Project Financials: Analysis, capital requests, and funding; a course for project managers

Summary

The Secrets of Financial Analysis, Capital Requests, and Project Funding. This course shows you how to have the bean counters eating out of your hand and giving you the funds you need for your project or capital acquisition. This self-paced course requires no textbook or instructor.

Master project finance, and you master a major project management career stumbling block.

Approximate study time: 11 hours

Benefits

Upon completion of this course, you will:

Avoid common mistakes made in capital requests (do you know, for example, which commonly used financial calculation you should not include and why?)
Understand which numbers managers like to see and which upper executives like to see, and why.
How to calculate and present the key financial quantities.
Be fluent in the language spoken by the gate keepers and bean counters.
Know how to write capital request properly, including what to include, what to exclude, and what to emphasize.
Be persuasive.

Why Buy

This course will show you how to put together a compelling capital request that quickly makes it past the various gatekeepers to final approval.

That improves efficiency within your company, giving your company a competitive advantage. Just as importantly, it gives you a personal advantage in your career.

You will, with this course, learn how to get the proper funding. In so doing, you will prevent a common cause of project failure (and career failure).

You will also understand how to properly evaluate the financial feasibility of a project before presenting it for approval, so you enhance your reputation each time rather than diminish it or even embarrass yourself.

FAQs

Questions

Answers

This looks really interesting but I can't figure out what you are sending or how you are sending it.	These are downloadable files. In other words, you get download instructions as soon as the buying part is done and you get the files right away.
What is it that I'm going to get and how? Is it a file that I’ll download? Is it mailed?	As soon as your purchase is complete, you will receive download instructions both on screen and via e-mail. You download self-extracting zip file that contains the course material. Depending on the course, the individual files will be in the rich text format or in the e-book format. Most materials are in the easier-to-handle rich text format.
Are we talking about a lot of pages for me to read?	Here's something that pleasantly surprises most people about these. If you look at a typical $99 professional book, most of it is filler. These courses don't have the filler. Ditto for $995 seminars covering the same information. Our courses get right to the meat, saving you the effort of wading through pages of nonsense. We don't mass up the high overhead of generating the filler, and we pass the savings on to our customers.
Do your courses on project management prepare me for the various certification routes of the Project Management Institute?	No. The material does not focus on exam preparation. It focuses on improving your real-world skills. However, what you learn will not impede certification.
Are you one of the approved (by PMI) course providers?	No. We are not affiliated with the Project Management Institute, although we may consider going that direction. Our goal is not to make you spend a lot of money learning how to answer test questions. Our goal is to teach you how to do your job better.
How long does each of your courses take?	It depends on the student. These courses are essentially white papers with exercises to help you relate the information to what you are doing now. You can read the material in each course in under an hour. But, how long it takes to digest it and apply it is up to you.
Do I have to buy books in addition to your course material? Will those books have to be bought from you?	To both questions, no. You don't have to buy anything else. Each course stands on its own.
What if your course material is not clear? Are your course writers available for clarification? Since it is not possible to read all material at one shot, and collect all questions at the same time, will the course writers be available as needed or on a one time basis?	a. It will be clear. b. Yes. c. Your success is important. If you have a question that is germane to the material, and not a probe for free consulting services, we will help you understand the material. We have kept the prices low, because not everyone can afford $995 for a two-day seminar that amounts to little more than a book promo. This is not a book promo.
What if I have other questions?	We'll answer to whatever extent is reasonable. It may be possible that you will ask questions that require developing a new course--some aspect of successful project management we didn't cover and that is not part of the normal project management training regimen. In that case, you would get the new course for free.
Do you have other courses?	Yes, and we are developing more. You can always write to us with specific needs, and we will adjust our product development accordingly. Also, it's a good idea to check Mindconnection on a regular basis, just to see what is new.
Who writes these courses?	That depends on the subject. For example, Dr. Jay Prince wrote the behavior courses based on his experience as a licensed therapist. All of the courses are well-researched and devoid of pseudoscience. Most are written by a subject matter expert. All are reviewed by a professional editor for clarity and succinctness.
Do your courses qualify for employer reimbursement?	Possibly not, because they are not accredited. Then again, our cost is very low. So, you must ask yourself if that small amount is worth investing into the skills you need to keep yourself employed and employable. The goal here is not to pile up paper credits. The goal is to get the information you would ordinarily get only from a lifetime of working in project management--if even then. We save you "classroom time" in the "school of hard knocks." You will recover your investment (and then some), simply because you will be that much better at what you do.
How much time can I reasonably expect to save, once I use the principles in your time management course?	That depends on how you presently approach your work. The typical student can expect to increase productivity by 50%. If you look at the way most people do their work, and then work your way through the course, you'll see why this is so. The author of that course works three full-time jobs and is Chair for one non-profit and acting Chair for another. Yet, he manages to excel in all of these roles while still maintaining outstanding health and enjoyment of life.

Price

What are your real goals, in regard to project management education?

If you want PMI certification, then you should spend the $2200 or so that takes.
If you want to improve your skill set for better performance, our courses are the answer.

Essentially, our project management courses cover the same material as the PMI certification courses, but we haven't added the expense.

More Info

Getting capital for a project is often quite a battle, isn't it? In battle, victory goes to those who have the right information and marshal the right resources the right way at the right time. We will show you the path to victory.

Unfortunately, the standard approach is to put together a weak written justification, followed by financials that the finance people don�t even care about instead of the ones they need to see. This is why most capital requests are delayed and why so many simply fail.

This course will show you how to put together a compelling capital request that quickly makes it past the various gatekeepers to final approval.

Every time you turn around, your company (or customer) is trying to save money�often at great cost! The shortcuts in system design, installation, and testing may save pennies today, but will cost big dollars in lost revenue due to performance issues. It will also cost more to maintain. If it works to begin with. But, try telling them that. It�s like they can�t hear you. Maybe it�s because you don�t speak their language. And sometimes, you must show instead of just tell. We�ll show you how to do just that.

This course shows you how to evaluate a project financially and get the funding to do the project. You must know this material if you want to create a new project, rather than manage only ones assigned to you by somebody else. This course will help you develop the expertise to make that a reality and allow you to move into the senior ranks where the big league players are.

We show you what questions to ask, and why. We show you how to assess the environment, how to use visibility properly, how to make your case in person, how to make your case in writing, and how to avoid common mistakes that can sink a funding request.

This is the third in the Intermediate Level Two series of courses in project management. The first two courses, Critical Path Method and Gant Charts, start off this series because this series focuses on the "high end" technical skills of project planning. These are the skills you need to be an outstanding project administrator.

Unfortunately, good financial proposal writing is becoming a lost art. Consequently, many projects that should get approved don't get approved. Or, they don't get properly funded. This need not happen to your projects.

If you understand proper financial proposal writing, as you will upon completion of this course, you can polish both your reputation and your resume with every project you do.

No more guesswork, no more misinformation, no more needless expense.