Project Delivery Basics Pathway Template

What's up, Empathians? I'm back and I did a thing. We're gonna talk about it today. I put together the basics of a project delivery pathway template inside Empath. Does it cover everything? No, no, it doesn't cover everything because we are still working on putting together amazing project delivery and project management content, but it is enough to get started. So when you log into Empath, I am logged into our demo tenant here. If you head over on the top navigation ribbon with our new beautiful UI to Learning Pathways over here, and then you click on Pathway Templates, you will be presented with all of the available pathway templates. There are a few that'll show up on screen now that aren't in your tenant, that we have here in our demo tenant, but the one we care about that we're actually interested in is this one, this General Purpose Project Delivery Basics pathway template. And it's currently in an Express Edition form. And that is, if you don't, do not remember Express Edition templates are the templates I've been putting together that do not require you to customize a ton of things to get started. It will eventually split off and there will be two, like there are with other pathway templates,, but I didn't want to make you wait for this really cool template to get started. And when I finish zhuzhing it up, you'll get the really cool templated version at that point as well. And as you can see, this is a Ron Swanson edition for those who are familiar friends of the show Parks and Recreation. Ron Swanson, in a project management capacity, was famous for telling people what? I know more than you. So I'm assuming you know more than me about how your MSP does projects, and you're gonna be able to use this version of this pathway to fill in some gaps. So let's get into it. If I click on the pathway template itself, you'll notice our new pathway UI, which is amazing. Please give us feedback. And you could just assign it or you can customize it as always. Let me cover a little bit how I broke this down and what's in here. I wrote out for you a pathway description like I normally do, following a general technical scope of work format since I know we're all familiar with that scope, audience requirements, assumptions, how and when to use this pathway, and tips for implementation. Please do read this stuff. It is there to help you, uh, put down the basic skills covered here: project planning, client communication, and internal coordination. And then we get into the milestones, and this pathway currently has 4 milestones. The first one is understanding projects at an MSP. The next ones are planning and executing with your team, deeper learning, project essentials, and then some additional MSP project thought leadership. But the first milestone here, I start off with a piece of external content. When I had an MSP, as we got bigger, this video, which is actually a comedy sketch. It's a comedy sketch about an engineer brought in to give advice on a project in front of a client. This was actually required viewing for all new hires that were going to be in our technical department, because it really does encapsulate the modality and the mindset that we need to be in, especially at a small to medium-sized MSP, where our project engineering team probably isn't that big, and they're going to wear a lot of hats. Sales engineering, project engineering, project management, delivery, installation, you're the expert. And I think this video is actually really important to have your team watch. They're gonna laugh, but they're gonna get the point as well. The clients perceive them to be the expert, no matter whether what's being asked for is practical or even obeys the laws of physics. So we start off with that video. Next thing that's really important is we go into our Raving Fans course. And you may be saying, well, Dean, why is there a course on raving fans in a project management pathway. I mean, they're not doing help desk, and that's, that's where I would have to say, well, you're technically right, you're wrong. I want you to think about something just for a moment with projects. Think to the last project that you did at your MSP, whether that was a new client onboarding, a migration, a physical installation of a workstation, a server, whatever. Usually projects are the only thing we tend to do at our MSP that has a tangible lasting impact that the client can see, they can touch. It's one of the few things they can go over often literally and say, this is what I'm paying this MSP for. And so it's really important that our project team understands the amount of impact they can have on the relationship, not only with the client's leadership, but with individual users. You've all used a product that had a bad design before where you're like, what was the engineering thinking? We don't want our projects to be that way, which is why I think it's really important to actually start off with this concept of how do I create raving fans in my relationship with the client. Next, we move over to a course that we had Adam Hanneman from PAX8 put together for us, Building a Project Management Practice. It is a fantastic, just enough info course to get you started on all the basics. And then I have two other bits of external content that I really like that I put in here because they cover challenges that I have found universally affect MSPs. One of the most common refrains I've heard over my career from MSPs that are using a PSA, especially one of the more mature PSAs, it's been around for a while, is my PSA stinks at managing projects. And there's a whole lot to unpack there. But what's really funny to me is I will usually ask those MSPs, well, do you use the Gantt chart in your PSA? And everybody looks at me like, what's a Gantt chart? What are you talking about? So I've got a 5-minute video here that breaks down what a Gantt chart is, which is the most common style of project planning visualization for technical projects. Not necessarily software coding projects, but like technical engineering stuff. It is the industry standard and it's why so many PSAs include that view. Hopefully that will help your team go, oh, that's what that screen's for in your PSA and use it a little better. And then we round out this first milestone with the most important project management video that you are ever going to have anybody in your project team ever watch. And if you are in sales engineering or sales and leadership and you want to skip the rest of this pathway, you should still watch this video. It has nothing to do with MSP and was not recorded by an MSP. It was recorded by a contract that installs fences, and it's called Never Break Down a Bid for a Customer. This video is really important. Because it explains the idea and the difference between a fixed bid and an estimate. And in MSPs, we don't necessarily use those words, but all of our projects, the scope of work, are either a fixed bid or a pay-as-you-go estimate. And fundamentally understanding the customer's perception and expectations management that come with the billing model for the project is super important. And in this video, they do a really good job just explaining that without talking about technology at all. So this was actually another required video at my MSP for people on the project team. And now I have it here for all of you. Moving forward, we have Planning and Executing with Your Team. I have two more courses from Adam Hanneman because we locked him in a box and said, you're going to make us a bunch of project stuff and then we'll let you see the light of day. So I have Life as a Project Engineer and Life as a Project Manager, which summarize and give a wonderful introduction and sort of all of the basics you need to know in both of those roles. My assumption being that at the average MSP, you're probably split between both of those roles. If your MSP is big enough where you can just only be an engineer or manager, that's amazing. You're still going to love both these courses because they'll help you see the other side of the aisle and how they're living. From there, we go into a customer service basics course on team communication skills. I have that weighted so highly in this because projects often happen on an island. And really focusing on how we talk internally and how we communicate internally with the help desk and the projects team is so critical to not undoing all of the excellent work you've done as a projects team at your MSP. And you notice that's followed with a ticket escalations course. Listen, help desk, what's going on there? Because ticket escalations, and really the information in this course, really teaches us how to pass information between departments. And that is the biggest internal failure point that we see with all MSP projects— a lack of communication and poor communication between departments. So I want your project team thinking like they're on the help desk escalating a ticket up the chain when they are communicating with the rest of the company. And then lastly, we have a customer-facing communications course in here, because what's the second biggest failure? We don't tell our customers what's going on. We don't let them know about our projects. We don't communicate. Project engineers And this is not just an MSP thing. Project engineers are so bad at communication. We don't tell people stuff because we have our heads down and we're working, and we just figure they know we're working. Well, they don't. They set their own expectations. So really important to have that course in there. Moving forward, I have the Google, um, Project Management Certification course. It's the prep course for the Google Project Management Certification, which is a great general prep course on all of the basics of project management. It is technically aligned, but it is not MSP-specific, which I actually think is a benefit here because we really want our project team to gain some literacy in project management. We don't need them to go out and get a PMP Lite or Pro at this point in their career, but we do want them to know how to talk project outside of just MSP words because we're going to interact with stakeholders and people at our clients who also may be familiar with talking project.. And having that common language and understanding is so important to be able to overcome all the objections, hand, you know, manage expectations and otherwise keep projects moving forward. And then lastly, and I'll be filling this one out a little more as I go in this template, I have some additional lead, uh, thought leadership on project management from some of our live streams. There is really a lack of great formalized how to project train in the MSP space content, but there is a lot of live webinar content that talks about really important concepts. So I picked some here that really talk about the finance and business side of projects, because I think that's really important to learn. And you're never too new in your project role in an MSP to start thinking about the underlying business, why it works the way it does, why we charge what we do, why it's important to understand how much money we made or lost, and all of those concepts. The sooner you learn that as somebody executing the project, the sooner you can start helping improve the process and speak a language with your stakeholders that'll really help them understand why you're so concerned or want to improve an element of project delivery. So that is the template as it stands. Like my other templates, as I have additional content, I will update it for you. It is a really, really great start to a project management template. Remember, when you're working with this template, and I'll show you quickly, you can of course customize it. And if you do hit Customize Template, you can edit everything in here. Grab time with me on a call if you need help doing any of this. But remember, it's very easy to add content, and there is an awful lot of, uh, project management content for individual vendor tools. So if you are using a particular vendor tool, a particular ticketing system, or a project management tool, or a revenue management tool, or reporting management tool that has a project module, and they already have training, especially if it's on YouTube, I highly suggest that you stick it in to the second milestone at the end with the add content button and import that content and stick it in here. I don't know which tools you use, so I can't do that on your behalf, but I really think that's so helpful. A lot of those vendors have put in quite a bit of work to making really useful content around project delivery using their products. If you have any questions, need any help with any of this, grab time with me or go down here to the little chat icon in the bottom of your empath. Yes, it is manned by people. I'm one of them. Let me know what you're running into, and we'll do our very best to help you out. Finally, we have something to start moving forward project delivery education in our MSPs, which between you and me, if we're doing it right, should be the most profitable thing we touch at an MSP. So why not start teaching that department, right? Take care, everybody. Keep learning.