Management and Leadership for
Engineering and Technical Professionals

A leader who practices effective situational leadership can readily adapt his or her leadership style to a variety of contexts or circumstances and achieve maximum effectiveness. This course builds upon the work of Ken Blanchard and Paul Hersey in which a leader analyzes the needs of a given situation and adjusts his or her style appropriately. There are two types of leadership behaviors: "supportive behavior" and "directive behavior," which can be broken down into four categories: supporting, coaching, delegating, and directing. You'll explore these leadership categories and develop a strategy for dealing with a wide variety of people that encourages you to match their "leadership development levels" and realize a higher degree of team effectiveness.

Effective communicators know their audiences' needs and expectations at the outset. This course helps you polish your communications skills and tailor your content and style appropriately for different audiences and different communication styles. You'll learn how to be effective with technical staff members who need clear, concise, and detailed instructions so they can perform their work in a manner that meets your expectations, and with upper management, who need to understand the effect of your work on the company's goals and objectives. The course also covers the use of graphical elements to underscore your message as well as presentation skills that can help you achieve maximum results.

Gain the skills and knowledge needed to recruit and retain top talent for technical positions. As a technical manager, it's often up to you to find the best people for your organization and, once they begin working for you, to keep them motivated. Your company's human resources department plays a key role, of course, but you need to know precisely the skill set you're seeking when recruiting for technical staff positions and you need to know how to inspire and motivate those employees once they are on the job. You'll learn how to: 1) identify top talent and determine appropriate compensation for that talent; 2) select staff members that will work together cohesively and effectively on team projects; 3) resolve disagreements and conflicts among your staff members; and 4) delegate responsibilities and tasks effectively to your staff members. The course also covers basic laws that affect recruiting and hiring processes.

Learn how to develop budgets and manage your department's financial affairs. Developing a budget is really an opportunity to create an effective and comprehensive plan for the future. You'll learn how to evaluate your department's future needs for personnel and resources, and how to capture those needs in terms of financial requirements. You'll also learn how to view budgets from an organizational perspective and how your department's individual budget fits into the bigger picture. You'll explore financial statements, annual reports, and other financial documents.

Managing an IT project in an enterprise poses unique challenges. This course focuses on those elements of project management that are of greatest interest to IT workers. Topics include requirements definition and use-case analysis, performance metrics, risk determination and mitigation, task identification, scheduling, verification and testing, and version control. One of the goals of the course is to help IT staff members work more productively with business analysts, who frequently initiate IT projects.

Businesses use project management to manage projects and achieve outcomes typically with limited resources and under limited time constraints. This intensive, hands-on course provides an overview of the principles that underlie project management and covers the fundamental skills needed to enhance the outcome of any project. Gain a working knowledge of the nine major areas of the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK as defined by the Project Management Institute) including human resources management, communications management, scope management, quality management, scheduling/time management, cost and resource management, risk management, contract/procurement management, and project integration.

An important part of an IT manager’s job involves purchasing equipment and services from outside vendors, evaluating and recommending software for company use, and outsourcing tasks and functions. This course helps you deal with these responsibilities. You’ll learn how to apply financial considerations to your decision-making as well as how to elicit specific technical requirements from your internal clients to ensure that their needs are met effectively. You’ll also learn how to differentiate between projects that you should carry out in-house and those that you should outsource, and how to manage those external resources. Finally, the course addresses special considerations for dealing with international vendors.