Welcome to the Big Picture of the Projects and Beyond!

Throughout the years spent in leading different kinds of projects, we’ve learned that seemingly evident and clear facts are the vaguest. Given that they are apparent, no one is asking to be clarified.

The aforementioned is also the case with understanding the whole environment in which we do projects, the entire Big Picture. We tend to jump right into learning the various project and other methodologies to be more successful. At the same time, due to the neglect of that simple basic understanding of the Big Picture, it is not clear to us where all these methodologies fit and why we are still unsuccessful in projects. Also, the success of projects, despite a bunch of very advanced methods, is still shallow.

The objective of this course is to clarify the challenges in the overall journey from recognizing a business need to delivering the value that business needs will be met. These challenges exist across organizations. These are challenges that span a much wider area than the project life cycle itself. In most cases, we are even aware of them, but we repeat the same approaches, ignoring them.

In Part 1 of the course, you will learn about how we do our day-to-day work in organizations. Understanding the basics of value-chains is key to understanding why, how, and from what sources a business needs come.

Part 2 of the course deals with challenges at the strategic and portfolio levels of the organization related to articulating business needs and prioritizing them. The handling of initiatives on the strategic and portfolio level is a segment that is taken for granted by most organizations and does not adequately address the challenges we will mention. By organizations, we mean all types of organizations, those who need to start a project, as well as those who provide project execution service.

Part 3 of the course logically shifts the focus to defining the basis for undertaking future projects. We have identified numerous challenges here. It is essential to learn them so that you can adequately address them. Many paradoxes have been identified in practice in establishing the basis for a future project. Although they are well known to most, identical practices that lead to escalations and projects in crisis are still persistently applied.

Part 4 of the course continues to meet the challenges of completing and closing projects and delivering value at the end. Part 5 of the course, as a conclusion, teaches about problems throughout the end-to-end path and what are the biggest challenges along the way.

This course will not address the details of particular methodologies. Its goal is to teach the students of the Big Picture and the challenges along the way. Our next courses will discuss how to deal with each of these challenges in practice.

The course is free of charge and is intended for absolutely everyone who participates in projects in any way or needs project results to be able to do their daily work.