of related reference materials and artefacts

Our Overall Approach

1. Initial planning meeting to arrange the engagement and set mentee's expectations
2. Initial interview with mentee (and/or his/her manager if desired)
3. Initial Project Manager assessment and Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) analysis
4. Establish schedule of fixed-duration meetings
5. Establish objectives
6. Monitor agreed action items
7. Individually trailored mentoring programmes
8. Project Manager skills mentoring (both soft skills and technical skills)
9. Specific project execution mentoring
10. We are available for mentoring outside of business hours (ie, after hours and on weekends)
11. Our fees are exceptionally reasonable for the knowledge and experience we bring
12. We do not promote long-term contracts
13. We can come to your office, you can come to our office or we can meet in a convenient cafe (whatever works best for each specific mentoring meeting)
14. Our job is to make you look good

Our Approach to Corporate Groups

• Skills alignment with business objectives
• More coaching than mentoring

Our Approach to Individuals

With individuals, we can be more flexible.  This means that the mentoring can range over a variety of topics, including:

• Specific programme issues
• Specific project issues
• Intellectual property issues
• Political issues
• People issues
• Legal issues
• Practice management issues
• Productisation issues
• Project startup reviews
• Project health check reviews
• Project closure reviews
• Post-project reviews
• Benefits realisation reviews

Our Project and Programme Management Skills and Experience

• 35+ years of experience managing projects and programmes
• Small and large projects and programmes
• Many different industries
• From a vendor perspective
• From a Client perspective
• From senior management perspective
• From a project and programme management perspective
• From a project, programme and portfolio (P3O) perspective

Our Mentoring Skill and Experience

• We have performed a lot of mentoring
• We currently have a stable of mentees
• We have mentored at various levels
• We have the emotional intelligence to deal with all types of people
• We have the roadmaps and collateral

Comments from Previous Mentees

"You hit the mark there.  That's exactly what I need to do."

                    M1

"I'm glad I have you on my side."

                    M2

 

 

Remember... mentoring is:

• Confidential and 100% supportive
• Motivated to achieving success for YOU
• Disconnected from the enterprise's politics
• Designed to reduce corporate and personal risk
• Designed for speedy capability transfer