SoftKey offers a variety of courses ranging from technical project management to soft skills and leadership. Any of SoftKey’s courses can be customized and provided onsite for your organization.

PMP® Certification Prep Boot Camp - 4 days

This course is designed to prepare the student for the Project Management Professional (PMP)® exam. The course is 4 days in length and provides the 35 project management education hours required to sit for the PMP® examination. In addition to PMP® preparation, the student will also learn essential skills for managing projects. The course covers all areas of A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide) as well as the Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct. Participants will learn how to structure and plan a project, how to form the team, how to estimate the project and develop the project schedule, how to monitor and control the project, assess risk, build quality into the project and much more.  During the course, students will work through sample exam questions and exercises that will prepare them to sit for the exam. The course is designed to be interactive and includes all the necessary course materials for exam preparation.

Program Management PgMP® Essentials – 3 days

Although programs and projects have been around for some time, the discipline of program management is relatively new. Many organizations are beginning to embrace the concepts and benefits of effectively managed programs. Program managers face many more challenges than project managers, in part due to the high number of stakeholders and necessity to communicate at various levels. In addition, true program management is largely misunderstood, and those managing programs lack the skills necessary to ensure the program delivers the benefits for which it was undertaken.

This course covers all aspects of program management outlined in PMI’s Standard for Program Management®, 3rd edition, as well as the topics presented in the Program Management Professional (PgMP®) Examination Content Outline. While this course covers the topics for PgMP® certification, it is appropriate for anyone who wishes to understand program management and the right way to manage programs.

The Practice of Project Management - 3 days

This hands-on, highly interactive course is designed to provide practicing project managers and team members the essential skills for managing projects.  This course covers all aspects of project management from startup to closeout.  Participants will learn how to structure and plan a project, how to form the team, how to monitor and control the project, assess risk, build quality into the project and much more.  This course provides a common language for project management and utilizes the terminology and concepts provided in the Project Management Body of Knowledge® published by the Project Management Institute. 

Project Management for the Executive - ½ day – 1-day

This course is designed to provide an overview of project management for the executive. The course focuses on the benefits of project management and how senior management can improve the success of project management within the organization. The executive will learn how best practices in project management can add consistency to the process of delivering quality products and solutions to customers – on time, under budget, and ahead of the competition. The course also provides an overview of the Project Management Center of Excellence and its strategic value.

Project Management for IT Professionals - 3 days

Technology continually enables organizations to take advantage of new opportunities, and information technology project managers are at the forefront of these efforts. However, there are a number of issues that challenge a project manager’s role within an IT environment. This course provides the technology project manager with tools and techniques to manage IT projects successfully. This course covers all aspects of project management from startup to close out with a focus on IT projects. Participants will learn how to structure and plan a project, how to form the team, how to monitor and control the project, assess risk, and build quality into the project. The course also explores such topics as integration of IT projects into the business processes, coordination of multiple stakeholders, identifying customer requirements, estimating duration, resources, and costs, understanding activities of the design phase, managing multiple projects and much more.

Project Management Boot Camp - 3 days

This intense, hands-on, 3-day course focuses on core project management principles and includes a compilation of areas project managers find most problematic. The course teaches the student how to apply effective project management techniques in real-world situations utilizing case studies, industry best practices, and typical scenarios confronted in practice. The course covers every aspect of project management from startup to closeout and teaches the student how to be an effective project manager rather than task manager. The course assumes the student is familiar with the basic workings of a cross-functional project team and has some experience with the project process. As a bonus, the course will include a brief section on the third day that covers the basic concepts of agile project management and which agile techniques can be utilized for any project. This course is beneficial for experienced, practicing project managers from any industry as well as new, eager-to-learn project managers who’ve had some exposure to project management. This course is also beneficial for project team members and any other practitioner involved in the project process to understand the project management perspective. Project managers interested in obtaining the Project Management Professional (PMP) certification will also benefit from the course.

Quality and Risk - 2 days

This course covers the essential concepts of quality and risk for projects. Student will learn how to build quality into a project as well as how to respond to project risks. While it may not be possible to predict project outcomes with 100% certainty, you can influence the outcome, avoid many potential risks, and calmly respond to unavoidable challenges instead of reacting to them. In this course, students will learn how to identify, assess, prioritize, plan for, and control risks.

Project Management Fundamentals - 2 days

Project management has quickly become a core competency for most organizations as they move toward a project-oriented approach to managing their businesses. This two-day course is designed to provide an introduction to project management. It provides the “big picture” of how project management tools and techniques are used to establish a firm foundation for a project, select and organize a team to perform project tasks, create schedules, budgets and project plans, monitor and control ongoing project performance, and close the project upon its completion. Students will learn how to minimize risk throughout the project life cycle by using contingency planning techniques. This course provides a common language for project management and utilizes the terminology and concepts provided in the Project Management Body of Knowledge® published by the Project Management Institute. This course is designed to be interactive and informal and includes practical exercises and a class book for each student.

Developing Project Requirements - 2 Days

Developing accurate and complete requirements is essential in managing the scope of a project. It also ensures that the product or service requested meets the need for which it was produced. This two-day workshop teaches the participant how to define and gather business requirements as well as how to track and manage them. It teaches the importance of keeping the ultimate customer involved in the requirements gathering process as well as the project. The course is geared to information technology professionals and is essential for project managers.

Managing Project Risk - 2 days

Every project has some level of uncertainty in its outcome. Projects that deliver successfully generally do so because the project team is proactive about managing risks on the project. This course examines risk management activities and provides practical strategies for applying them to projects to ensure successful completion. The course provides a process to identify risk, analyze and prioritize risk, respond to risk, and monitor and control risks. The course focuses on examining practical examples of common risk scenarios and providing tips for mitigation and contingency development. This course also addresses integrating risk management activities into the ongoing management of the project to control risks throughout the project life cycle.

Soft Skills for Project Managers - 2 days

In today’s project environment, project managers face many difficult and complex “people issues” that can make completing a project in a successful and cost effective manner almost impossible. New methods of facilitative management are required for a project manager to manage a project successfully. This course takes a hard look at the soft skills that can make or break a project and provides tools and techniques to develop these skills. The course covers areas such as building effective teams, managing expectations, effective delegation, how to motivate and negotiate, conflict management, pushing back and overcoming resistance, communication styles and strategies, effective listening, virtual teams, building effective business relationships and much more.

Effective Project Scheduling - 2 days

This course teaches the fundamentals of using Microsoft Project to create a project schedule. The course is geared towards the novice user of Microsoft Project who wants to learn the tools to create better, more effective project schedules. This course covers creating a task list, establishing dependencies, working with major task views, entering duration and work effort, assigning resources, resolving resource allocation problems, printing views and reports, and tracking and analyzing progress.

Advanced Project Scheduling with Microsoft Project- 2 days

Microsoft Project is the one of the leading applications for project scheduling and is designed to address the workflow and efforts of project resources in today's organizations. Designed for the advanced user or serious novice, Advanced Scheduling with Microsoft Project focuses on advanced scheduling techniques and how to best utilize Microsoft Project to successfully manage a project. The course covers customizing tables and views, customizing fields and creating calculated fields, importing and exporting project data, balancing resource loads, understanding how the baseline impacts the project, understanding multiple critical paths and resolving fragmented critical paths, understanding issues with tracking and updating, utilizing macros, and much more. The course explains some of the mysteries that often arise within the software and adds depth and mastery to your project scheduling skills.

Contract Management and Procurement - 2 days

Procurement management, and especially contract administration, has become an essential project management skill as more and more of today's businesses outsource all but the company's core competencies. This course offers insight into the role of procurement on a project team by guiding you through procurement practices, the solicitation of bids, and contract negotiations. This course also covers the fundamentals of contract law.

Estimating and Scheduling - 2 days

This course is designed to teach the student the essentials of estimating and scheduling a project. The course covers everything from defining the scope of work to creating the project budget. Students who attend this course will learn techniques to improve the accuracy of project estimates as well as improve the overall schedule. This course also includes techniques for developing the project budget as well as monitoring and controlling both the schedule and budget. Critical Chain techniques are also explored in addition to identifying risk. During the course, students work through case studies to reinforce the concepts.

Effective Communication Skills - 2 days

This highly interactive course is designed to provide project managers, team members, and stakeholders at every level the essential skills for effective communication. Participants will learn about communication styles, nonverbal communication, effective listening, communication strategies, virtual communication, conflict management, written communication, grammar tips, email etiquette, and communication with the project team.

Building Quality in Projects – 2 days

Executives, managers, and sometimes even team members talk about building quality into projects. What’s difficult, however, and what’s not explained is HOW to build quality into projects. This 2-day course focuses on defining what quality is for the organization, what the quality objectives are, and how to build those objectives into the project.

Consulting Skills – 2 days

In today’s environment, IT is required to act as a business consultant in addition to performing development work. In many cases, the IT department is the liaison between the business and outsourced development teams. This course is designed to assist anyone who performs a consultative role. Participants will learn about the consulting role and its relationship to other business roles, the role of outsourcing and how to manage outsourcing relationships, how to act as a consultant to the business sponsors and looking beyond purely technical solutions, and how to build a relationship with the business sponsors that ensure clear expectations and successful projects. Role-playing is used to simulate workplace situations.

Agile Courses

Courses providing certification through the Scrum Alliance® are taught by a partnering organization.

PMI-ACP® Certification Preparation - 3 days

This intense, 3-day workshop will help new and seasoned Agile practitioners learn how to successfully apply Agile methods to their projects and programs. Participants will learn how to apply Agile and how to utilize Agile concepts for projects and teams. This course focuses on the tools and techniques and knowledge areas required to pass the PMI-ACP® exam offered through the Project Management Institute (PMI®). Students will work through sample exam questions to prepare for the real exam.

Fundamentals of Agile Project Management – 2-days

Product/system development is critical to an organization as it drives strategy and innovation and allows an organization to deliver value to its customers and stakeholders. Agile brings a level of improvement to product development that increases quality, time to market, value delivery, and motivation of those involved in the process. It takes individuals out of their functional silos and puts them in self-managed and customer-focused multidisciplinary teams. The agile approach is helping to create more practical skills that further accelerate value generation in many areas. For agile to succeed and scale, however, the approach must be understood by all stakeholders involved in the process, not just those involved in the development. This workshop covers the fundamentals of agile project management. It is appropriate for anyone involved or currently working on an agile team or anyone interested in learning about agile project management. The course covers basic agile concepts as well as Scrum, the most popular framework under the agile umbrella.

Agile for the Business – 2 days

Product and system development is critical to an organization as it drives strategy and innovation and allows an organization to deliver value to its customers and stakeholders. Agile brings a level of improvement to product development that increases quality, time to market, value delivery, and motivation of those involved in the process. It takes individuals out of their functional silos and puts them in self-managed and customer-focused multidisciplinary teams. The agile approach is not only increasing profitable growth in organizations but also helping to create more practical skills that further accelerate value generation in many areas.

This 2-day workshop covers the agile methodology from the business perspective. It is meant to educate anyone involved in the process on key concepts and what is required to make agile successful. You will walk away with a new perspective and understanding of the agile methodology. You will finally understand the big picture and be invigorated to participate and incorporate agile concepts into your work. You will not only understand the Scrum infrastructure but also lean concepts, Kanban, and more.

Writing Effective User Stories – 2 days

The heart of Agile is user stories, yet there is confusion on how to write them. Many agile teams struggle to write user stories with just enough information so that developers can reasonably estimate the effort to implement. During this 2-day workshop, you will learn how to write user stories that are valuable to stakeholders and developers. This workshop will also examine the role of the product owner in managing user stories.

Agile Planning and Estimating – 2 days

This 2-day workshop covers the core concepts of agile planning and estimating. Appropriate for anyone participating on an agile project, this course provides techniques and approaches for estimation and planning that are consistent with the core principles of agile. This course is appropriate for both new and experienced project managers who are transitioning to a Scrum Master, Agile Coach, Product Owner, or Agile Project Manager.

Certified ScrumMaster® (CSM®) - 2 days

This 2-day workshop covers the essential concepts and tools of Scrum and provides a roadmap for adopting Agile. You’ll learn how to lead development teams toward Agile operations by managing product backlogs, planning releases and sprints, tracking and reporting progress, and conducting retrospectives. This two-day Certified Scrum Master training prepares you to gain your Certified Scrum Master (CSM®) certification from the Scrum Alliance, proof of your understanding of the Scrum framework and its application to complex projects. Upon class completion, you’ll be eligible to take the Certified Scrum Master exam and earn a two-year membership in the Scrum Alliance®.

Certified Scrum Product Owner® (CSPO®) – 2 days

In this 2-day Scrum Product Owner training, seasoned experts prepare you to master the most difficult role in Scrum. Our practicing experts go beyond basic Scrum to teach you how to function as a Scrum Product Owner in the real world. Take charge of the Product Backlog and prioritize for your team while learning to communicate clearly with project stakeholders. While leading a realistic Scrum simulation, we also gently introduce you to principles and tools from methods like Lean Startup®, Kanban, Lean UX and XP in order to demonstrate Scrum’s true versatility.

Certified Scrum Developer® (CSD®) – 2 days

Learn to use a deliberate and disciplined approach to tackle any development challenge and produce reliable, robust, verifiable applications. This three-day Agile engineering workshop provides you with the technical skills necessary to write better code with fewer defects and respond quickly to changing requirements. This is a hands-on agile engineering workshop, so get ready to roll up your sleeves and code! Upon completion, earn your Certified Scrum Developer (CSD) credentials from the Scrum Alliance.

A-Certified Scrum Master (A-CSMSM) – 2 days

Advanced Scrum Master (Scrum Alliance A-CSM® Certified) gives you a practical set of tools, feedback on your communication and facilitation skills and techniques for guiding and evolving your Agile teams. You will be practicing a host of advanced personal and group facilitation skills and exercises that will reinvigorate your leadership approach and take your team’s performance to the next level.

• Deal with common agile problems

• Dive into team and relationship dynamics

• Learn how to keep things fresh for your teams

• Help your teams understand how to deal with different people & motivations

• Walk away with a ready-to-use toolkit of coaching games, exercises and tools

To earn an Advanced CSM, you first must have an active CSM® certification with Scrum Alliance®, as well as at least one-year work experience specific to the role of Scrum Master. For more details on Scrum Alliance requirements, visit the Scrum Alliance website.

Certified Agile Leadership I by the Agile Leadership Academy – 2 days

This 2-day workshop is focused on the role, responsibilities and reasons for being an agile leader. A highly interactive program is aimed at helping participants create personalized plans that can be put directly into action following the workshop. A rich combination of discussions with peers, lecture, movies, micro-exercises and more ensure that participants are both engaged and entertained. This course is taught by actual executives who have personally been at the forefront of numerous agile transformations, and are recognized thought leaders in the agile space for over fifteen years. Learn what has and hasn’t worked in real world whole-company transformations, encompassing not just software development but also impacts to HR, finance, marketing and more. This course is appropriate for coaches, consultants, management, executives or anyone who aspires to be an agile leader.

Scrum Master Course – 2 days

This course covers the same Scrum concepts as the Certified Scrum Master course but without the certification from the Scrum Alliance. You’ll learn how to lead development teams toward Agile operations by managing product backlogs, planning releases and sprints, tracking and reporting progress, conducting retrospectives, and much more.