In-house seminars and workshops

When you engage us to conduct a seminar (or anyone else, but why would you do that?), you aren't buying instruction. You're buying better leadership, a higher rate of successfully completed assignments; more projects staying in control and delivering what's expected; successful business change.

You're paying for a result. Seminars … any seminars; ours or anyone else's … only get you part way there by themselves.

A personal offer from Bob Lewis

When I conduct a seminar (and I conduct every seminar personally), my goal is your goal: to have an impact. When you bring me in, I'm going to do everything I can to improve the odds. Here's what I'm willing to do to make that happen:

Version 1 – No additional charge: I won't fly home until the following morning. Instead, at the end of the day, you and I will go out for dinner so we can go over what you have to do to keep the momentum going and remove whatever barriers there are to the participants putting their new skills to good use.

I'll even pick up the tab (so long as the restaurant isn't too elaborate). And, I'll encourage you to call me if things aren't going as planned so we can figure out what's going wrong and what you might do about it.

Versions 2 through whatever: If you see the seminar as just the pointy end of a long spear … as one component of a multifaceted attempt to make your organization more effective at project management, achieving planned change, or what-have-you … I'll work with you to figure out an economical way to complement the seminar with whatever other services you need to get the job done.

Our seminars

We offer seminars on Leadership, Project Management, (NEW!) Handling Individual Assignments, and (NEW!) Business Change Management. All of our seminars are in-house events. They're designed to be highly interactive, which is why we recommend limiting attendance to 15 participants in each session.

Project Management Develop the core skills everyone needs to make change happen in your organization. Make project completion so routine that nobody even thinks it's unusual. Change is constant. This is more than a cliché and more than a philosophy. It's the central challenge of business, which is why you can't view project management through the old lens - the lens that says it's just a skill for making sure deliverables happen on time. It's much more than that. Project management is a core skill for making change happen in an organization. It's the discipline that transforms the intent to change into the specific tasks that have to be executed on time and on budget so the business can adapt to changing circumstances. You can't afford to limit your organization's project management skills to a small number of certified project managers. Staff at all levels can play an important role in effective project management. Which is why we've turned Bare Bones Project Management into a high-impact one-day seminar. Clients have found it has a clear advantage over more traditional project management seminars: Even the most skeptical project managers see the value of the techniques we provide. And because we present only ... and literally ... the bare bones, even novice project managers won't be overwhelmed by a vast and unnecessary collection of templates, forms, and artifacts. Best of all, our project management seminar pays attention to the human issues as well as those required for effective project planning and administration - the "street-smarts" side of project management that too-often gets lost among the project-management formalisms that dominate so many commercial seminars on the subject. We also offer a two-day version Sometimes you need more than good project managers. You need a company that's good at project management. In our two-day seminar we add business sponsor training and project governance consulting -- two factors that, done well, pave the road for project managers, and done poorly can prevent even the best run projects from succeeding. We also provide a project clinic for projects that could use an outside pair of eyes to help spot and address challenges of one kind or another. NEW! A half-day version: How to handle assignments How-to-delegate seminars are commonplace. But how about the employees on the other side of the transaction? They need to know how to handle assignments just as much as managers need to know how to delegate them. We started with our project management seminar. We stripped out everything having to do with team dynamics. Then we took our leadership seminar's delegation module, stood it on its head, and folded it in. The result: Something you won't find anywhere else: A highly focused, affordable half-day session to help every employee in your organization handle whatever assignments your managers delegate to them more effectively. NEW! Business change management Project management pushes change into an organization. But organizations are stable ... all of their moving parts have evolved to reinforce each other in their current form, which is why, when you push change into an organization, the organization pushes back. If you want to go beyond just providing deliverables ... if your goal is to be highly effective at designing, planning, and implementing change in an intentional way ... you need a complement to project management that pulls change into the organization. That's what our two-day business change management seminar gives you. It's based on Bob Lewis's new book, Bare Bones Change Management: What you shouldn't not do -- a unique approach designed, not for the business executive who tries to implement change from a position of authority, but for project managers and other change agents who have to make change happen from the middle. It's what you need to make change happen, because business change management isn't an independent set of activities. Everything in a business change management plan turns into tasks that have to be integrated into the project plan. It's already up to your project managers. Our business change management seminar gives them the tools they need to be excellent at it.

Praise for IT Catalysts' Bare Bones Project Management Seminar "By implementing the basic BBPM fundamentals our clients have seen great improvements in project performance. I would directly attribute their success to BBPM's simplicity. It's easy to understand, simple to implement and simple to maintain. For most organizations it's the most pragmatic approach to project management on the market." - Andrew Graf, Principal, TeamDynamix "Our company wanted to improve our execution with projects while developing additional project leadership talent. After reading Bob’s excellent Bare Bones Project Management book, we decided to bring in IT Catalysts to do a seminar for all of our leaders. In the seminar, we walked through one of our more aggressive projects and immediately used the plan to complete the project on-time and on budget. Since that time we've used Bare Bones Project Management as the basis for all corporate projects. Bare Bones Project Management is a realistic approach that all leaders can learn and put to immediate use." - Dave Kaiser, CIO, SFM "The Bare Bones Project Management approach is a perfect fit for our situation at The University of Arizona. We are re-implementing all of our major administrative systems, and the Implementation Directors, while expert in their own business functions, are not generally experienced as project managers, nor is that their long term career direction. The Bare Bones approach is exactly on point and just right in its level of detail and emphasis. In this context we see the Bare Bones approach as a complement to highly experienced project management provided by our consultants. In other contexts, where the projects are smaller, we are considering establishing the Bare Bones approach as the foundation." - Hank Childers, Project Director, Mosaic, University of Arizona, UITS