As I said in my previous blog 5 Best Podcasts for Business Managers, I am always on the lookout for useful free management training tools. I just recently came across a nice website with free Project Management training webinars.
PM Centers USA holds free monthly webinars for Project Management topics. Attendees can earn 0.5 Professional Development Units (PDUs) for each webinar that can be used for maintaining your PMP accreditation. You can register for their upcoming webinars at their website.
They also offer free access to many previously recorded webinars. You will need to register your name and contact information with the website, but it is completely free and well worth it. I highly recommend the following 2 Project Management webinars:
Common Scheduling Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
Joe Lukas, an outstanding presenter, takes you through his top 10 scheduling mistakes that he's seen people make. He gives some best practice tips including a nice Microsoft Project instruction document that will allow you to better track task float by visualizing early and late start/stops for your activities.
Essential Business Case Skills
Joe Lukas does another masterful job of providing useful training and tips in a short amount of time (about 25 minutes). Joe gives a very good introduction to Net Present Value (NPV), Internal Rate of Return (IRR), and other business finance calculations that all project managers should be familiar with. The webcast introduces an excel file document that can be freely downloaded from the PM Centers USA website that will automatically calculate NPV, IRR, and other project financial information. It's a very nice tool to play with, whether you're discounting future cash flows on your project or calculating your monthly car payments needed to pay back your loan in 3 years.
So there you go. More free management training tools for you to look at and learn from. As I continue to find others, I'll keep you posted on what I think are the best ones. Please feel free to contact me or comment to this post if you have other sources of good information that you know about.
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