In the legal profession, project management is often an exercise of trial by fire.  We are usually assigned tasks, resources to complete the project, a budget and a due date.  But we aren’t given the project management skills required to help keep the project in line and on track.

My quest to learn all that I could about project management started almost three years ago in a small conference room in New York City where a large international law firm was interviewing potential vendors to help with their upcoming migration.  There I sat, surrounded by IT professionals as they grilled me for hours on various project management techniques.  Shortly after that moment, I decided to hit the books, go back to school and learn as much as I could about project management.  (In spite of my lack of formal project management education, we won the contract and successfully completed the project.)

Back to School
A hectic travel schedule combined with the pressures of trying to run a busy and growing company didn’t leave much time for traditional education.  For this reason I decided to see what online opportunities existed.  I read an article in Business Week on the expanding role of online education versus traditional institutions, searched the Internet, and asked friends at Microsoft and Boeing who had previously taken similar courses. 

Those who had attended project management courses on a physical campus spoke of the amazing networking opportunities they were able to take advantage of as a result of their education.  But the people I spoke to who had attended an online program argued about the merits of being able to log onto a secure site, day or night and complete the assignments and tests at their own pace.

At that time, the availability and selection of online project management programs were quite limited.  Now, several years later, programs exist at many schools — from Stanford University to the University of Washington, Regis University to Villanova.  I decided to apply to the Villanova Master Certificate Program in Project Management and was accepted. 

The Project Management Program
The first required course was Essentials of Project Management.  I received a binder with 731 pages of printed PowerPoint slides, a CD with video lectures and two textbooks.  Each week, assignments were received and discussion topics were posted that required comment.  These discussion threads encouraged interaction between students and made each one of us feel more like a part of the group.  Approximately every two to three weeks, we were required to take an online exam.  The exams were given in multiple-choice format, and we could take them several times until we were happy with the score.

Applying the Lessons Learned
The role of a project manager is to ensure that everyone understands the project goal, is able to determine and secure the resources to get the job done, build a team, set a realistic schedule and develop a dynamic plan and keep it up-to-date.  The project manager must also garner support from those who have a stake in the project outcome (stakeholders) and from those who are funding it (sponsors) and communicate milestones and project timelines effectively to all vested parties.  Perhaps most importantly, the project manager must also be the project’s biggest cheerleader.

How does this apply to the legal profession?  Think back to some of the historical projects at your own firm.  Who was assigned as project manager?  Was there anyone at your firm who actually held this specific title?  Did they have the partner buy-in and authority to change a deadline if it was unrealistic?  Were they able to select their own team members?  Too often, the answer is no.

And have you ever seen a project pushed through even after it was determined that the end result would not fully meet the needs of the firm?  Perhaps you realized, after the fact, that the software you had purchased for a particular project might not meet your firm’s exact needs but it ended up getting rolled out anyway because it had already been purchased.  This course taught the five-step process used in project management along with kill points that determine whether a project should be stopped, reviewed, corrected or, if necessary, terminated and resources reassigned.

The course also covered essential project management skills such as:

• Risk Identification and how to use the Risk Impact Matrix
• Project planning
• Work breakdown structures
• Network diagrams
• How to determine organizational structure matrix
• Scope management
• Time management
• Cost management
• Human resources management
• Risk management
• Integration management

What I learned from this one class was extremely valuable, and I was immediately able to apply it to our company’s current list of client projects.  The course ended up being so valuable, in fact, that we created an internal program and study group to distribute this knowledge to Payne Consulting Group’s internal project management team.
With the first course complete, I signed up for the second class, Mastering Project Management.  One down — two to go.

Much of the second class was focused on working with people.  The course covered personality testing, including the Myers-Briggs type indicator test, and then moved onto project modeling, budgeting and more complex analysis.  The second class was much more challenging than the first because it introduced topics that I was less familiar with.

The second course also contained information that was directly applicable to working within the legal industry.  With each module completed, I found more practical reasons to apply the lessons learned to internal and external projects and scenarios.

Course number two taken and passed — now it was time to move onto the third and final course in the program— Project Management Professional Prep.  The primary goal of this course was to enable you to take and pass the PMP exam offered by the Project Management Institute (PMI).  The course included a series of tests that help you prepare for and pass the final test.

End Result
When a project succeeds, there is no shortage of people willing to step up and take the credit.  But when a project yields less than successful results, too often we hear the project leaders say, “I can’t understand what happened” — or they end up wrongly placing the blame on factors outside of their control.

After taking this class, however, I feel confident that our project managers are well equipped to handle even the most potentially derailing project scenario.  To be a successful project manager, it’s not essential that you enroll in a full-fledged master’s program like I did.  But by doing so, I was able to learn the formal fundamentals of project management and am now better able to understand potential risks and how to deal with them before they disrupt or shut down any of our projects.  Best of all, I received an overall education in the subject and was exposed to many of the various tools and methods used by successful project managers worldwide.

Villanova’s Online Education Facts Websites:

Villanova University Online Education: www.villanovau.com
Project Management Institute: www.pmi.org

Current Tuition
Essentials of PM $ 1,980
Mastering PM $ 2,280
PMP Prep Course $ 995
Advanced Strategic PM $ 1,980
PM for IT Professionals $ 1,980

Ease of Use
In order to complete the class, you need a computer with a CD-ROM drive, speakers, Internet connectivity and software provided by the university (BISK disk).  You may be required to download a free version of QuickTime and adjust your firewall settings.  Technical support is available to help troubleshoot connectivity problems.

Instructor Credentials
Most facilitators are project management professionals or professors at various universities that choose to hold these classes to supplement their income.  In my experience, the instructors were less of a factor than the other students who readily shared their experiences.

About our author . . .

Donna Payne is president and founder of Payne Consulting Group, headquartered in Seattle.  She and the company have authored 11 books on Microsoft Office including the bestselling series: Word for Law Firms.  Payne is a member of Microsoft Legal Advisory Council, the American Bar Association, the American Society of Journalists and Authors and the Project Management Institute.  She can be reached at donnapayne@payneconsulting.com.