Quick Wins interview with Ed Lively and Stephanie Cole of the International Institute for Learning (IIL), seasoned project managers discuss the importance of consultants need to have strong project management skills.
In this episode – Christie, Ed, and Stephanie have a roundtable discussion walking through key techniques along the phases of a typical project lifecycle – initiate, plan, execute, monitor/control, and close.  Episode also covers International Project Management Day coming up in November and how you can enhance your project management skills by attending an upcoming virtual conference.
Episode also covers International Project Management Day coming up in November and how you can enhance your project management skills by attending an upcoming virtual conference.
Learn more about project management:
International Institute for  Learning 
IPM Day 2017  |  Registration | A Virtual Tour

Listen to the Episode Here:
We will be doing a segment that I call Quick Wins. Quick Wins is when I have the opportunity to connect with individuals, discussing products, services, or ideas to help round out your consulting toolkit. In this episode, I’m going to call it a round table. We’re going to do a round table on project management. If you’re new to consulting, what you’ll soon discover is that regardless of the type of consulting projects you do, whether you work on six-week strategy cases or you end up on large multi-year implementation types of engagement work, you’re going to need to understand how to optimize the operations of that project, which is what project management is all about.
Why is that important? It’s important because we think about the crux of many projects that fail. If you are a consultant, there are some concerns or challenges you may be having in your projects. Chances are the root causes of problems may go back to the project management of that specific engagement. Consider the statistics, because it’s staggering. For every billion dollars invested in projects in the US alone, $122 million of that is wasted due to subpar product performance. That’s according to PMI. They also share that 75% of both business and IT executives anticipate their projects will fail. Standard Group states that only a third of all projects were successfully completed on time and on budget in 2016. These numbers go on and on the stats of projects and why projects fail.
When you go back to being a great consultant and the journey to greatness, that also includes becoming a great project manager. We have a couple of seasoned project management experts joining us from the International Institute for Learning. We have Ed Lively and Stephanie Cole, and we’re going to have a conversation about project management. We’re going to have almost a round table discussion around some tactics, techniques, and best practices that you can use and bring to your projects. We’re going to do that across the typical project management life cycle. The language changes depending on your projects and depending on your firm or your clients, but initially, the beginning and the end of a project are the same.
There’s typically an initiate phase, a plan phase. There is execute, monitor, control, and then a close phase. That’s the rhythm of most projects out there.