Lesson 1

Welcome to “What is Project Management?” After watching this video, you will be able to
define project management, identify the six types of project
management constraints, and explain the benefits of
effective project management The Project Management Institute
defines project management as follows: “Project management is the use
of specific knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to deliver
something of value to people.” Examples of projects might include
the development of software, the construction of a building, or a
relief effort after a natural disaster. Projects can be generally defined as
a collection of tasks, activities, and deliverables that must be carefully
organized and executed to produce value. Project managers are the people responsible for
managing this organization
and the delivery of projects. Because project management is first and
foremost about the management of projects, this makes it distinct from
general or operations management. While general management involves
the ongoing management of a team, project management begins and ends with a project.
Project management begins
when a project is kicked off, and it ends when all project requirements have
been completed to the customer’s satisfaction. Although the informal process of
managing projects has existed for centuries, project management as a distinct
practice emerged in the mid-20th century. It was born out of a need in the
aerospace, engineering, pharmaceutical, and telecommunications industries to
manage projects of increasing complexity. Effective project management allows companies
to increase the success rate of projects, mitigate project risks, and reduce overall costs. For
team members, effective project
management allows them to better understand their roles and responsibilities,
collaborate, and utilize resources. A key aspect of project
management is understanding your project’s requirements. The entire
team should agree on the project’s goals. Often, projects are kicked off
by developing requirements. Today, projects are everywhere. We live in a Project Economy,
in which projects are the primary method by which work
is accomplished, and value is produced. Project management skills are key for
success in a project-based economy. Project management involves a range of skills, including
technical knowledge
to interpersonal skills. As a result, it is relevant to a
wide variety of roles and situations. Learning project management can be
helpful to everyone, ranging from a student working on a science project to an
executive negotiating personality disputes. Project management helps prevent organizations
from simply jumping into a
new project without a plan. Without proper management, many projects
fail to meet their original objectives, if they are completed at all. Project management
provides focus
and direction for the project team. It allows businesses to outline their
requirements from the beginning, apply project management techniques,
and monitor project activities. This mitigates risk by preventing resources
from being wasted or put into failed projects. Project management may reduce risks, but it
does not guarantee that projects will
not encounter any problems or surprises. Project management will, however, provide
standardized practices that can
be used to respond to and prevent risk. There are six types of constraints to
keep in mind when planning a project. These are cost, scope, quality,
risk, resources, and time. Cost is the project’s budget. Project management balances the
budget so that
projects neither overspend nor underspend. Scope is both the desired features and
functions of the final product and the
work required to deliver them. Accurately estimating scope is a
crucial part of the planning process. Project quality refers to the standards
the project must meet to be effective. The final product must be able
to accomplish its intended task, deliver the expected benefits and value, or both. It must
additionally meet certain levels of
availability, reliability, and maintainability. Managing risk means addressing external
factors that can potentially harm your project. It refers to both the probability of these
negative events and the consequences if they do. Resources are what is needed
to accomplish the project. This includes people, equipment, facilities, funding, and anything
else required
to deliver the final product. Time is the time needed to finish a project. Tasks and their
estimated durations must be accurately identified and estimated to
ensure that projects stay on schedule. Balancing these six types
of constraints throughout project delivery is the challenge
that project managers address. The benefits of effective
project management include: Managing budgets and timelines,
so that projects are able to be successfully completed within
the planned budget and timeframe. Improving productivity,
efficiency, and quality of work. Addressing project risks proactively. Improving
communication between
team members and with stakeholders. Increasing customer satisfaction by
planning and meeting expectations. In this video, you learned that project management is
the application of knowledge, skills, and tools to a project to deliver
intended outcomes and produce value, considers constraints including cost,
scope, quality, risk, resources, and time, has many benefits, including managing budgets
and timelines, improving productivity, addressing project risks, improving communication,
and increasing customer satisfaction.

Lesson 2
Welcome to Expert Viewpoints:
What do project managers do? In this video, we will hear from several
project managers explaining what project managers do and discussing examples of
their involvement with their projects. If you ever have an opportunity to go ahead and talk
with any kind of an
experienced project manager, ask them what their job description is. In most cases, you'll
hear something like my job is to go ahead and provide new
products and new services on time, within budget and hopefully within the
scheduled timelines that the customer requires. Project managers are responsible for
scheduling organization of the overall project, and in reality, they're actually owners
of the project and are held responsible. Many projects require budgeting,
making sure we have resource alignment. Building those relationships between business
stakeholders and internal stakeholders. I like to believe that project managers are
the cement that holds everything together. You're the person who's in the
middle, organizing everything and bringing all the necessary elements together for
successfully completing the work at hand. And this means that you're working
with everyone from upper management down to every member of your team and
figuring out how do you get them into the optimum position for doing the very best work.
Next, we will hear about examples of
projects that these experts worked on and they will tell us a little bit about
their involvement as a project manager. It starts right from the beginning. We work
internally with cross-functional
teams including our sales team. Our pre-sales team, the consultants, even our technical
account managers
for some or our customer success managers we go ahead and start building the
internal relationship from the kickoff call. We build an external relationship
with our stakeholders. We also help with scheduling, organizing
everything, making sure everybody is involved that should be on the calls, or just should be
notified for any reporting. So recently I worked with a small
company to help them move their systems, move their customer information to a new
customer relationship management tool. So there was some technology
that was being changed. We needed to train their
employees on a new system, and there was lots to be done in terms of
creating some automations, transferring the data, and really doing that training and
creating things like FAQs and documentation. So one of my roles for one of my roles for
the project was to be the project manager. And so the first thing that I
did was I met with the company, met with a couple of people on the team. One of the first
things that I
did was meet with some people on the team to talk about what
the project objectives were. Our project goals were and kind of
get a basic sense of the timeline. Now, let me tell you about a
project I did years ago because it was really an epiphany about what
makes a great project manager. Years ago I was specializing
in fixing troubled projects, projects that were over budget, behind schedule, and I was down
in Sarasota, Florida managing an HR
software development project for Arthur Anderson, and the project was millions of dollars
over budget and over a year behind schedule. Within three weeks, everything was
ticking and everyone was shocked that the project was back on schedule and
was hitting deadlines every week finishing key pieces of it, and what I found was, the most
important thing that a project manager can do is being the person who
can translate between the business and the dev team in a way that makes it possible
for everybody to get what it is they want. Recently I’ve been working for Green
River College here in the Seattle area. The college and I decided that perhaps
coming up with a new continuing education program for a business analyst
track was a very, very good idea. We used something called the PDCA methodology.
PDCA stands for: plan, do, check, act. And this is a methodology that is tried and true. First
of all, we did our planning. We took a look at the potential curriculum, the potential
audience, how long
this particular course should take. Then we went into the D, which stands for do,
we developed all of the different courses. The next step was C, which plans for check. What
we did was we ran a quick beta class. We got feedback from a lot of
the different participants. We upgraded what we needed to go ahead
and fix and then finally the A was act. We're now ready to go ahead and roll out
this new curriculum on a full-time, basis. An example of a project that I have worked on is a
cybersecurity course in the cybersecurity program for UC Berkeley, and my involvement in
that
process was working with external stakeholders, which were the faculty, working with
our internal stakeholders, which were several different types of roles, there were people
who were working on
graphics where that course people who are working at production for that course and
that people who are also on the support end. So, my role was to make sure that
external stakeholders were very clear on the different milestones that
they had to accomplish in order to make sure that the internal stakeholders
were able to do their job and that we were able to successfully launch the
course on time for our online students.

Lesson 3
Welcome to “Program, project, portfolio
– What’s the difference?” After watching this video, you will be able
to: Compare and contrast a program, a project,
and a portfolio in project management. And differentiate between project, product, and
portfolio managers. The terms project, program, and portfolio
are often confused or used interchangeably. However, these terms have distinct meanings
in the context of project management. First, what is a project? The Project Management
Institute, also known
as PMI, defines a project as a “temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product,
service, or result.” Projects are temporary, meaning they have
a clear beginning and end. They are complete when the project goals are
achieved or when the project is no longer viable. Projects can stand independently or be
part
of a larger program or portfolio. A successful project meets or exceeds the
stakeholders’ expectations. Projects are distinct from operations. To determine if what you
are working on is
a project, ask yourself the following questions: Is it unique? Is there a way to determine
when the project
will be completed? Is there a way to measure stakeholder satisfaction? It is a project if you
have answered yes to
all these questions. An example of a project might be a social
media campaign for a product. This meets all three criteria from the previous
slide: it is unique because the product will launch
only once, it has an end state because after launch the project concludes, and produces
measurable value, such as the
percent increase in product usage after the campaign. Next, a program is a group of similar
or related
projects managed as a group rather than independently. Programs are most useful when a
group of projects
sees benefits from being managed that it wouldn’t see individually. The goal of a program is
to realize the advantages
for the entire organization. Implementing programs makes it easier to determine
which projects produce value for the business. Like projects, programs are temporary
organizations. When all projects in a program are complete,
the program is also complete. All programs share four traits. They are: Large, incorporating
multiple projects with
a wide scope. Long-term, as it takes a while for a business
to see the benefits from multiple projects. General, able to encompass a range of relevant
projects. Strategic, serving the overall strategic goals
of the organization rather than a single project. An example of a program might be all
marketing
campaigns that use multiple channels for a single product, including social media platforms,
digital
advertising, and print advertising. While the individual marketing campaigns in
each channel serve as separate projects; together they form a single marketing program. By
contrast, a portfolio is a group of programs
and projects within the same organization. These programs and projects may or may not
be related. Like programs, portfolios are useful when
a group of projects and programs would benefit from being managed as a whole. Unlike
programs and projects, managing a portfolio
is a continuous process, and new programs and projects are included
in the portfolio as they are started. All portfolio elements must align with the
company’s overall strategy and goals. The goal of a portfolio is to help an organization
meet its long-term objectives. If a project is a social media campaign, and
a program is the entire marketing campaign on multiple channels, then a portfolio would be
all the projects
and programs that concern the product. A portfolio could include all social media
campaigns for all of the organization’s products. This might include marketing and other
departments
such as production, design, and distribution. As there are differences between a project,
program, and portfolio, there are differences between a project manager, program manager,
and portfolio manager. A project manager has a responsibility to
ensure that an individual project is managed within time, cost, and quality constraints. They
typically focus on how to get work done
at a tactical level, and their day-to-day tasks mainly focus on timelines, resource
allocation, and assigning tasks. A program manager, on the other hand, is responsible
for ensuring a larger group of projects is completed. They are focused on ensuring that the
overall
program is meeting key business objectives. Their day-to-day tasks mainly involve resource
management across multiple projects, improving processes and tools, and tracking long-
term
timelines and large budgets. A portfolio manager is responsible for ensuring
that groups of programs that may not be related to one another are being delivered and that
they are contributing to broader business objectives. They are primarily focused on ensuring
that
the portfolio of programs is aligned to the overall organizational strategy. Day to day, they
meet with executives, build
portfolio-level roadmaps to provide direction to program and project managers, and track
and balance resources and costs
across multiple programs. In this video, you learned that: A project is an endeavor that is
unique, temporary,
completable, and measurable. A program is a collection of projects that
is large, long-term, general, and strategic projects. A portfolio is a collection of projects and
programs that is ongoing and aligns with the organization’s strategic objectives.