We Advise

Projects are unique undertakings with a defined start and end date, scope and resources, planned to accomplish a singular goal. Many organisations struggle with this as they have a process orientation and lack the structures and discipline to manage projects effectively. Mindavation helps with the basic knowledge to set this up and then with driving project initiatives from inception to implementation and creating the organisational awareness and capabilities required to continue a project approach to getting work done.

• Agile/Waterfall/Hybrid Assessment
• Deliverable Based Outcome Design
• Project Management Office Reviews
• Project Management Office Maturity Assessment
• Project Recovery Services
• Software Vendor Package Selection, Configuration And Implementation
• Support Solution Design
• Transition Management
• Infrastructure And Architecture Design

Projects are used to create change. That change can significantly improve the abilities and efficiencies of an organization. Without any proper analysis, attempts to improve the organization can go very badly, resulting in confusion and difficulties in achieving organizational objectives. As a business analyst, you seek to understand the process strengths and the weaknesses your organization uses, and then validate any improvements to be implemented by a project. Mindavation leverages the skillsets, mindsets and tool sets that successful business analysts bring in developing the right change. Allow Mindavation to demonstrate the value Business Analysis can bring to your organisation and change program.

• Strategic Needs Assessment
• Competency Assessment
• Agile Business Analysis Practices
• Analysis Planning And Design
• Business Case Development
• Technique Identification & Selection

Arguably the most vital partnership in the project world is the partnership between the project manager and the sponsor. Unfortunately, the project manager-sponsor partnership is the one most often described through gnashed teeth. The good news is… it doesn’t have to be this way!

This workshop will examine different sponsorship and governance approaches, the pros and cons of each, and how to tailor the project management approach for each of these sponsorship schemes. Attendees will work through an assessment of the degree of trust and sponsorship knowledge that resides with the sponsor, and what to do as a result. The workshop presents the project manager-sponsor partnership as a process, and addresses the pitfalls and strengths that a process approach can surface. How to create the sponsorship process at the start of the project and how to recover a sponsorship process that is failing is a major focus of the workshop.

At the forefront of a successful sponsorship approach is an effective decision making process. This workshop concludes with an examination of various successful decision making schemes and the customization of a personalized sponsorship management worksheet that attendees can apply in their workplace.

This course is not about how to avoid litigations, be politically correct in the workplace, or equal opportunity employment. Although those are important aspects to a work environment, this diversity conversation is broader – it’s about perspectives, ideas, experiences and a culture.
In “Making Diversity the Solution” participants will learn and apply skills and techniques to capitalise on diversity in the workplace. They will discover how their individuality supports success and gain insight into other’s strengths so as to access and leverage the possibilities. Perspectives, ideas and productivity will shift so as to generate sustainable results when it comes to the triple bottom-line: profit, process and people. Participants will leave with an understanding of the role they play and the impact they have, as individuals and as team, when it comes to unleashing the potential of a multifarious environment.

Innovation leaders need to recognise and utilise every phase of the innovation process to develop effective policy, services and products that successfully deliver or exceed the expected benefits to the organisation and stakeholders. Innovation implementation we will cover the proven methodologies and best practices (although they are seldom correctly applied) to lead and participate in innovation efforts for your organisation to gain or maintain sustainable offerings. This course covers the complete innovation life cycle, from goods and service ideation through to launch and ongoing lifecycle management.

Facilitation means ‘to make easier’. In other words the facilitator’s real job is to make it easier for a group to accomplish its goals and objectives. Skilled facilitation helps facilitators and teams to recognise and effectively deal with problems, generate ideas, create project deliverables, improve processes or simply, to be more productive in less time with better results. This course teaches participants ‘best in class’ skills to enable effective group performance. Participants are engaged and learn through dialogue, feedback, videotaping and group activities.

How do we establish enough influence over key stakeholders to get our work done when we have no ‘real’ authority over them? We know what needs to be done and we know how to do it, yet we cannot get our boss, our colleagues, and yes, even the people who report to us, to do ‘the right thing.’ Some days it feels like we are just banging our head against the wall. The result…a whopping headache!

When we encounter problems we often go to what we know to solve them. All that means is we tend to base our solutions skills what’s familiar. Creative Problem Solving is a deliberate process by which you get to a new and different solution, or add a twist to a previous solution. Or perhaps you have a familiar problem and you need a different result this time. For example, in six months you need to increase profit by 25% instead of 15%. This is a great opportunity for creative problem solving. Creative problem is a team sport – it works better with more people in that you have that many more ideas to use when developing the best solution. This workshop will focus on ways to support and conduct creative problem solving in the workplace with your teams in new and experiential ways.

It has long been discussed that technology has made our world “smaller” and we are more interconnected than ever. Whether it is a crisis or a celebration, our public (whether they are our employees, teams, supervisors, etc.) often expects “immediate” action and decisiveness. As such, leadership is evolving and different skills and abilities are required – specifically the ability to adapt. More and more often we are tested and measured by the situations we face in which we must make take action without a known or proven “good” or “right” answer. Adaptive leadership can support you and your organisation with growth, gaining a competitive edge, ensuring sustainability and more. Learning how to recognise, understand and improve your personal adaptive leadership will give you access to new and different ways to more successfully respond, instead of react, to the many opportunities in your business environment. In this fun and fully interactive workshop, you will experience and explore proven improvisational techniques and principles, designed to help you grow and effectively become more adaptive as a leader.

Organizations introduce changes to their products and services to stay relevant, but they also want those changes to deliver specific benefits. In this course, Haydn Thomas covers the fundamentals of business benefits realization. He demonstrates how to document your expected outcomes, and then shows you how to put together a roadmap that includes the sequence of the expected benefits. Haydn wraps up by showing you how to tie the process together and avoid pitfalls along the way.

Use Cases provide a structured, industry-standard way of eliciting and documenting functional requirements. The process enhances communication between business analysts and business customers, and lays the foundation for user interface design and test case development. They also provide insights into data requirements, and help clients articulate their needs in ways other requirements activities cannot.
This course provides the right blend of knowledge and skills for people to understand and model Use Cases effectively. Attendees will learn where Use Cases are most effective, a step-by-step method for creating them, and numerous guidelines and tips to enhance creating them. Participants also receive a comprehensive Use Case template that can be readily used back in the office.

When you’re trying to grapple with user demands and market changes, it can be difficult to mentally zoom out and assess your organization’s operations. Business process modeling helps you see the big picture by allowing you to translate your business processes into easily understood pictures. In this course, instructor Haydn Thomas walks you through the most widely used business process modeling diagrams—context, functional flow, cross-functional flow, and flowchart—and explains the purpose of each one. As Haydn touches on each modeling technique, he shares its unique features, explains how to use that technique to create a diagram, and points out how to avoid common pitfalls. He pulls it all together by comparing process diagrams to help you determine which diagram you should use to document your organization’s business process.

Every project needs someone that can help turn ideas into reality: a business analyst. Join author and certified business analyst Haydn Thomas as he walks you through the fundamentals of business analysis tools and techniques. Haydn will demonstrate how these skills are used to gather requirements and identify solutions to provide better business outcomes on your change initiatives.
Discover where business analysis lives in the project life cycle, how to initiate a project, the best way to gather requirements, and smart strategies to monitor results and test outcomes.

An examination of requirements gathering, verification, and documentation processes to ensure your project starts off on the right foot. Students will learn to discern between needs, characteristics and solution elements as well as techniques for managing the scope of the project throughout the project life cycle.

Explore the career of business analysis, in this interview-style course with experienced analyst Haydn Thomas. Learn how business analysis fits in with project and change management and how business analysis works on large projects. Then find out what traits a business analyst must possess and the role of an analyst within an organization.

A strategic project you’re working on is going to require that people change the way they do their work, or who they work with, or what they care about, or how they’re performance is measured, or….. you get the picture! Organizations reach their goals through projects; projects require that people change. BUT – as a wise man once told me, “The only person who really likes change is a wet baby – and even they usually kick and scream throughout the change process!”

Ethical behavior starts at the top. If leadership sets a good example, the rest of the organization will follow. Yet while most managers try to run ethical organizations, the headlines are rife with stories of corporate corruption. In this course, Bob McGannon helps you understand what business ethics is and why it is critical to the success of your business (especially in the era of social media). He also describes some of the behaviors and expectations you can put in place at your company today to promote ethical behavior from top to bottom.
Bob also discusses ethics in relationship to specific business scenarios: working with suppliers and vendors, organizational decision making, and doing business internationally. He addresses how to handle business ethics violations and provides a checklist of items for staff to evaluate if something is ethical.

Use cases are a highly effective tool for gathering requirements for software development. There is confusion in the application of use cases, and their most effective usage. Our course demystifies use cases by translating their theory into practice. It helps participants learn the required concepts in business terms and by putting those concepts into direct application. Add to your requirements-gathering repertoire and set the stage for later translation of requirements into software-friendly formats. The course covers the fundamentals and reinforces them with several in-depth workshops using a comprehensive case study. Leave the course with the confidence to gather requirements utilizing use case scenarios and activity diagrams. Participants will gain new skills and confidence so that they can gather more complete and thorough requirements.

Agile project management allows you to produce smaller deliverables more frequently and efficiently, making it an excellent choice for teams that work in product development, programming, business analysis, and other collaborative areas. But it’s a fragile process that requires the right scope, goals, and management. In this course, author and Project Management Professional Bob McGannon shows you the tools and techniques you need to successfully manage a project through the agile life cycle. Learn how to use agile for the right projects and then walk through the four major phases in the cycle, from scoping the work and designing your sprint structure to collecting requirements, managing the project without interfering in the rapid build process, adapting to feedback, and closing the project. In the bonus chapter, Bob discusses real-life challenges he has encountered running agile projects, giving you real-world perspective into the project life cycle.

In this Insights interview, Bob McGannon, PMP, will share the secrets he’s cultivated in years of international project management for companies such as IBM and Boeing. Discover key skills for project managers, the ins and outs of certification options, and best ways to build and manage successful projects.

Project managers can boost their reputations and increase project participation and success by embracing respectable project ethics. In this course, Bob McGannon covers the four values of project ethics: responsibility, respect, fairness, and honesty. Bob shows how to build your own framework of ethical standards that work with your company’s culture, and describes typical ethical situations you might encounter during each project phase.
BONUS: In the bonus chapter, Bob answers seven questions about specific ethical dilemmas: sharing information, resolving conflicts over standards, communicating with stakeholders, reporting project status honestly, and more.

The more complex a project is, the more likely it is that you’ll need help from outside vendors and partners. Enter project procurement, the processes of planning, managing, and executing purchases of goods and services for your business. In this course, PMP Bob McGannon guides you through the project procurement process, helping you understand if procurement is right for your project, exploring common procurement approaches, and explaining the different procurement contract types, including fixed price, cost plus, and time and materials (T&M). Learn how to plan your procurements wisely with payment scheduling options, and discover methods for reducing risk. Then check out market-testing techniques for soliciting potential vendors and partners, and examine solicitation agreements such as the request for information (RFI), the request for quotation (RFQ), and the request for proposal (RFP).

Do you have a remote team and need to engage them more effectively? Or perhaps you are stepping into a management role for the first time, or with a team that’s scattered across office branches? In this course, author and PMP Bob McGannon shares the secrets he’s used for managing remote teams across continents and time zones for over 20 years.
Discover how to build rapport, set mutual expectations, communicate, connect, overcome conflict, get work done, and grow the team. Also included is a look at the top five challenges managers face in leading remote teams and helpful solutions that will get your team on track.

Project integration ensures all processes in a project run smoothly, and results in a properly synchronized series of deliverables such as the project charter, project plan, and preliminary project scope statement. This course will help managers plan the integration needs, communicate with staff and stakeholders, and integrate the project into an organizational portfolio. Along the way, Bob McGannon, PMP, shows how to ensure your scope, risk, and change approaches are in sync; recognize warning signs when integration goes awry; and plan the simultaneous integration of multiple projects and customer deliverables.

One of the most substantial problems with international projects is misunderstanding how cultures can differ from country to country. In this course, PM expert Bob McGannon helps leaders plan and deliver complex international projects with teams and products based in multiple countries. He helps leaders understand how culture, language, and time zone differences can hamper successful collaboration and how to adapt your communication style to bridge these gaps. Bob also shows how to find and nurture managers who will champion international projects, and shares tips to ensure the ongoing success of projects.