Microsoft Project eLearning Programme

As a core part of our charter, the PMO have been facilitating various professional development training courses since 2017. Our primary course was a Modus training course which was originally provided by a 3rd party training company in conjunction with an MS Project course. We then took ownership of it ourselves through a classroom course. During Covid-19, we reviewed our delivery model and moved to a virtual classroom using Cisco Webex. These have been very successful, and the feedback has been very positive. The downside was that even with a virtual classroom there was still a significant element of last-minute cancellations. From a Lessons Learned workshop we established a need for an agile customised self-learning course. In April 2022 a Modus Course went live on HSeLanD. This has been very successful and has led to a 50% user increase of Modus courses year on year.

The success of this course meant that the logical follow up to the Modus course has been a tailored MS Project course. With the surge of recruitment over the last 3 years, MS Project training has become essential for staff in project teams to do their jobs effectively. These classes were originally run in 2 formats:

1. A 1-day course with Modus and MS Project combined. Feedback was generally good, but some users felt more detail was needed.
2. A 2-day deep-dive course into MS Project. The feedback was very positive but what we found was that as it was a standardised course, there was a desire to be more tailored to the day-to-day activities in Modus. There were also still a number of cancellations as busy PMs found it hard to give 2 days to training.

From this feedback, the PMO established that there was a need for a customised self-learning MS Project course which not only went into detail on MS Project but aligned it to daily project management work in the HSE.

Lessons learned from the HSeLanD Modus course were brought into the initial discussions for the course. There were a lot of positives brought forward but one relevant point was that more user interaction in the course would be welcomed. This led to a discussion with the eHealth Training and Development Team about what we could improve on the previous course.

There were several MS Project training materials from over the years and these were reviewed alongside any relevant online materials. The first step was to review what was relevant for the HSE but also how we could bring this to tie in tandem with Modus use. The ideal was a course which would be suitable for people working on a stand-alone version of Project as well as offering a course which was customised to the needs of Modus users. From the training materials I drafted a syllabus document which also brought in Modus use. One of the biggest challenges was to ensure the course was relevant for daily use, so at this point the PMO Team and some PMS were surveyed to get their advice on content. A demonstration module was compiled and presented to Tom Molloy, the Head of PMO for review and approval. A Cost/Benefit Analysis was also run to justify the costs and from this, a business case was created which ran successfully through the sanction process.

A large challenge was that because we were replacing a 2-day course the course duration would be significant. Having developed the course, the first draft was for a 210-minute course broken into 18 modules. The Training and Development team reviewed the syllabus and due to their additional training and acquired expertise, they were in a position to offer a more creative role for the course this time around. They felt they could bring more interactivity to the course and this in turn could be 

used to combine modules and condense the course into a more manageable size. From a project management point of view, a MoSCoW analysis was ran on the material to aid them on what would be acceptable to change.

Because of the scale of the course, it has taken several months to complete, and probably longer than we initially estimated. I think it’s been a learning curve for both departments with a lot of useful Lessons Learned.  We’ve involved eHealth project management staff throughout the process to ensure that the course is relevant and focussed to their needs.

There has been a demand for MS Project training in the short term and The PMO have facilitated this for any training requests by assigning access to the raw videos created for the course. 

We’ve also encouraged post-course learning by including a guide to additional expertise for each of the topics covered, displayed at the end of each module.

The course is now live on HSeLanD (look for “Microsoft Project eLearning Programme”) and we’re looking forward to getting feedback from eHealth staff. It has a focus on Modus users but if you use MS Project as part of your role and don’t use Modus, the course should still be highly relevant. It starts with the basics (commands, adding tasks) and moves in complexity (scheduling, resourcing) through the lifetime of a project plan.

We would say that if you’re looking at your own departmental training needs, we’d recommend talking to the Training and Development Team and discuss taking a more active role in delivering more personalised training. Thanks again to Training and Development team for all their help with the course.

Contact: pmo@hse.ie