Foundation Calendar
All upcoming dates
Exposure date
Nomination for the Project Contractor of the Year Award
Name a Project contractor that delivers extraordinary products or services. .
PBP class
PBP Qualification & Certification Live
The PBP qualifies and certifies you for the management of projects on: Project customer-side Orchestrating networks of contractors for mission success Project contractor-side Driving business success in projects for paying customers It includes: PBP training Project Business Professional PBP certification by the Project Business Foundation proctored by the trainer Option to retake In case the first attempt failed: Repeat the seminar and exam free of charge Official seminar handout Digital document provided by the Project Business Foundation, accompanies the seminar Project Business Compendium – Digital handbook provided by the Project Business Foundation to apply the skills in practice Details on the certification: https://project-business.org/certification/pbp-certification.
Foundation workshop
Meet the Project Contractor of the Year Award (PCoTY) – why this award, who it is for, and how to take part
Most awards in project work celebrate the manager on the customer side. The contractor who delivered the work is usually a footnote. Project Contractor of the Year exists to name that other half of the relationship: contracted delivery across a customer-contractor boundary, scored on evidence, not reputation. This first-cycle workshop is for people who might nominate a contractor, complete a client evaluation, or sit as a Stage 1 assessor. In one hour we will cover: – Why the award exists, and what "excellence" means here (not just a finished job). – Who can be nominated, what the packet looks like, and why the client's own evaluation is required. – How the cycle runs: nominations 1 September to 31 October, Stage 1 screening, Stage 2 presentation to the panel, winners in January 2027. – The assessor job: PMP or PBP, a short calibration, 3-5 nominations scored remotely in November and December. Bring a name. If you already know a contractor whose work should be on the table, this hour will tell you what to do next. If you hold PMP or PBP and might assess, bring that too. Nominations: ittd.space/pbf-pcoty Become an assessor: ittd.space/become-an-assessor
Foundation workshop
Make the Project Customer Happy – To Make Them Come Back for More
Oliver F. Lehmann · Vahe Avetisyan
In project business, the deliverable is only half of what the customer takes away. The other half is the experience of working with you – and that half decides whether the next contract goes to you, to a competitor, or to no one at all. Satisfied customers pay the invoice. Happy customers come back for more, and they bring their friends with them. This workshop looks at the gap between the two: why formally successful projects still fail to generate follow-up business, why customer expectations are rarely the ones written into the requirements, and how contractors can manage happiness as deliberately as they manage scope, cost, and schedule. Vahe Avetisyan and Oliver F. Lehmann work through three proven models and show how each one applies to contract-based project work: – The Net Promoter Score gives a simple, hard-nosed measure of whether a customer would actually recommend you – and, more usefully, a structured way to ask why not. – The Kano model separates what customers take for granted from what genuinely delights them, and explains why yesterday's excitement feature becomes today's basic expectation. – The Technology Acceptance Model addresses the moment of truth in so many projects: a technically flawless solution that users never adopt, because it was neither perceived as useful nor as easy to use. Participants leave with a practical set of questions to take into their own customer relationships and a clearer view of where their next contract is likely to come from.
PBP class
PBP Qualification & Certification Live
The PBP qualifies and certifies you for the management of projects on: Project customer-side Orchestrating networks of contractors for mission success Project contractor-side Driving business success in projects for paying customers It includes: PBP training Project Business Professional PBP certification by the Project Business Foundation proctored by the trainer Option to retake In case the first attempt failed: Repeat the seminar and exam free of charge Official seminar handout Digital document provided by the Project Business Foundation, accompanies the seminar Project Business Compendium – Digital handbook provided by the Project Business Foundation to apply the skills in practice Details on the certification: https://project-business.org/certification/pbp-certification.
Foundation workshop
Cash-Flow Modelling in Project Business
This one-hour workshop is essential for anyone involved in contract-based projects, as it underscores the critical importance of cash flow projection for success. Participants will discover how key factors such as payment terms, milestones, advances, retentions, delays, and project expenditures directly impact liquidity. You’ll learn why a project that appears profitable can still encounter serious cash flow issues. In this engaging workshop, you'll receive a practical introduction to Cash Radar, the complimentary cash flow modeling tool offered by the Project Business Foundation. You'll see firsthand how to effectively map anticipated incoming and outgoing payments across the project timeline, allowing you to identify potential funding gaps early and make more strategic commercial decisions. Claimable PDUs: 1
Foundation workshop
The Negotiation Skill Gap – What Internal Project Managers Miss From Project Business Practice
Jude P. Joseph · Max Mustermann
The Negotiation Skill Gap: What Internal Project Managers Miss From Project Business Practice" is a 90-minute webinar for internal project managers, program managers, PMO leads, and delivery leads. Internal PMs rarely negotiate contracts directly, so they often miss the negotiation and relationship-management skills that Project Business Foundation (PBF) practice treats as standard. The course reframes negotiation as a delivery skill rather than a procurement task, walks through core negotiation concepts, hands participants editable planning tools, and puts everything into practice through a live case study and role-play exercise built around a CRM migration project. *** Learning objectives *** By the end of the course, participants will be able to: Explain the gap between PMI-PMP delivery practice and Project Business Foundation practice, and recognize where that gap shows up in day-to-day project work. Apply core negotiation concepts, including BATNA, WATNA, distributive vs integrative negotiation, and positions vs interests, to real stakeholder and vendor conversations. Use a negotiation plan template and a relationship scorecard to prepare for negotiations and track relationship health over time. Run a structured negotiation, using the role-play scenarios and a scoring rubric to build and assess these skills firsthand. Identify KPIs (schedule variance, change order counts, escalations, stakeholder satisfaction) to measure the impact of stronger negotiation practice. Build a personal 30/60/90-day plan to apply these skills on an active project.
PBP class
PBP Qualification & Certification Live
The PBP qualifies and certifies you for the management of projects on: Project customer-side Orchestrating networks of contractors for mission success Project contractor-side Driving business success in projects for paying customers It includes: PBP training Project Business Professional PBP certification by the Project Business Foundation proctored by the trainer Option to retake In case the first attempt failed: Repeat the seminar and exam free of charge Official seminar handout Digital document provided by the Project Business Foundation, accompanies the seminar Project Business Compendium – Digital handbook provided by the Project Business Foundation to apply the skills in practice Details on the certification: https://project-business.org/certification/pbp-certification.
PBP class
PBP Qualification & Certification Live
The PBP qualifies and certifies you for the management of projects on: Project customer-side Orchestrating networks of contractors for mission success Project contractor-side Driving business success in projects for paying customers It includes: PBP training Project Business Professional PBP certification by the Project Business Foundation proctored by the trainer Option to retake In case the first attempt failed: Repeat the seminar and exam free of charge Official seminar handout Digital document provided by the Project Business Foundation, accompanies the seminar Project Business Compendium – Digital handbook provided by the Project Business Foundation to apply the skills in practice Details on the certification: https://project-business.org/certification/pbp-certification.
PBP class
PBP Qualification & Certification Live
The PBP qualifies and certifies you for the management of projects on: Project customer-side Orchestrating networks of contractors for mission success Project contractor-side Driving business success in projects for paying customers It includes: PBP training Project Business Professional PBP certification by the Project Business Foundation proctored by the trainer Option to retake In case the first attempt failed: Repeat the seminar and exam free of charge Official seminar handout Digital document provided by the Project Business Foundation, accompanies the seminar Project Business Compendium – Digital handbook provided by the Project Business Foundation to apply the skills in practice Details on the certification: https://project-business.org/certification/pbp-certification.
Foundation workshop
Benefit Engineering in Project Business: A Municipal Infrastructure Case using Four BE Tools
T. Casey LaFrance
Learning Objectives By the end of the workshop, participants should be able to trace strategic benefits to operational evidence, construct a basic Benefit Breakdown Structure, identify benefit owners, interpret Earned Benefit information, connect project risks and changes to the benefits they affect, and use benefit evidence to support decisions among project partners. The workshop is designed around application. Participants can use the Riverbend case throughout the session, then repeat the exercises using a project from their own experience. Why Benefit Engineering? Scope, schedule, and cost tell us quite a bit about delivery. They tell us considerably less about what happens because of that delivery. A new pump station can open on schedule while operators struggle to use its controls. A technology system can satisfy its specifications while creating additional work for the people using it. A transportation project can add capacity while leaving the access problem that justified the investment largely unchanged. These are project business questions because somebody committed resources based on an expectation of value. Benefit Engineering brings that expectation into planning, execution, risk management, change control, governance, and eventually closeout. We ask: Are the benefits that justified this investment actually arriving? That question becomes especially useful in partnered projects because value rarely belongs to one organization alone. The Riverbend Resilience Project Riverbend has a problem. Its wastewater pump station is roughly forty years old and approaching capacity. Heavy rainfall increasingly strains the system. Emergency maintenance has been climbing, and planned residential development will create additional demand. A state infrastructure grant gives the community an opportunity to replace the station while improving flood resilience. The proposed project includes new pumps and controls, backup power, flood protection, remote monitoring, and improvements to the site and maintenance access. Several partners have to make it work. The municipality owns the infrastructure and carries responsibility for reliable service and affordability. The engineering firm is concerned with performance, compliance, and constructability. The general contractor has to deliver the work safely while managing cost, sequencing, and schedule. The state funding agency needs eligible expenditures and evidence of public benefit. Utility operators will inherit whatever gets built. Community partners care about flooding, construction disruption, access, and what the investment actually does for the neighborhood. Each perspective makes sense. The problem comes when those perspectives remain separate. Benefit Engineering gives the partnership somewhere to connect them
Foundation workshop
Beyond the Pipe: Make or Buy Decisions in the Project Business of Wastewater Infrastructure
T. Casey LaFrance
Beyond the Pipe: One-Hour Project Business Workshop Workshop Purpose A wastewater project can look like an engineering decision pretty quickly. Build locally or connect to a regional system. Compare the estimates, capacity, rates, and technical requirements. Then people have to live with the choice for the next forty or fifty years. Beyond the Pipe uses a municipal wastewater case to explore that longer Project Business story. Participants work through a make-or-buy decision involving assets, contracts, capability, dependency, risk, and public value. Both options can work technically, which makes the case more useful. The interesting part is figuring out what each choice sets in motion among the organizations involved. Learning Objectives By the end of the hour, participants should be able to recognize make-or-buy choices as decisions about organizational boundaries and relationships, separate production costs from the costs of managing those relationships, and identify how asset specificity changes bargaining power once infrastructure is in the ground. Participants will also practice looking at uncertainty, lifecycle costs, failure, adaptability, and public value. The goal is to leave with better questions for decisions where several organizations will share the consequences long after the project closes. The Case A community of about 3,500 people needs to replace aging wastewater infrastructure and prepare for future capacity. One option keeps treatment local. The community owns the assets, develops the capability, operates the system, and carries those responsibilities forward. The other connects to a larger regional utility. The community gains access to existing treatment capability while taking on a different set of dependencies, agreements, conveyance assets, and future uncertainties. Neither answer gets to be the easy one. The case asks participants to figure out what the community should make, what it might buy, what could be shared, and which capabilities may be worth keeping close. The Tools We start with Transaction Cost Economics because the treatment price is only part of what the relationship costs. Agreements have to be negotiated, monitored, adjusted, and sometimes repaired. Asset specificity takes us further. A force main pointed toward one regional system does not have many alternative uses. Once it is buried, the bargaining situation changes. SWOT helps organize what each option brings with it, then we push past filling boxes and ask what requires action. Evidence-Based Management turns words like flexibility, reliability, and value into things we could actually observe later. FMEA asks how each option can fail and what happens when it does. Poka-Yoke asks whether some of those failures can be made harder to create in the first place. Then lifecycle costing follows the money beyond construction, while public value widens the view to affordability, resilience, environmental performance, development capacity, and what the community actually receives from the investment. Where We Finish After an hour, I want participants looking at the pipe differently. The engineering tells us whether it can work. Project Business asks what happens among the organizations once we decide who owns it, who operates it, who depends on whom, who carries which risks, and what happens when circumstances change. Those decisions may outlive everyone sitting at the original project table.
Foundation workshop
Clue Hunt! Or, The RFP Leaves Fingerprints: A Guide to Finding the Clues That Shape a Winning Project Proposal
T. Casey LaFrance
Introduction An RFP leaves fingerprints. Someone chose every requirement, assigned every percentage, decided which details deserved three sentences and which deserved three pages. Those choices give us a window into the organization making the purchase. This guide uses a 2018 municipal procurement for a wastewater grit collector system to explore how project professionals can read an RFP closely, follow its clues into supplemental research, and turn what they find into a proposal strategy. We will begin with the words on the page, move into the patterns hiding among them, follow a few clues outside the document, and finish with an activity that asks a project team to make the decision every bidder eventually has to make: What will win this work? Introduction An RFP leaves fingerprints. Someone chose every requirement, assigned every percentage, decided which details deserved three sentences and which deserved three pages. Those choices give us a window into the organization making the purchase. This guide uses a 2018 municipal procurement for a wastewater grit collector system to explore how project professionals can read an RFP closely, follow its clues into supplemental research, and turn what they find into a proposal strategy. We will begin with the words on the page, move into the patterns hiding among them, follow a few clues outside the document, and finish with an activity that asks a project team to make the decision every bidder eventually has to make: What will win this work? Full RFP: https://rigov.org/DocumentCenter/View/13714/RFP—Repair-Modification-or-Replacement-of-Grit-Collector-System?bidId= Introduction An RFP leaves fingerprints. Someone chose every requirement, assigned every percentage, decided which details deserved three sentences and which deserved three pages. Those choices give us a window into the organization making the purchase. This guide uses a 2018 municipal procurement for a wastewater grit collector system to explore how project professionals can read an RFP closely, follow its clues into supplemental research, and turn what they find into a proposal strategy. We will begin with the words on the page, move into the patterns hiding among them, follow a few clues outside the document, and finish with an activity that asks a project team to make the decision every bidder eventually has to make: What will win this work? Clue Hunt! Or, The RFP Leaves Fingerprints Reading for Value, Risk, and Opportunity in Project Business Learning objectives By the end of this one hour workshop, participants will be able to: Identify clues in an RFP by examining evaluation criteria, repeated language, unusually specific requirements, open requirements, and areas that warrant further investigation. Distinguish evidence from interpretation when drawing conclusions about a customer's priorities, concerns, constraints, and definition of value. Connect RFP evidence to project business decisions involving scope, technical approach, schedule, risk, price, project management, and post delivery service. Identify useful supplemental research from sources such as previous procurements, budgets, award records, meeting documents, organizational priorities, and comparable projects. Develop a defensible proposal strategy by selecting the strongest available clues and explaining how they should influence the bid. Apply Project Business Foundation and Project Business Professional thinking to the period before project delivery, when customer needs, commercial relationships, commitments, risk, and value are being shaped. Suggested One hour learning flow Time Activity 0 to 8 min The RFP leaves fingerprints. Introduce the case and the idea of reading for clues. 8 to 15 min First read. Participants review the scoring criteria and identify what immediately gets their attention. 15 to 30 min Clue hunt. Teams look for repetition, unusual specificity, open requirements, missing information, and places requiring supplemental research. 30 to 40 min Evidence → Interpretation → Decision. Teams work their strongest clues through the worksheet. 40 to 50 min What will win? Each team selects five clues and develops its proposal strategy. 50 to 57 min Project Business connection. Debrief through Project Business Foundation and PBP concepts: customer, value, commercial relationships, risk, commitments, and the transition from opportunity to delivery. 57 to 60 min Individual self assessment and reflection. Self assessment 1 = I need more practice 3 = I can do this with some guidance 5 = I can confidently apply this in project business Self Rating Questions: I can identify the difference between a mandatory RFP requirement and a clue about what the customer values. I can use evaluation weights to understand how the customer is likely to make its decision. I can recognize repeated language and unusual specificity that may signal an important customer concern. I can recognize places where an RFP gives the bidder room to exercise professional judgment. I can separate what the evidence actually says from my interpretation of what it might mean. I can identify supplemental research that would help me understand the opportunity and customer. I can translate an RFP clue into a decision about scope, technical approach, schedule, risk, price, or service. I can explain how proposal commitments can shape the project that the delivery team eventually inherits. I can use project business thinking to examine the customer's definition of value rather than treating proposal development primarily as a compliance exercise. Given an unfamiliar RFP, I could develop and defend a proposal strategy using evidence from the solicitation and supplemental research. Reflection questions What did you notice on your second reading that you missed on your first? Which clue changed your thinking about what could win the work, and why? What is one question you will ask the next time you read an RFP that you probably would not have asked before this workshop? Full RFP: https://rigov.org/DocumentCenter/View/13714/RFP—Repair-Modification-or-Replacement-of-Grit-Collector-System?bidId=
Foundation workshop
The Hidden Value Challenge
T. Casey LaFrance · Dr. Harri Emari
Project Business leadership requires creativity and finding value in what we already have in-house to reduce dependencies and transactional costs associated with the make or buy calculus. In this one hour workshop, you'll practice creative repurposing and imagination spurred by the history of some accidental discoveries like the Slinky. In this context, the "product" is the working relationship between partners in project business. Where is the value hidden in front of our eyes? Background he Slinky. It was created as a spring that could help stabilize sensitive naval instruments. During development, Richard James accidentally dropped one of the springs. It didn’t simply fall. It walked. An engineer saw an interesting mechanical property. His wife, Betty, saw something entirely different. She saw a toy. She recognized a new customer, a new purpose, and a new source of value. The spring didn’t change. The conversation around it did. That story captures one of the central ideas behind Listening for Value. We often assume innovation begins with inventing something new. Just as often, it begins by listening differently. New value appears when we invite new perspectives, question our assumptions, and connect people who were never part of the original conversation. Today you’ll practice doing exactly that. Each team will receive an ordinary object. Your job isn’t to improve it. Your job is to discover value that its original designer may never have imagined. As you work, use the three Listening for Value tools. Mapping the Conversation asks, “Who isn’t at the table?” Every new stakeholder brings different experiences, needs, and possibilities. The Relational Value Stream asks, “How does value move through people and relationships?” An object can create entirely different value when it reaches a different user, industry, or community. The Lens Check asks, “What assumptions are limiting our thinking?” Sometimes the only thing preventing innovation is believing an object has just one purpose. There are no wrong answers in this exercise. Some of the best ideas in history began as accidents, unexpected observations, or solutions to entirely different problems. Post-it Notes, Bubble Wrap, Velcro, microwave ovens, and the Slinky all became successful because someone looked beyond the original intention and recognized hidden value. Your challenge is to do the same. By the end of this activity, you won’t just have generated creative ideas. You’ll have practiced expanding conversations, strengthening relational value streams, and discovering opportunities that become visible only when we learn to listen for value.
Foundation workshop
Three Foxxy Ways to Listen for Value in Project Business Partnerships
T. Casey LaFrance
This workshop explains how the logic of a relational value stream can be applied to multi-partner projects and the relationships that hold them together. Based on the Amazon Top New Release, "Listening for Value" views conversations as an organizational process that can be observed, discussed, improved, and measured. When people develop stronger shared understanding, projects move forward with greater clarity, teams coordinate more effectively, and organizations become better equipped to respond to change. This workshop previews three tools that help make listening visible. Mapping the Conversation helps participants follow the movement of meaning through a conversation and identify where shared understanding develops. Finding the Listening Constraint helps teams identify where listening begins limiting organizational performance and where the greatest opportunities for improvement exist. The Lens Check encourages participants to examine the experiences, assumptions, and perspectives that influence how they interpret what they hear. Together, these tools provide an approach for strengthening conversations across projects, organizations, and communities. This workbook is designed to be used during workshops, team meetings, classrooms, leadership development programs, and community engagement activities. Each tool includes clear instructions, facilitator guidance, discussion questions, reflection activities, and suggestions for applying the results within your own organization. Participants will examine real conversations, discuss different interpretations, identify opportunities for improvement, and leave with ideas they can begin using immediately. We hope to help people create more shared understanding before making decisions.
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