{"id":5380,"date":"2010-11-11T14:00:43","date_gmt":"2010-11-11T21:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/svapm.org\/?p=5380"},"modified":"2010-11-10T09:10:02","modified_gmt":"2010-11-10T16:10:02","slug":"whenever-possible-have-great-people-resources-and-you-can-deliver-the-impossible","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/svapm.org\/?p=5380","title":{"rendered":"Whenever Possible Have Great People Resources and You Can Deliver the Impossible"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Cisco was a client we wanted to work with.\u00a0 I\u2019d gone with my project management course coordinator, Kimberly Wiefling<\/a>, to meet with the leaders of Cisco<\/a>\u2019s project management educational initiatives to explore options of what training we had that they might want and that that they\u2019d want us to do.\u00a0 Every training organization wanted to get a contract with Cisco.\u00a0 Competition was fierce.\u00a0 \u00a0Another (national) vendor was already well established doing traditional project management courses. What did UCSC Extension Corporate Training have that was unique and would serve a strong training imperative at Cisco?<\/p>\n

Cisco has thousands of project and program managers and individual contributors who work on projects.\u00a0 They wanted an ongoing training program open to all their engineers to encourage an environment of good project management practices.\u00a0 They wanted a \u201clunch and learn\u201d type of program that would be held in a large auditorium for perhaps a hundred project managers and engineers once a month. They didn\u2019t want to spend a lot of money to fly speakers in.<\/p>\n

UCSC Extension has a large number of project management instructors who all lived and worked in the San Jose area.\u00a0 Without travel expenses the cost could be kept down and instructors could be available for just 2-hour modules, especially if it was something different that intrigued them to do.\u00a0 Our instructors were not the kind who wanted to deliver just an ordinary lecture series.\u00a0 If they were going to do this, they wanted it to be experiential learning and with \u201ctake-aways\u201d that Cisco employees would put into action.\u00a0 They would be asked to make commitments to action before leaving the workshops and \u201cthinking partners\u201d who would help hold them accountable for taking action.<\/p>\n

The project grew\u00a0 – \u201cscope creep\u201d anyone?\u00a0 And before long, we were asked to have the contract cover up to 300 attendees and be webcast to other Cisco locations.\u00a0\u00a0 We set up a monthly program on topics from working in virtual teams to risk management.\u00a0\u00a0 We challenged teams to build the highest towers possible with nothing but sheets of paper.\u00a0 One highlight included having teams of 5 or 6, each with a mousetrap (talk about risk management) and instructions about safely setting the 60+ mousetraps off without harm to any team members.\u00a0 Another highlight was having all 300 attendees drumming on and with all kinds of implements as they learned to work as teams.<\/p>\n

Jeff Richardson<\/a> manned the webcasting technical requirements, doing voiceovers of some of the proceedings for the remote audiences and setting up appropriate exercises for small groups or individuals watching on their own.\u00a0\u00a0 Kimberly Wiefling was a speaker and recruited additional instructors to lead and orient them to this \u201cedutainment\u201d form of instruction.\u00a0 Alan Tsuda<\/a> and Francine Gordon both led workshops and were regularly present to help with breakout exercises and crowd control.\u00a0 And so many other instructors took on the challenge over the 3 years of the workshop series.<\/p>\n

Greg Brower and Alicia Lopez were amongst those from Cisco who had the vision and trust to convince Cisco management to allow us to do outrageous things to support their project management educational commitment. \u00a0Conrad Sinsay and Christina Munoz managed to bring in full attendance and support which made the impossible happen each month and never lost their faith in our ability to pull it off.<\/p>\n

Many resources are needed for every project but if you have the right people resources, you can make almost anything happen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cisco was a client we wanted to work with.\u00a0 I\u2019d gone with my project management course coordinator, Kimberly Wiefling, to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"give_campaign_id":0,"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[394,876,62,171],"class_list":["post-5380","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous","tag-innovation","tag-projectmanagement","tag-silicon-valley","tag-training"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/svapm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5380","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/svapm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/svapm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/svapm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/svapm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5380"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/svapm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5380\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/svapm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5380"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/svapm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5380"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/svapm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5380"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}