Government Leadership Curriculum
Course Descriptions from the Leadership Curriculum
All courses in the curriculum build on the academic and interdisciplinary research expertise of Stanford University and on best-practice methodologies tested and proven by IPS in its work with various government agencies and Fortune 500 companies. Individuals who complete a total of six courses, including the program's three core courses, will receive the professional credential of Stanford Certified Project Manager (SCPM). Click on the course titles below for additional information.
Each course can be taken on campus at Stanford University, onsite at your organization, through synchronous online advanced project management courses delivered virtually, or via streaming video in our online Stanford Advanced Project Management program.
Click on each of the course names below for additional information about those courses.
Converting Strategy Into Action (CSIA)
Learn strategic management concepts, techniques, and tools for building a strong and effective organization. You'll see why it's imperative that your organization's strategy, structure, and culture all align; what the payoffs can be; and how to get there.
Course Topics
- Strategic Role of Project Management
- Framework for Converting Strategy into Action
- Culture and Strategy
- Project Portfolio Management
- Aligning Strategy, Structure, and Culture
- Managing the Social Dynamics of Project Work
- Deep Dive: An Application of Strategy, Structure, and Culture in a Project Environment
- The Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action
- Strategic Execution Framework: Mastering the Project Organization
- Knowing-Doing Cafe
Financial Mastery for Projects (FMP)
You'll leave the course understanding the relationships among strategy, finance, and program and project management, and you'll be able to assess alternative options using discounted cash flow analysis and related financial tools. You may not be a finance whiz, but you'll learn enough about financial statements and how programs and projects impact them to know the value they deliver to your organization.
Course Topics
- Introduction to the Strategy-Portfolio-Project Continuum
- The Strategy-Portfolio-Project Continuum
- Relating Programs and Projects to Corporate Finance
- Introduction to Financial Statements
- Capital Budgeting and Investment Analysis
- Project Scenario Analysis
- Project Benefits Management (PBM): An Overview
Leadership for Strategic Execution (LSE)
You’ll learn how you can be an effective leader, whether for making strategic decisions, translating strategy, assessing risk, establishing sponsorship, or managing change within your organization. And you’ll leave the course—and the program—with an in-depth appreciation for the critical context leaders must provide to create the optimum level of performance through portfolio, program, and project management.
Course Topics
- The DNA of Strategic Execution
- What Wise Leaders Do: An Evidence-Based Approach
- Making Effective Decisions
- Strategy Innovation
- Strategy Execution Mapping
- System Risk Assessment
- Leading with Power
- Sponsorship
- Insights to Leadership
Leading Effective Teams (LET)
Drawing on research on high-performance teams whose leaders attained success, the course demonstrates how to avoid breakdowns—and how to achieve breakthroughs. Participants acquire the ability to unleash a team’s potential by applying proven approaches to communication, coordination, collaboration, and conflict management.
Course Topics
- Highly Effective Teams
- Leading Through Context and Culture
- Team Design and Development
- Interpreting Team Dynamics
- Fuzzy Membership
- Conflict and Conflict Management
- Fostering a Collaborative Team
- Best Practices in Distributed Teams
Leveraging the Customer Relationship (LCR)
Leveraging the Customer Relationship helps develop skills in managing customer relationships whether internal or external, and across gender, cultural, and generational boundaries. You'll learn proven communication and negotiation techniques for handling the challenging dynamics of customer interaction. You'll discover exactly how successful salespeople increase business opportunities. And you'll find out how you can be most effective at balancing competing objectives, facilitating decision making, and ensuring customer satisfaction.
Course Topics
- Creating and Sharing Value with Customers
- 1-to-1 Diagnosis of Customer Behavior
- Understanding Communication Styles: How Customers Think and Make Decisions
- Managing Customer Relationships across Gender, Cultural, and Generational Boundaries
- Selling for Project Managers
- Negotiating for Mutual Gain
Managing Without Authority (MWA)
This highly interactive course demonstrates effective techniques - including how to influence decisions, gain commitments, hold people accountable, and address performance problems - and provides plenty of practice in using them.
Course Topics
- Reading the Political Terrain
- Influence Strategies
- Influence Tactics Overview
- Bringing up problems: What can go wrong
- Solving Motivation Problems
- Solving Ability Problems
- Solving Emergent Problems
- Putting Strategies and Tactics to Work
Mastering the Integrated Program (MIP)
Recognizing that it is not enough to approach programs simply as big projects, the course presents a unique set of management skills for identifying and assessing the myriad of interfaces and relationships affecting your programs. Participants acquire proven techniques for initiating, defining and organizing, planning, tracking and managing, and closing out programs of any type and size. Particular attention is given to techniques for managing the project interfaces that are crucial to program success.
Course Topics
- The Program Challenge
- Managing Complexity Through Agreements
- Managing Integration/Agreement Complexity Factors
- Strategies to Initiate, Maintain, and Change Agreements
- Building Strategic Business Agreements
- Outcome/Output Management
- Leveraging Scope and Structure
- Interface Management Mapping
- Program Resource Management
Mastering the Project Portfolio (MPP)
Mastering the Project Portfolio provides a complete methodology for project selection, prioritization, and oversight—plus mentoring in how to resolve real-world implementation concerns. You’ll examine how a strategic framework and metrics are vital to success, and you’ll learn to align your projects with your business strategies. You’ll also apply the portfolio management process through a dynamic multi-part case study.
Course Topics
- Portfolio Challenge and Introduction
- A Primer on Strategy
- Creating the Right Environment
- Strategic Metrics
- Aligning Projects with Business Strategies
- The Right Resources on the Right Projects
- The Optimized Project Portfolio
- Managing Innovation as Part of an Overall Portfolio Strategy
- Mastering the Portfolio Management Process
- Implementation Action Lab
The Strategic PMO: Projects to Enterprise (SPMO)
Part of the Stanford APM curriculum, this three-day elective course combines the latest research from Stanford with the world of practical strategy execution. This course provides proven techniques for creating SPMO's to support the achievement of your organization's strategic objectives. Students create an SPMO for each of three complex, global case studies during the course. On the final day, the class conducts an innovative simulation of various real-world scenarios for each of the case studies with real-time changes to the business environment.
Course Topics
- Rationale for an SPMO
- Defining an SPMO
- Implementing an SPMO
- SPMO Politics & Organizational Change
- Lessons Learned & Knowledge Brokering
- High-performance SPMO's
- SPMO Reality Dive
