PROJECT MANAGEMENT AND PROCESS FACILITATION

1. Project cycle management and governance
Schedule: 22nd February 2023 at 12-1 pm EET / 11-12 am CET
Target groups: INVEST alliance higher education organisations staff and students, 
Webinar recording: Please register here to see the recording

The Project Cycle Management (PCM) represents the whole of management activities and decision-making procedures used during the life cycle of a project. PCM helps to ensure that projects are relevant to an agreed strategy and to the problems of target groups. PCM strengthens the project life cycle by focusing on a well-organized system that has proven results. It's organized in phases that are laid out for clarity, objective goals and expectations, and universal practice. Each phase works much like a chapter of a book, to be started and completed before moving on to the next phase. This ensures better quality outcomes and meeting agreed project expectations.
At a project level, proper governance clearly outlines roles, responsibilities and reporting chains, giving structure to the entire project. On a portfolio level, portfolio project governance collates all these reports and gives key stakeholders and decision makers complete visibility over all their projects and the strategic value of all their current activities.
If you have been involved with projects before, you would know the pain of drowning under thousands of reports, review and approval requests, and properly qualifying all this activity on a strategic level. Effective project governance depends on the application of efficient and integrative systems and software to avoid becoming an additional time-consuming admin step, it ensures that you are doing right projects and Doing projects right.!
Join our webinar and let’s upgrade our project management skills for more effective and efficient project management! 

2. Project, result and transition. Indicators, monitoring approaches and tools
Schedule: 22nd March 2023 at 12-1 pm EET / 11-12 am CET
Target groups: INVEST alliance higher education organisations staff and students, 
Webinar recording:  Please register here to see the recording

Monitoring and evaluation (M&E) is a powerful management tool that can be used to improve the way organizations achieve results. Just as organisations need financial, human resource, and accountability systems, they also need good performance feedback systems. 
There has been an evolution in the field of monitoring and evaluation involving a movement away from traditional implementation-based approaches toward new results-based approaches. The latter help to answer the “so what” question. In other words, organizations may successfully implement projects or policies, but have they produced the actual, intended results. Have they truly delivered on promises made to stakeholders? For example, it is not enough to simply implement an educational project and assume that successful implementation is equivalent to actual improvements in delivery of education. One must also examine outcomes and impacts. The introduction of a results-based M&E system takes decision makers one step further in assessing whether and how goals are being achieved over time. These systems help to answer the all-important “so what” question and respond to stakeholders’ growing demands for results.
Thus, performance indicators are measures of project impacts, outcomes, outputs, and inputs that are monitored during project implementation to assess progress toward project objectives. They are also used later to evaluate a project's success.

3. Project management in INVEST project 
Schedule: 21st April 2023 at 12-1 pm EET / 11-12 am CET 
Target groups: INVEST alliance higher education organisations staff and students
Webinar recording: Please register here to see the recording

The INVEST project is a typical example of a large scale complex project in the field of Higher Education. Five (5) European Universities in different countries, with significant experience from previous involvement in European projects join their forces to establish an University Alliance within the framework of the European initiative “European Universities”. This session presents an application of project management during the project’s life cycle along with the required structure that’s necessary to contribute to overall goal by achieving specific objectives through a work breakdown structure that includes work packages, deliverables, verifiable metrics, Means of verification. Participants will acquainted with the requirement for managing large scale projects, managing the scope of the project with respect to the triple constraint of time – cost -scope in European funded projects and the management requirements to maintain a balance among the three main parameters, while achieving objectives and goals. 

Trainers:
Ing. Norbert Floris, INVEST Project coordinator, Slovak University of Agriculture (SUA),
doc. JUDr. Lucia Palšová, Erasmus+ Institutional coordinator, SUA,
Pandelis Ipsilandis, Emeritus Professor, University of Thessaly (UTh), Greece 


4. Finance and administration
Schedule: 24th May 2023 at 12-1 pm EET / 11-12 am CET 
Target groups: INVEST alliance higher education organisations staff and students, 
Webinar recording: Please register here to see the recording

Without a predefined budget, not only is it difficult to answer these questions, but it becomes impossible to assess whether you are progressing in the right direction once the project is underway. In large organizations, the scale of this problem is further heightened due to concurrent running of multiple projects, change in initial assumptions and the addition of unexpected costs. That’s where cost management can help.

By implementing efficient cost management practices, project managers can:

• Set clear expectations with stakeholders
• Control scope creep by leveraging transparencies established with the customer
• Track progress and respond with corrective action at a quick pace
• Maintain expected margin, increase ROI, and avoid losing money on the project
• Generate data to benchmark for future projects and track long-term cost trends