Live Webinar April 2nd 2014 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm EDT
Offered by IAG Consulting (REP 2858)
Duration 1 hour 1 PDU or 1 CDU 1 Category A – Free PDU

This session is for business analyst leadership and development executive looking to make long term, systematic improvement to their business analyst organization.

IAG will draw from its project experience with over 700 customers to baseline organizations, assess the value of improvement, and determine the action plan for success.

Learning Objectives:

1. How do you assess the maturity of an analyst organization?
2. Where do you focus for improvement?
3. What implementation guidelines should be used to enhance success?

Click to register for Managing Requirements Operational Excellence

Live Webinar March 28th, 2014 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm EDT
Duration: 1 hour webinar Credits: 1 PDU Category A – $15 USD PDU
Presented by: Solutions Cube Group (REP 2451)

The WBS 100% Rule

Creation of a complete WBS for a project can be accomplished when project teams understand and adhere to the WBS 100% rule.

Project teams often confuse the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) with the Project Schedule or treat these different project deliverables as interchangeable project elements. The WBS is a pre-requisite project deliverable defining tangible project deliverables while the project schedule depicts how these deliverables will be produced.

The 100% rule ensures that all deliverable components are included in the WBS and helps the project team decompose the WBS into manageable work packets. The work packets represent the level of clarity in the WBS that will allow for a natural transition from tangible deliverables to activities for producing these deliverables.

Solutions Cube Group’s live Webinars address many relevant project issues. Learn how to build a detail WBS that represents 100% of the work to be produced and expand the WBS deliverables into project schedule activities.

In this 1 hour in-depth webinar participants learn:

• The use of the WBS 100% rule
• Techniques for numbering the WBS components to clearly depict relationship of each WBS component to its parent component
• Using the WBS as a blueprint that can be easily tailored to represent smaller project efforts and drive our project schedule activities.

EARN 1 PDU after viewing this webinar Although this is a part of a series the information from each session can stand on its own.

Click to purchase Transitioning From WBS to Project Schedule

Live Webinar March 27th, 2014 – 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm EDT
Duration: 1 hour webinar Credits: 1 PDU Category A – Free PDU
Sponsored by: PMI Requirements Management CoP (REP #S055)

• Do you wonder how agile teams adapt requirements practices? Wrangle with the right requirements to deliver?
• Fumble to filter through voluminous product “wants” and “needs”?
• Are you confused about decisions based on incomplete requirements? Having difficulties in collaborating with customers?

Ellen Gottesdiener will share a spectrum of requirements practices ranging from traditional to agile.

Hear how agile practitioners lighten, tighten, or incorporate a subset of traditional requirements practices. Understand how traditional projects can utilize agile requirements practices to increase quality and decrease delivery time. Join us to learn ways to calibrate your requirements to fit your project.

A key contributor to the business analysis profession across industry and PMI communities, Ellen is an expert reviewer of business analysis and requirements knowledge and role delineation works. You can reach her via ellen@ebgconsulting.com, Linkedin and follow her tweets (@ellengott)

Presenter: Ellen Gottesdiener, (LinkedIn profile @ellengott), is an internationally recognized facilitator, coach, trainer, speaker and expert in agile product management practices, product envisioning and roadmapping, business analysis and requirements, retrospectives, and collaboration. As founder of is founder and principal of EBG Consulting, she works with global clients and speaks at numerous numerous industry conferences. Ellen has authored of two acclaimed books: Requirements by Collaboration: Workshops for Defining Needs and The Software Requirements Memory Jogger TM. – Ellen has recently co-authored (with Mary Gorman) a book on practical agile planning and analysis practices,Discover to Deliver: Agile Product Planning & Analysis.

Note: You do have to be a PMI® member to register for this opportunity.

Click to register for Do the Right Things: Adapting Requirements Practices for Agile and Traditional Project

Live Webinar – March 25th, 2014 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm EDT
Presented by: Enfocus Solutions
Duration: 1 Hour 1 PDUs Credits: 1Category C PDU- Free PDU

The vast majority of organizations are using archaic methods to develop requirements based on methods from the 1970s and early 1980s.

With the dynamic pace of business change, organizations that continue to use these practices have continued to see a significant amount of challenged and failed projects and have placed their organizations at a competitive disadvantage.

In fact, even with the recent emphasis on project management practices and certification, Standish Group research shows that there are more failed and challenged projects than there was in their original 1994 report when waterfall and traditional requirement practices are used.

Many studies have shown that poor requirements and changing requirements are two of the leading causes of project failures.

The birth of Agile development largely stemmed from frustration of ineffective requirements practices and the desire to find a better way out of this horrible dilemma.

Agile has made a big difference on project success rates; Standish Group research shows that Agile projects are three times more likely to be successful than waterfall projects. However, having such little documentation has created problems for some organizations that have adopted agile.

In this webinar, John Parker will discuss how methods used to define and manage requirements need to change whether Agile or waterfall development is used.

John will address the following topics:

• The Difference between Business, Stakeholder and Solution Requirements
• Requirements: One time or Incremental delivery
• Requirements Review and Validation: One Time or Continuous
• Requirements Documentation: Paper Documents or Electronic
• Elicitation: Interviews or Stakeholder Collaboration
• What is Requirements and What is Design
• How Better Discovery Practices can Improve Agile

PDU Category C (PMBOK 5) documentation details:

Process Groups: Executing

Knowledge Areas: 4- Integration 5 – Scope 8 – Quality

• 5.1 Plan Scope Management
• 5.2 Collect Requirements
• 5.5 Validate Scope

As a Category C ‘Self Directed Learning Activity’ remember to document your learning experience and its relationship to project management for your ‘PDU Audit Trail Folder’

Click to register for Requirements: The Old Way and The New Way

Live Webinar March 21st, 2014 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm EDT
Duration: 1 hour webinar Credits: 1 PDU Category A – $15 USD PDU
Presented by: Solutions Cube Group (REP 2451)

Project teams must be able to understand and document the full scope of their project effort and communicate all of the project deliverables that must be built. Without this complete picture of the project outcomes, the risk of project failure increases due to higher probability that requirements and related solutions will missed from the project effort.

Establishing the project’s Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) provides the most comprehensive baseline of expected project deliverables. Building the WBS is not a one time project activity. The WBS is expanded using progressive elaboration to incorporate growing knowledge of the project as the project scope is being defined.

In this 1 hour in-depth webinar participants learn about:

• Factors that influence the content of the WBS
• Updating the WBS to reflect clarifications provided by Objectives, Context Diagram, Constraints, CSFs and Project Assumptions
• Ensuring the WBS accurately reflects only those deliverables that are in scope for the project

Solutions Cube Group’s live Webinars address many relevant project issues. Join them for this 1 hour in depth presentation to learn about how the Project Scope Statement provides valuable knowledge to build and adjust the WBS ensuring it represents the full scope of the project effort.

EARN 1 PDU after viewing this webinar Although this is a part of a series the information from each session can stand on its own.

Click to purchase Influence of the Scope Statement on the WBS

Live Webinar – March 11th 2014, 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm EDT
Duration: 1 hour 1 PDU/CDU Credits: 1 PDU Cat B – Free PDU
Hosted By: Systemation

We often think the culprit to poor project results is a lack of technical knowledge and skill in project management and business analysis.

While this is a contributor it is not necessarily the only one,
nor the main one.

An organization’s project environment can significantly neutralize even the best efforts to bring a project in on time and budget as well as identifying and delivering on scope.

Additionally, since all projects involve people, projects managers and business analysts have to be highly skilled at engaging and communicating with people. Shortcomings in these areas guarantee lackluster efforts and overall confusion.

Systemation will help you move forward with your projects!

Note: How to Receive PDUs for Attending a Live Systemation Webinar – You can earn one PDU per live webinar attended. All you have to do is fill out PMI’s online form or download the PDF version and claim the PDUs in Section 4 as Category B (Systemation’s address is: 12503 E. Euclid Dr. Suite 55. Centennial, CO 80111).

Click to register for Project Success – What’s Holding You Back?