Project management

[Gordon Banner]

On 23/01/2013 10:34, Adrian Howard wrote:
> 1) Consider Certified Scrum Master course.
>
> The certification itself is pretty useless as a signifier of skill - 
> it basically just means you attended a two day course - but the 
> courses themselves tend to be quite useful.

That was my experience - a very good and throught-provoking 2 days 
followed by a laughably trivial quiz.

> 2) General Assembly and Skills Matters
>
> http://skillsmatter.com/ & http://generalassemb.ly/
>
> They both do free/cheapish courses with good presenters. Might be 
> worth dipping a toe in here.

+1 for SkillsMatter.  I've done a number of courses there and they pride 
themselves on covering topics which are at the leading edge, ie if you 
start hearing a buzz about something, they're just about to run a 
course.  They don't have a permanent team of fulltime trainers - their 
trainers tend to be committers on the project you're learning about ... 
perhaps less polished but at a different level for depth of knowledge.

Going back to the original question:

> I'd like to grasp a decent methodology. From what I've seen
> that would be Agile.

You may need to decide what are you trying to achieve exactly.  I think 
the Scrum approach is a breath of fresh air after years of over-rigid 
project planning.  But Scrum is more about managing development work, 
rather than "project management" as such.

Basically, Scrum & other Agile approaches tend to start from the view 
that a traditional project plan with a 2-year delivery date is doomed to 
failure, and does more harm than good.  But this may not be what 
"management" want to hear, and the sorts of places that advertise for a 
Project Manager role probably still want someone with PRINCE and a nice 
line in oversized pert charts.

My feeling would be to go on the Scrum course and avoid the places that 
want PRINCE, but YMMV.

Gordon