Goal Directed Project Management (GDPM) provides an extremely powerful, yet deceptively simple, approach for ‘cutting-through-the-detail’ to provide a one-page view of a complete business project or programme showing all key milestones and progress towards achieving them.

GDPM offers a set of consensus-based planning techniques, which focus on the fundamental business outcomes that are required from the project or programme, and who is responsible for delivering them.

These techniques are first applied during project mobilisation, resulting in a Milestone Plan which is then used throughout the project as a high-level tracking and communications tool. Detailed planning is still required, of course, but is always aligned with the Milestones.

GDPM has been used by many organisations over the last twenty years to strengthen their activity-based delivery plans by providing high-level clarity of true project achievement against goals.

Duration:

One day, residential or in-house. The course is most effective when it is followed by a facilitated project day.

Audience:

Sponsors, steering group members, key stakeholders, programme managers, project managers, team leaders, team members, project and programme office staff – in fact, anyone involved in defining plans and then delivering against them.
Objectives:

On completion, delegates will be able to start applying the GDPM techniques to real projects and programmes, to:

• Identify and agree project outcomes
• Build and improve a Milestone Plan as part of a team
• Identify roles and responsibilities for Milestones, as part of a team
• Link the Milestone Plan to the detailed workplans
• Monitor progress against the Milestone Plan
• Describe how GDPM supports project management methods such as PRINCE 2

Pre-Requisites:

Ideally, delegates should be involved in a project or programme that is about to mobilise. Experience of working in a project-based environment is preferable.
Workshop Based:

This is an experiential course, with the majority of the day taken up with doing. GDPM works best as a workshop based technique, and the course simulates a project mobilisation workshop to provide delegates with hands-on experience of :

• Building consensus of project goals through the Milestone Planning process
• Gaining agreement on Responsibilities for achieving Milestones
• Linking detailed workplans to the high-level Milestone Plan

Topics:

An introduction to GDPM

Overall objectives of the project: Milestone planning

Overall responsibilities: Responsibility charting

Delivering the project: detailed workplans

Tracking and communications: using GDPM throughout the project

Putting it all into practice

Case Study:

The course uses a real-life social scenario (not workplace related) to practice the GDPM techniques. The lecturers also draw on their personal experiences of using GDPM to illustrate how it works in the business environment.