Earlier this week I had the opportunity to sit down and enjoy coffee with a colleague dealing with a daunting business process re-engineering task.  She’s working with a client that has not leveraged technology well in their current business processes.  Management recently hired a new CIO who has been hard at work getting approval and buy-in at the management level to automate many processes, but she’s finding great resistance actually implementing the improvements at every level.

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I’m looking at actually sitting down and doing some course work. In some ways, the idea is a bit scary as it’s been nearly a decade since I’ve done a real course. To get to the next level in my career, I think it will really help to get a couple courses under my belt and back up the experience I’ve gotten in the field.

My first go will be with some project managment courses. I’ve looked at many of the in-class courses available here in Vancouver, but their schedules just don’t fit my life. It’s insanely hard to take a week or more off as a consultant.

A little while ago I ran across a number of great-sounding online courses offered by Villanova University in the ‘states. They claim their project management courses were put together with the help of the PMI, and offer full professional development credits if I plan to go for a full PMP (the verdict’s out on that right now). The nicest thing – they offer a number of courses (and a full certification) specific to IT.

Does anyone have experience with this, or any other, online PM course?

In the future, I’m going to be looking at a number of courses through the Sauder school of business (at UBC). They offer nice 2-day courses in managment, financial analysis and other business areas that will be nice ones to add to the

A friend and I were talking on MSN today about the challenge of managing updates for tasks that you have delegated to people. He was telling me that it can be very hard not to want/need constant updates.

I can understand how you can feel this way – especially with junior staff or people you don’t 100% trust to complete a task within the required constraints (both quality and time). The challenge is that harassing people for updates can very detrimental to the confidence and productivity of a team member. Not to mention that it shows a big lack of trust in a member of your team.

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