May 4th, 2009

University Programme in IT Project Management: Johannesburg 25-29 May 2009

Getting a course like this going has been my personal passion since I first studied Project Management back in the previous millenium, when I found that what apparently worked fine in construction and events management did not work well for me at all when I attempted to apply it to software development! I finally persuaded a number of people that we needed a university course like this which is specific to IT, after I ran into my long-lost hero, Martin Butler, in a corridor one afternoon shortly before a trip to Botswana to do training for the Office of the President there along with Dr. John Morrison.

The objective of the programme is to equip project managers and owners with the knowledge required to complete IT-intrinsic projects successfully. A generic approach is followed and whilst reference is made to methodologies such as Agile, PRINCE2 and others, no specific project management approach is promoted. And Martin is the lecturer. (Yay!)

We did a trial-run of this course for an IT company a couple of weeks before the delivery of the first public course, which was held in Cape Town earlier this year. They came from Bloemfontein, Durban, Johannesbug, PE and Cape Town -- 20 of them, including line managers and senior programmers -- and it absolutely transformed the organisation. Their training manager (herself an experienced programmer, who has done other training in Project Managament before), said it was the best course of any sort which she had attended in her life. I take that as a compliment coming from a training manager!

Find out more about the course here and and get an application form ASAP. (You snooze, you lose.)