Planning and Delivering Successful Projects: Lessons from Practice [St Lucia]

Health projects often face complex challenges, including tight timelines, shifting priorities, limited resources, and unexpected disruptions from stakeholders, policies, or field conditions. Many of these issues are difficult to avoid entirely, but the ability to recognise potential risks, plan ahead, and build robust mitigation strategies can dramatically reduce them and improve project outcomes. This workshop provides early-career professionals with practical, real-world project management skills tailored to public health settings. Through interactive examples and insights drawn from multidisciplinary projects in Australia and Vietnam, participants will learn how to structure a project from idea to implementation, develop a project framework, create realistic timelines, and coordinate diverse teams and partners. A strong emphasis is placed on anticipating challenges before they escalate, conducting stakeholder mapping, designing risk matrices, and adapting plans when conditions change. Learners will also practise applying these tools to a short case study to strengthen their confidence in planning and delivering effective health projects. By the end of the session, participants will be able to manage health projects with greater foresight, clarity, and resilience.
 

Presenter

Dr Hong Le is a public health researcher and project manager with extensive experience leading and coordinating complex health projects across Australia and Vietnam. She has managed large, multidisciplinary interventions funded by Wellcome Trust, USAID, NHMRC–NAFOSTED, and other international agencies. Her work involves developing project frameworks, coordinating field implementation, managing diverse teams, navigating government and community partnerships, and mitigating real-world operational risks. Hong also has a strong track record in teaching and training, delivering workshops on research methods, health impact assessment, and project skills for healthcare professionals. She brings practical, hands-on insights that help early-career researchers confidently plan and deliver effective health projects