On four different days, spread out over the course of two weeks in March, CSIA delivered a remote learning project management course in partnership with ISA. Over 40 companies were represented. The course was based on training ISA has offered in the past, but customized to the needs of system integrators. Eric Schaefer (Stone Technologies) and Jeff Miller (Interstates) reviewed the material ahead of time and helped tailor it to ensure consistency with our Best Practices and relevance to the realities of system integration companies.
Training supports CSIA’s mission to advance the industry of control system integration. Project management is an important part of our Best Practices with an entire chapter dedicated to it. In our 2015 membership survey, we asked about the interest in project management training delivered remotely. The interest was significant, which encouraged us to work on this initiative.
What did we learn from the first delivery of this training course?
- Remote delivery was welcomed and most of the participants were comfortable with it. Spreading the sessions out over 4 days, during the course of two weeks, and with lunch breaks in between, helped attendees stay focused.
- Need to assign pre-course work, with confirmation test, to eliminate the more tedious part of any training: the portion related to terminology.
- A clearer articulation of the target audience for this course is required. It is appropriate for entry to medium level engineers with less than five years of project management experience, not senior PMs.
- Increased SI specificity is needed through the addition of more typical SI examples, ideally with a single case study with different modules that are reviewed throughout the course.
While there is room to improve, we feel very energized by this training and the opportunity that the remote learning platform brings. We thank Eric Schaefer and Jeff Miller for their work on this, and all the CSIA member companies that supported our efforts by sponsoring training for their employees. We also gladly welcome project management experts from CSIA member companies who would like to help refine the content of our next round of training.
We are planning for our next series of training sessions to start on Sept 20, 2016.