 Hi, we're so excited that you're here. I'm Emilio, and I'm a program manager on the responsible innovation team here at Google. And I'd like to officially welcome you to Google's certificate program in project management. Let's start with a simple exercise. Take a moment and think about some of the different tasks that you've completed in your life. Maybe you planned your wedding or a birthday party, or you filed your annual tax returns. Maybe you moved from one state to another. Or maybe you're the family member who somehow every year is tasked with organizing the annual family reunion. Believe it or not, you've been developing all kinds of skills through these tasks that will help you become a successful project manager for any organization or your own business. With this program in project management by Google, we've put together a set of courses, activities, quizzes, and exercises that'll teach you the fundamentals of project management. And of course, help you get a job or advance in your career. Wondering how I started my own career in project management? Well, in college, I always gravitated towards things that were more hands-on and action-oriented and less theoretical. I wanted to make an impact in whichever career I took on. So my first job out of college was as a Spanish and leadership teacher in Los Angeles, California. My main objective in guiding the student leadership team at the school was to identify, mobilize, and inspire the student leaders. After two years of teaching, I realized that the moments when I felt the most energized were when I was building a vision for how to get a big project done. Or when I was working to bring different groups together around a common goal. That's when I realized I had a lot of core project management skills. And I could focus on growing and developing them in the business world. I'm grateful that I get to be here for the start of your journey. When I was first starting to think about my career, project management wasn't even on my radar. It was one of those professions that I didn't even know existed until I entered the business world and experienced how great of a need there is for folks who are organized, action-oriented, diligent, and strategic. I hope that by the end of this program, you'll be as excited as I am about the prospects of a career in project management. OK, let's get into it. We'll start with an important question. What exactly is project management? Project management is the application of knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to meet the project requirements and achieve the desired outcome. It's possible that you've been project managing every day on some level without even knowing it. In this course, you'll learn how to hone those skills to become a truly great project manager. And the awesome thing about project management is that it spans a lot of industries and company types, and it doesn't require deep technical knowledge. This means that any job or life experience you've gained so far will help you in building those skills to become successful in a project management career. There are a lot of people around the world like you who are hoping to learn the skills to get a project management role. Whatever your reason for being here, we're glad you've joined us. This program is rooted in a belief that a strong foundation in project management can help anyone start a great career as a project manager. This program includes six industry-relevant courses that focus on topics like project management fundamentals, goals, objectives, and deliverables, risk management, team dynamics, project management methodologies, data-driven decision-making, and more. Each course is made up of personal anecdotes, reading materials, quizzes, and case studies. And you can go through the program at your own pace, skip the sections that you might already know, and review the videos again if you need a refresher. You'll be doing a lot of hands-on learning. You'll build project plans and timelines. You'll learn how to manage budgets and meet the needs of the people involved in the project. And you'll learn different project methodologies like agile, scrum, and waterfall. You'll use tools like Kanban and learn about project management software like Asana. You'll also develop your soft skills, some of which you likely already have. Don't worry, even if you aren't quite sure how to tap another yet, we'll explore which skills are transferable to a project management role. Above all, this program will help get you ready for a new job. But we're taking it one step further. When you complete this program, you'll have the opportunity to share your work with Google and other top employers aiming to hire project management professionals. And the best part is, you'll have professional work examples you can share with them to showcase what you've learned. Along the way, you'll hear from Google employees like me. We'll share personal stories about how we became project managers and how our foundations in project management, launched our careers. We'll also share what we do at work every day and give you tips for job interviews. We've got a truly amazing group of course instructors for you to learn from. Ready to meet them? Hi, I'm Joanne, a senior program manager on cloud security programs. I'm your instructor for course two, where we'll learn more about what's needed to set the stage for a successful project. Hey there, my name's Rowena, a senior program manager in Google Cloud. I'm your instructor for course three, project planning, putting it all together, where we'll learn about the importance of thorough project planning, identifying key milestones and dependencies, documenting project plans, scheduling, budgeting, and risk management. I'm Elita, a senior engineering program manager at Google. And I'm your instructor for course four, project execution, running a project, where we'll learn about communicating effectively, managing risks, understanding team dynamics, using data to inform decision making and tracking progress. Hi, I'm Sue. I'm a technical program manager for Google support platform. I'm your instructor for course five, agile project management, where we'll gain a deeper understanding of agile project management, including principles and practices, the benefits and costs of agile transformations, the dynamics of agile teams, and the process of running sprints and releases. And I'm Dan, a program manager in Google research. I'm really excited to be your instructor for course six, applying project management in the real world, where we'll take all the knowledge, skills, and understanding you've built up throughout this certificate and apply it to an advanced project scenario. Ready to get started? Let's go. So far, we've previewed what you can expect throughout this program. In this video, we'll discuss the details of this course, and you'll have a greater understanding for which types of jobs are suitable for learners like you. We'll cover some key project management terms and the roles and responsibilities of any entry level project manager. Plus, we'll discuss the kinds of jobs you can pursue after you complete this program. One thing you'll learn soon is that there's other roles and jobs outside of just project manager that this program will prepare you for. Later in this course, we'll have a video on how to search for those roles and how to view project management as both a position and a skill. But for now, we'll start by going even deeper into what a project is, what a project manager is, and what kinds of skills they have. We'll provide real life examples to help illustrate that you probably already have learned some of the skills required to become a successful project manager. Then, you'll learn more about adding value to projects and tips on being a successful project manager from real life Googlers. Pretty exciting, right? We'll also cover the project's life cycle. You'll learn all about a project's different phases, the corresponding tasks in each phase, different methodologies for completing tasks, and which is effective for a given project. And finally, you'll learn about different types of organizational structures and cultures and how to impact project management. Coming up, we'll start exploring the concept of a project and the project management field as a whole. Are you ready to crank things up a notch? See you soon. Hey again, let's get back into it. In this video, we'll define a project, define project management, and explain its value to an organization. Let's start by defining exactly what a project is. A project is a unique endeavor and usually includes a set of unique deliverables. It's also a temporary pursuit. It has a defined beginning and an end. To put it another way, a project is a series of tasks that need to be completed to reach a desired outcome. Reaching that desired outcome takes collaboration and careful planning that keeps the project on track and on budget. That's where project management comes in. Project management is critical to the success of projects both big and small. So let's break it down into the what, the why, and the how. So what is project management? Why is project management an important part of an organization? And how is it vital to a project's success? As I mentioned, project management is the application of knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to meet the project requirements and achieve the desired outcome. Project management is valuable to businesses because it helps ensure that a project delivers the expected outcomes both on time and within budget. To demonstrate what I mean, I'll take you through a real life example of project management. Imagine a school district signs a deal with a telehealth company to make sure students don't have to miss school for simple health issues like fevers or headaches. The deal will be completed by the end of the school year. The students can now interact with the doctor through a tablet, smartphone, or computer while they're at school. Implementing this technology into the school's procedures is the project. It's got a clear outcome and start and end date. So how is that project managed? Well, this project has several tasks and each one has to be carefully planned out and tracked or managed in order for the project to be completed. For example, to start, you can organize training sessions for faculty to get them better acquainted with the technology, policies, and procedures. You can budget for tablets, computers, and other vital equipment to facilitate the virtual checkups. And you can maintain strong communication with doctors, the telehealth company, and school staff members, and so much more. To successfully launch the product in the schools, all of those things need to get done and that is project management. Seems pretty important to an organization's success, right? More and more companies are starting to understand how project management can save them lots of money and time. Poor project management can lead to trillions of wasted dollars every year for organizations around the world. More specifically, poor project management can lead to 48% of projects missing delivery dates, 43% missing budget targets, and 31% failing to meet an organization's goals. As a company that serves so many different purposes in communities, it's no surprise that project management's a huge part of Google. But here, many of our project managers are described as program managers because they manage multiple projects for specific products, teams, or programs. There's thousands of people here with a job of keeping projects and programs running smoothly, people like me. I'm a responsible innovation program manager. My team is responsible for ensuring that the technology we produce, the research we pursue, and the publications we put out are all done with Google's artificial intelligence principles in mind. I review the processes for each of these types of technologies and I give ideas for how to continue innovating responsibly to meet our organizational goals. So my job adds value to Google through the core aspects of project management we've mentioned, planning and organizing, managing tasks, and budgeting and controlling costs. Hopefully you have a better sense of what a project is, what project management is, and why project management is an important part of every company and how it's vital to a project's success. Next up, we'll learn more about what a project manager does. Hey, so we've covered what project management is and why it's important to organizations. Now, let's learn more about what project managers do on a day-to-day basis. Project managers usually follow a process that involves planning and organizing, managing tasks, budgeting, and controlling costs and other factors. Everything they do helps make sure the project can be completed on time and on budget. In broad terms, a project manager also needs to make sure that the project outcome is bringing value to the company. A project manager can add value in many different ways, whether that's creating a new service for customers or modifying an old service so it's more tailored to the customer's needs. No matter what the task is, a successful project will always add value and it's the project manager's job to make sure that project is both valuable and successful. You may be asking yourself, well, if I'm a project manager, how do I add value to an organization every day? What does the day-to-day life of a project manager look like? Well, a project manager's responsibilities can vary depending on the project, the industry, and the company they're working in. Are you constructing a new building? Are you project managing a renewable energy product in a startup? Or are you setting up your own event management company? Your tasks will be different in each scenario, but here's a general overview of what a typical day might look like. A project manager's daily responsibilities always includes some version of the following, planning and organizing. An example of that might be gathering requirements from teammates or customers. This means figuring out what exactly your project's trying to accomplish. You might have a kickoff meeting or send a survey. From here, you may also work on creating project plans. Creating project plans is a key part of project management. It helps set the tone of the project, keeps everyone on pace and aligned, and helps move tasks along, which leads me to my second point, managing tasks. Once the project is underway, the project manager helps manage tasks for the team members and communicates key milestones to the larger team or customers. This helps keep team members and customers updated on how the project is progressing. The third piece is budgeting and controlling costs and other factors. Managing the budget and controlling costs is a common responsibility that project managers have to understand to keep the project on track and within budget. This is a full-time job because the plan you've created and managed may change, causing unexpected costs to come up. And that's just to name a few. I could go on for days, but the most important thing to know about the day-to-day of a project manager is this. You'll use different tools, techniques, and methodologies every single day. There's never a dull moment. Personally, my favorite part about being a project manager is that I get to watch the project's growth from start to finish. It's really special to create something from nothing, working from the ground up. It's a really satisfying feeling. As a project manager, you'll use a variety of skills every day and a lot of these skills you might already have. And we'll discuss this more coming up. See you there. Welcome back. Let's get right into it and explore the variety of skills you'll use. Have you ever been tasked with planning a loved one's surprise birthday party? There's usually a lot of pressure and responsibility, but when you get it right, it feels amazing. That's still true even if there were a couple of issues. Maybe the guest of honor arrived home earlier than expected and nearly ruined the surprise. But if you made someone feel special on their birthday, you probably planned a successful project. As you chose a venue, sent out invitations and calculated your budget based on your number of guests, you were using several project management skills, like planning and organizing, managing tasks, budgeting and controlling costs and more. Or maybe you've never planned a party. Have you ever worked in the retail space or in the service industry? Then you might have experience that'll translate into the project management field too. For example, you might have been in charge of managing several employees' schedules. To do that, you had to plan and organize which employees' work styles would compliment each other in a productive way. You also had to make sure that all duties and responsibilities would be covered during each shift. Plus, you had to be aware of all employees' availability. Doesn't sound familiar? Well, have you ever had to relocate for a new job and plan to big move? To successfully move all of your belongings, you may have coordinated friends and family to help. You would have had to budget and control costs for moving companies, boxes and miscellaneous expenses. And you probably packed your boxes one room at a time and clearly labeled the boxes so that you knew what each box was when you arrived at the new place. You had to manage all of these tasks simultaneously. You've likely handled several tasks like these in your lifetime. And in studying project management, you'll learn to further advance and sharpen these skills so that you'll be equipped to manage even bigger, more daunting tasks. The abilities that helped you complete these past projects are a great selling point for yourself as a future project manager. So be sure to bring up these examples in job interviews to demonstrate your skills. For instance, if you're asked questions like tell me about a time when you had to juggle several tasks at once or tell me about a time when you had to influence a customer or a teammate, it's good to have examples that demonstrate your skills with time management and leadership in both your everyday life and previous workplaces. Are you thinking about all of the skills that you already have and can use in your future project management role? Perfect. Up next, we'll learn more about the types of project management roles that you'll be qualified for after this program. We'll also discuss how to start exploring the various job opportunities out there for you. See you soon. Hey everyone, my name is X, yes, just the letter. And at Google, I'm a program manager for a department called Responsible Innovation. Most of us in our everyday life use program management. When you have only a couple hours left in a day and you have to figure out, well, do I clean my house or do I go to the grocery store and how long will each of those tasks take? Those are just different elements or variations of program management and project management. My path to program management is pretty nontraditional. I didn't go graduate from a great college. In fact, I dropped out of high school and I dropped out of college. So a GED is like the highest credential that I have. So after I dropped out of high school, I taught myself how to code. I built a whole bunch of websites but realized like I didn't have the responsible skills to make me a mature adult. So I ended up joining the military. After spending eight years in the army, I traveled the world building apps for really big companies and governments around the world. When I came into Google, I realized I could still be technical, but then I'm just using the skills I already have. So how can I grow myself as a person by learning new skills? And that's when I heard about the program manager role. The program manager role at Google is super cool because it varies depending on which team you're on. So if you're a program manager in Google Cloud, that could look very different than being a program manager in YouTube. That switch up and that change from coding all day long in front of a computer screen was something that was really, really attractive to me. Some of the biggest skills from my past and my history that helped me become a program manager and make that transition from somebody who was managed by program and project managers, it's actually becoming one myself, was taking a little bit more accountability in my personal life. There's lots of things I wanna learn in life and I started doing things like making schedules to practice like different instruments like the bass guitar. And each of my roles, whenever I worked with the project or program manager, I also made sure to check in with them about why they were doing what they were doing. I'm someone who doesn't really learn from books if you can't tell by me dropping out of school. So I always found somebody who was willing to teach me why they were doing what they were doing because that's how I learn. I tend to be more kinetic, I learn as I go. Program management to me was a natural calling. Not because I like to run around and make sure everyone, tell everybody what to do, but because I have a real personal passion for bringing people together and getting everybody on the same page to move towards the same goal. Whether that's convincing all my friends to go to my favorite vegan spot in downtown LA like four times a week or whether that's getting us all together to resolve conflict or to work on an idea to collaborate on projects on the side together. Those skills that you use in your everyday life to keep your tasks together can apply to program and project management very easily. You just have to be a little bit more intentional around them and there's a lot more paperwork involved. Welcome back. Now that you have a general understanding of what a project manager does, let's focus on the types of jobs that you may be qualified for after completing this program. To start, I've got a question for you. How many open roles do you think are out there for project managers? Hint. The answer is a very big number. Project managers are in high demand. In 2017, a study by the Project Management Institute found that by the year 2027, employers will need 87.7 million people filling project management-aligned roles. According to that same study, the industries with the most growth are manufacturing and construction, information services and publishing, management and professional services, finance and insurance, utilities and oil and gas. Project management plays a big part in helping all of these industries grow. In some industries, you'll find the term project manager grouped with a more industry specific qualifying word. For example, construction project manager or IT project manager or engineering project manager. Don't worry, these are all still project manager roles. They're just specific to an industry. And it's important to keep in mind that the skills you learn in one industry can be applied to another industry. New projects are popping up every single day. Across all industries, we notice that new technology is introduced, which leads to processes changing and a need to manage those processes. So all kinds of companies need people like you who can tackle a variety of projects from start to finish to help them navigate these changes. By now, you might have noticed that you already have some of those skills like organizing or planning an event, problem solving or even managing a budget and you use them effectively in your everyday life. Reflect on some of those skills. We mentioned earlier and ask yourself, what are some of the parts of project management that you're drawn to? While you may not have the answer just yet, thinking about these things can help you find suitable roles later. As you keep going in this program, try to keep track of the lessons and activities you prefer and the ones you didn't like as much. This will help you narrow your choices as you search through job boards later. The beauty of project management is that you don't need to be an expert on a focused technical topic. You just need to be able to manage projects. You could be a construction or technology project manager or you could enter the healthcare industry and work in patient management. You could also enter the energy sector and act as an environmental project manager. The possibilities are almost endless. What's equally exciting is that you could even end up with a completely different title altogether. For instance, there are roles that entail a sequence of ongoing projects that are considered programs or operations in the industry. In this case, the role may not be described as a project manager, but instead something a little more evergreen like operations manager or program manager. Other titles that might make sense for you could include operations assistant, project assistant, project coordinator and program assistant. When it comes to job duties, your responsibilities might change depending on the type of company you choose. For example, the workload and specific tasks at a small agency will be different from those at Google. It's also important to keep in mind that as the world continues to change and evolve, so do industries and the job opportunities you'll find there. So be sure to cast a wide net. You'll be able to find more and more jobs you're qualified for in addition to being qualified for project management related jobs. There's plenty of other roles or paths that may interest you. Internships can sometimes be a good place to start. An internship is a short-term way to get hands-on experience in an industry. Plus, internships are a great way to help boost your resume and set yourself apart from other candidates. One of the key benefits of internships is that you get real work experience while simultaneously networking with people in that industry. It's a win-win. Now some internships in your field might not technically be project manager roles, but a lot of roles are easily transferable. For example, something like an events manager intern role can become a full-time project manager position later on. Internships aren't great for everyone's lifestyle, but if you can make them work, they're a fantastic option. Another path you can take is contract work. Working for companies on a contract means you'll work with them on a project-by-project basis, but you won't be a full-time employee. This kind of work is a great way to get your foot in the door and build your portfolio. Plus, it gives you the flexibility to try your hand at a few different projects at once, depending on the commitment level required for that. Another benefit of contracting is that it lets you explore different kinds of companies and project types. Since it's a temporary position, you can explore what type of company is the best fit for you. Maybe you find you like working with a large or a small team, or you find you enjoy specific types of projects. And if you find a situation that suits you and the organization, your contract position might just lead to a full-time position. As you keep charging forward, try thinking about the type of job you might be interested in going after when we're done here. Every new topic you discover brings you one step closer to your first role in project management and one step closer to where you wanna be. In the next video, we'll learn how to identify and search for job titles best suited for a project manager. We'll see you there. Hi again, let's discuss how to search for a job in the project management field. It's no secret that job searching can be a challenge. Even the most detailed, specific job listings can leave you wondering what the company's really seeking in a candidate. Don't worry, we've all been there and we're here to help you sort through the lingo and the confusion. The more job listings you find, the more buzzwords you'll likely notice too. Words like data-driven, team player, self-starter, understanding all the buzzwords and job listings will help figure out if a job is right for you. Up to now, we've discussed project management as a role, but many companies actually list it as a skill. Here's some more good news. You'll soon be qualified for a position as a project manager and a position that lists project management as a skill. Here's the even better news. If you have the skills to manage projects, you'll be qualified for program manager or operational roles that require you to manage an end-to-end system or department two, which ask for the same skill set. Now, let's check out different types of jobs that use your project management skills. When job hunting, keep your options open. As I just mentioned, you don't have to limit yourself to just project manager titles. There's lots of other titles you're qualified for too. You'll know what's a good fit for you by reading the job descriptions, so cast a wide net. Depending on the field you choose, you might find roles like operations manager, program manager, operations associate, or project assistant. All of these could be a great fit for your skills. For example, let's say you're searching a job board for project management roles when you notice a community operations manager role for a small city open up. The job title isn't project manager, but you'll notice that the job functions match your skill set and years of experience also match the job requirements. The job description may include a list of required skills like organizational management, strong planning and communication skills, budget preparation and monitoring. Sound familiar? Maybe you'll even start to notice that the job's responsibilities seem like tasks you've covered in this course, like creating monthly status reports, helping to implement new and necessary technologies, tracking work plans and performance metrics, assisting other members of the operations team on given projects, and ensuring timely responses to requests for information. These duties are nearly a perfect match for your project management skills. And there are plenty more listings like these too. How great is that? The skills that go into project management are used in all kinds of roles and professions. Believe it or not, we've all worked with or learned from a project manager at some point in the past. Can you guess who that is? It's your teachers. Think about it. Everything that goes into being a teacher takes project management skills, designing a curriculum that's accessible to students with unique needs, managing a budget, communicating with others like parents, department heads or school admins, developing processes to make things run efficiently in the classroom and so on. For example, when I went for my first interview at Google, I highlighted my experience as the founder and advisor to a student leadership group. I told them about how I assembled and led a team of 20 students to plan and execute events like fundraisers, community gatherings and academic assemblies for over 300 students during the academic year. I even kind of surprised myself looking back at how much relevant project management experience I had. Now, I'm sure you'll think back on your own experiences and feel the same thing. One more thing to call out is networking. Networking is when you meet other people in a professional setting with the goal of learning, sharing knowledge and creating new business connections. This plays a big role in job hunting. So it is a great tool to start learning and perfecting. The skills you learn here will prepare you for all kinds of project management jobs. Knowing how to search for jobs will make it even easier to match those skills with the best opportunities for you. My name is Gilbert and I'm a talent outreach specialist here at Google. Talent can mean many things. It can mean folks that have never envisioned themselves at Google. And so part of our team's remit is to identify talent that Google or other companies may not necessarily reach out to or consider for roles in the past and helping them navigate the interview process. It could also mean candidates that are already interested or have expressed interest in opportunities at Google in the past and engaging them to support them through the interview process today. At Google, you have to wear the program and project management hat regardless of what role you're in. And that's definitely been the case for me. So in my role, I've had to practice skills such as communicating to stakeholders, managing a budget, managing a project timeline in many different projects within my role. An example of this could be organizing events for university students to come to Google's campus and hear from guest speakers about the projects we work on, the roles and their career journeys. And so as you can imagine, this can be a complex project. My first job out of college was completely unrelated to what I'm doing now. I was an assistant manager at a big box retailer. And so a lot of the skills that I actually learned in that role have translated to support me in my role and allowed me to have success. So some of these skills are being able to talk to and have difficult conversations, being able to manage a budget, managing resources and managing your time. These are especially important in the retail setting. I started applying a lot of these project management frameworks or practices, even into the smallest projects. Maybe it's related to my goals for the next three months, setting a project plan based around that, right? I was the only stakeholder. I was the only one reviewing maybe this documentation, but the practice of being able to do this really helped me so that when I had to do it for a project at Google with multiple stakeholders, with multiple timelines, competing priorities, it was already second nature to me because I even applied it just in my day to day. So I think one of the biggest support that I had as far as working through imposter syndrome or lack of confidence as I stepped into a lot of these skills is really just practice. And you can practice it in many different ways in your personal life and your professional life and anything in between. So that was really important for me as I've gone through this journey of upskilling as a program and project manager. So I'd say that by joining this course and stepping into this, you're already taking the first step and I think that's just as important, right? Like not letting fear or fear of failure get in the way of new opportunities for you. And the second piece is don't be afraid to ask for help. I think that folks are generally willing to help and support you. So the biggest thing that you can do is reach out and not be afraid to ask questions, not be afraid to do an informational interview, to ask for resume tips, to ask for advice from people that are maybe already in the role that you're hoping to step into or in the field that you're looking to work in. Just reach out to them, ask them questions. I think people like to connect with folks that are intuitive, that are curious and are just eager to learn. And so if you can leverage those two pieces, I think that you're gonna have success in whatever you do. And just like that, you're done with the first module. Congrats on hitting this exciting milestone. You're one step closer to becoming a rock star in project management. Let's revisit the concepts we've learned so far. We started by discussing how project management is the application of knowledge, skills, tools and techniques to meet the project requirements and achieve the desired outcome. Then we learned that project management is alive in nearly every industry and company. So you're working on an incredibly useful and versatile certification. We also learned what a project is, a unique endeavor and temporary pursuit carefully planned out to achieve a particular goal. Hopefully by now, you're familiar with the idea that every project has a defined timeframe, cost, scope and dedicated resources. We've covered some broad concepts and key terms that'll help you become a successful project manager. And we've gone over how to search for jobs when that time comes. We've also discussed how to effectively translate your past experiences into talking points for why you'll be a successful project manager. We talked about how you can transfer skills from your previous job into your new project management role and how that'll really set you apart. Everything from juggling a to-do list to budgeting for a loved one's birthday party demonstrates that you probably already have some of the skills to be a phenomenal project manager. But no worries if you don't, we're starting from scratch here. By the end of this course, you'll have the skills, but also the experience and knowledge to find the role you want. Whether that's contract work, internships or general project management positions, you'll be able to figure out what's the best fit for you. And as we go forward, I want to encourage you to keep thinking about what kind of work you might like to do in the future. And let's not forget the most exciting news we learned about project management. Just about everyone needs a project manager. This position's in high demand and that demand just keeps growing. Wow, okay, that's a lot of ground we covered and we've just barely scratched the surface. I hope you've enjoyed the course so far because it's about to get even more fun. Coming up, we have your first graded assignment and I know you'll ace it. Remember, take your time and relax. Trust yourself, you've got this. Don't forget, you can always review your notes and readings or go back and re-watch some of the videos if you're unsure about an answer. Good luck and I'll see you again soon. Welcome back. Let's start by reviewing what we've discussed so far. Earlier, you were introduced to project management as a career path. We discussed how this course can help you advance your career goals with a project management certification. And we also discussed some of the basics of project management, like how to define a project and its different components. Then we went over some distinct project management careers, roles and responsibilities. Now, it's time to gain a deeper understanding of a project manager's role. By the end of this module, you'll be able to explain the unique value a project manager brings to their team. You'll also be able to describe a project manager's roles and responsibilities and list their core skills. This course will help you continue to recognize the skills that you already have that will help you become a successful project manager. It will also help you identify new skills that you may need to learn in preparation for your new career. Ready? Let's get started. Earlier in this course, we introduced you to the world of project management. We discussed how project management spans industries and companies of all kinds, from large corporations to small businesses. Now let's define what a project manager is and describe how they add value to their teams and organizations. Let's start with the definition. Project managers shepherd projects from start to finish and serve as guides for their team using their impeccable organizational and interpersonal skills every step of the way. As you learned earlier, project managers usually follow a process that involves planning and organizing, managing tasks, budgeting and controlling costs so that the project can be completed within the approved timeframe. We'll dig deeper into these topics throughout this program. What you need to know right now is that project managers play a crucial role in their organizations. Project managers add value to their teams and organizations in key ways that include prioritization, delegation and effective communication. So let's break these down. First, we'll discuss prioritization. Project managers add value to their teams and organizations through effective prioritization of tasks required to complete a project. They're experts at helping team members identify and break down large tasks into smaller steps. There will be times when a project manager may not know which tasks to prioritize. To determine which ones are the most critical to the success of the project, they'll connect with their teams and with stakeholders to gather information and make a plan. Stakeholders are people who are interested in and affected by the project's completion and success, like the leader of an organization. You've probably used prioritization to complete work in the past. In any kind of project, personal or professional, there are tasks with different levels of priority. For example, let's imagine that you've decided to rent a house and plan to repaint the rooms. You've picked out your paint and you're eager to get started. While it may be tempting to start painting right away, you'll need to prioritize tasks like laying out drop cloths to protect the floors and furniture, applying blue tape to the rooms' edges, and much more. Those preliminary steps are critical and need to come before painting. Other related steps like choosing new faceplates for your light switches can come later in the process or be switched out of the project entirely if you run out of time or money. When you choose to take care of these preliminary steps before wedging open the paint can, you're prioritizing the tasks or steps of your project. You're also increasing the likelihood that you'll be satisfied with your newly painted rooms. This process is similar for professional projects. When you effectively prioritize important tasks, you set up your team and yourself for a better project outcome. Now, let's discuss delegation. Project managers use delegation to add value to their teams and organizations by matching tasks to individuals who can best complete the work. Let's return to our house painting example for a second here. Painting multiple rooms can be a time-consuming project, so it's possible that you might enlist a few friends to help you get it done. Maybe one friend has professional painting experience. Now, with that in mind, you might ask her to handle the more challenging aspects of the project, like painting the ceiling or the detailed molding. You might also schedule her to paint the molding before another friend paints the walls. So by delegating this task to the person with the right skills to complete the work and ordering the tasks appropriately, you're applying knowledge of your team's strengths to the planning of your project. That makes sense, right? Finally, let's talk about effective communication. Project managers deliver value through effective communication, both with their team and with key stakeholders. This refers to being transparent, which means being upfront with plans and ideas and making information readily available. Project managers keep in regular contact with their team about the progress of the work and help identify areas where a teammate may need support. In our house painting example, this might involve checking in with your friends periodically to ask if they have enough paint or supplies left to complete their tasks. Checking in regularly means you'll know if you need to buy more paint before the can is empty, which ensures that the project stays on track. In addition to keeping up with teammates, project managers keep in regular contact with people outside of the team, like company leaders who are invested in the project outcomes. For example, you might reach out to your landlord to get permission to paint and to share the days you'll be working on this project. Though your landlord isn't directly involved in the project's execution, the outcomes will affect her property, and so it's important to keep her informed. Without your project management skills, you might run out of paint halfway through the project, your walls might get painted without drop cloths to protect the floors, and your landlord could be caught off guard about your plans. So it's a good thing you're here to keep the project running smoothly and efficiently. Great, now you should be able to define what a project manager is and explain how they use prioritization, delegation, and effective communication to deliver value to their organizations. Coming up, you'll hear about the career path of a real-life project manager at Google. Their journey to me is fascinating, and we can't wait to share it with you. My name is Joanne. I'm a senior program manager at Google. I'm a first-generation Chinese American. My family and I came to the United States when I was young. My parents worked really hard when I was growing up, and I spent a lot of time by myself, basically just having to take care of myself, you know, planning my meals, doing my homework, taking care of chores. So I feel like I got a little bit of my program management skills from just being really organized, like having to be really organized all the time. My path to being a project manager really started as a business systems analyst. I was writing requirements or gathering requirements for our customers and translating them into documentation for our engineers so that they could implement it. Through that process, I became a project manager. I started to manage the timelines, manage the tasks, understand all the pieces and who needed to be involved. And there you go, you have a project manager. I think the funnest part about being a project manager is really working with people. You get to meet all different kinds of people, different personalities. Sometimes you get to travel to places to meet them, but even when you don't, I think just meeting new people and understanding how we interact, how people interact and behave is fascinating. I think if you build a relationship, focus on the relationship, and really understand what their style, where they're coming from, what their concerns are, it will help your relationship, your working relationship much better. You can communicate with them in the style that's necessary. You can work with them in the style that's more receptive to them. And that would just make the project better all around. Welcome back. I hope you enjoyed that last story because for me, it's always helpful to hear about someone else's career path. Maybe you even noticed a few parallels between their career path and your own. Or you felt inspired to pursue a specific area of project management. So far, we've discussed the types of project management roles you'll be qualified for and how to search for them. And earlier, we discussed the value that project managers bring to their teams and their organizations. Now let's learn more about the roles and responsibilities of a project manager. Earlier, you learned that project management is the application of knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to meet the project requirements and achieve the desired outcome. So, how does that actually happen? Well, that's where you come in. Project managers usually follow a process that involves planning and organizing, managing tasks, budgeting, and controlling costs, and other factors so that the project can be completed within the approved budget and timeframe. Let's break these down into examples of responsibilities that you might find in a job listing for a project management role. We'll start with planning and organizing. One responsibility that falls under the umbrella of planning and organizing is making use of productivity tools and creating processes. During the planning and execution of a project, you might need to use certain tools and develop processes to improve information sharing across the team. You may also need to create plans, timelines, schedules, and other forms of documentation to track project completion. And you'll usually need to maintain those documents throughout the entirety of the project. The next task is budgeting and controlling costs and other factors. As the project is underway, changes to the plan and budget are bound to come up. Believe me, this will require you to monitor and manage the budget, track issues, and risks as they arise and manage quality by mitigating those issues and risks. One way to do this is by removing unforeseen barriers that come up. Now, by barriers, we mean things that can get in the way of project progress. For example, if your teammates lack the resources needed to complete a task, you might identify that issue or barrier up front. Escalate the issue to a stakeholder and work to secure the resource so your team can move forward. Another huge piece of the project manager's role is managing tasks. A project task is an activity that needs to be accomplished within a set period of time by you, your team, or your stakeholders. Keeping track of tasks is a great way to help manage the team's workload and ensure that things are getting done. Keeping track of tasks is also a great tool for demonstrating progress to people outside the immediate team, like your stakeholders. Back when I was a program manager in student development here at Google, one of our goals was to create pathways for students who identify with communities that are underrepresented in the technology industry. A large part of my day-to-day responsibilities involved working with two separate engineering teams to create our technical curriculum. To manage the tasks associated with this project, I created separate project trackers for each team that outlined the vision for the curriculum. These trackers kept both teams in the loop about the timeline for delivery, the categories and subcategories for work, and the team members assigned to each task. I also made sure to update our stakeholders every step of the way. By actively managing tasks throughout the project lifecycle, I was able to keep tabs on everyone's work and efficiently inform stakeholders which allowed us to achieve our project goal with minimal issues. Nice job. Now you should be able to describe the roles and responsibilities of a project manager. Coming up, we'll discuss a project manager's role within the extended team, including how to work alongside the people tasked with executing the project. Catch you in a bit. Hey, and welcome back. Earlier, you learned more about the responsibilities of a project manager. And while it might seem like a lot to keep track of, it's important to know that you, as the project manager, won't need to do everything on your own. Let's discuss the role of the project manager and how that role relates to other roles within the project team. It's easier to hear the term manager and immediately think of your boss. But a project manager is not often the direct manager of the people working on a project team. Here we're discussing the project manager as someone who manages the tasks of a project. But what does that really mean, right? Well, although you might have a few teammates working with you on a project, you're probably not their day-to-day boss. With the help of your team, you can get a lot more done together. Everyone on your team will have their own set of roles and responsibilities. And you'll come together to ensure that everyone is able to do their part to advance the project. Each person will be an expert on their portion of the project, but no one will be an expert on every aspect of the project. And honestly, neither will you. For instance, the graphic designer will focus on graphic design, but probably won't be an expert on copywriting. Similarly, you'll be an expert on project management, but may not be an expert on marketing. Here's another way to think about it. Imagine that you're organizing a camping trip. You might be the person in charge of planning the trip, but that doesn't mean you have to be a camping expert. Maybe you've never been camping before, but your partner grew up spending every summer by the campfire. In that case, you might assign them the task of picking out the right number and style of tents for your group. So in this example, you are planning the trip by giving your partner the job of finding the right number of tents and the right size tents to make sure everyone's covered. You aren't doing the research or the task yourself, but you're making sure that things are getting done. It's similar in the workplace. As the project manager, you won't be an expert in every project role, and that's okay. As we said, your job isn't to be the expert on everything. Instead, you're responsible for guiding your team and making sure that they have the support that they need in order to complete the project. So how does a project manager go about doing that? Let's discuss using a few more examples of the required responsibilities you might find in a job listing. First, you'll need to hold all team members accountable for their assigned tasks. Managing tasks will help you hold your team members accountable by giving them ownership over specific pieces of the project. Second, you'll need to ensure that issues and risks are tracked and visible and be able to establish escalation paths. Now, by escalation paths, I mean that you should know how you'll communicate risks to the right people at the right time. Third, you'll need to understand and help teammates adopt the right workflows and project management styles. As the project manager, you'll likely have the best idea of which style is best for the work. It's your job to ensure that the team adheres to that style and the other systems in place. And fourth, you'll need to collaborate with other teams at the organization to meet the requirements based on project, scope, schedule, and budget. In other words, a project may affect not only your team but other teams at an organization, as well, say, the marketing or the finance team. So you'll need to work with those teams to ensure that everyone is happy with the project outcomes. You'll learn more about working with other stakeholders in a later course. Catch all that? Let's recap. You've learned that a project manager isn't always the direct manager of each member of the project team. Rather, they're responsible for guiding those people and ensuring they have the support they need to complete the project. Now that you have a good sense of the way that a project manager fits into the project team, let's move a little bit ahead, where we'll discuss the types of skills that a project manager needs to succeed. Meet you there. A great project manager is some funky combination of EMT, Ninja, and jazz musician. An EMT who can show up on a scene that's full of chaos, figure out what needs to happen. Now, triage all of the things on site and then develop a plan of action while also participating in that action. A ninja, because you kind of have to be stealth about how you go about influencing other people. Overt action or pushing people too hard isn't necessarily received well. And a jazz musician, particularly a jazz drummer, who keeps a steady beat as a lot of things are happening around you. On a team, you're going to be surrounded by a bunch of talented people, a trombone player, a bass player, a trumpet player, a pianist, and you, keeping the beat and making sure that everybody is working in time. I spend most of my days with my product and engineering counterparts, talking a lot about strategy, updating status to key stakeholders, and trying to figure out what comes next for our product. Some things about my job never change, from this day to my very first day. The fact that I communicate with a lot of people in a day, a lot of different types of people from engineers to product managers, to partnerships, to sales and marketing, all of that's the same. The biggest different is the number of people that I communicate with and the complexity of the topics I cover. The most important thing for you to keep in mind is staying organized. The more organized you are in your actions, the more organized your team is in their thinking and their actions. What I do to stay organized is lists. List, lists, lists. All day long, I have posted notes, I have electronic lists, I have lists and emails, and those lists help me stay on top of what actions need to happen now, what actions need to happen next, and which I can put off for a few more days. I do use the list to help manage my time. I think one of the things my lists are most important for is making sure I know what needs to be done today. And then, once my list is made, and I'm sure of what needs to be done today, I budget time for those things. A stand-up is a quick meeting, usually at the start of the day, but you can have them really at any time. My stand-ups usually happen in the morning, around 9.30 or 10 o'clock, depending on when the engineering team got in. They lasted for about 15 minutes so that we were clear on what had gotten done the day before and what was on the docket to get done today. And then we usually checked in again quickly around lunch to make sure that people were still on track or ran into any technical issues that might require a longer time to finish the task. I think the thing that makes me a great project manager is a bias to action and resilience. One of my favorite phrases is pick it and stick it, in part because I think it's important to make a decision to get yourself unstuck, to follow through on that action, learn some things and decide to take a new action once you've learned something. The latter half of that is resilience. I am resilient and my teams are resilient. So if we've taken a bad action, we've learned that we can learn and change our mind with new information. I'm Elita, a senior engineering program manager at Google. Hey, and welcome back. Now that you've learned about the roles and responsibilities of a project manager, let's discuss the core skill sets that a project manager should bring to the role. While there are lots of different skills a project manager can bring to their role, there are four specific skill sets that we think can help a project manager be successful. Those are enabling decision-making, communicating and escalating, flexibility and strong organizational skills. First, let's talk about enabling decision-making. The ability to enable decision-making on the team or gathering decisions from the appropriate leader is crucial to keep projects on task and achieve their goals. Lots of the day-to-day decisions within the project will likely fall to you and your teammates to discuss and agree on. You'll ensure that projects stay on schedule by gathering information from teammates and using those insights to help the team make informed decisions. You'll also make sure that those decisions are communicated to the necessary coworkers, whether that's the immediate team or company leaders. For example, you might provide relevant data or feedback to help your teammates make an informed decision between choice A and choice B. The second skill is communicating and escalating. As a project manager, you'll use your communication skills in just about everything you do. This might look like documenting plans, sending emails about the status of the project or holding a meeting to escalate risks or issues to stakeholders. The third skill is flexibility. As a project manager, knowing how to be flexible when changes are needed is key. Plans definitively will change, even with careful upfront planning. For example, maybe the goals of your company change or maybe a member of your team unexpectedly takes a new position at another company. A good project manager knows that unpredictable moments like these are almost always guaranteed. A quote we love here at Google is the only constant is change and that's true. By staying cool under pressure, you'll be able to adjust while helping your team stay calm too. And finally, a successful project manager needs strong organizational skills. As you learned earlier, the role of a project manager requires using a lot of different processes to keep the project on track. Having strong organizational skills means having the ability to organize these processes and the core elements of a project to ensure nothing gets lost or overlooked, which trust me, can and does happen. To prevent this, you might decide to track daily tasks in a spreadsheet or send frequent status updates or reminders. There are many ways to stay organized and hone your organizational skills and we'll talk more about them throughout the program to recap. Decision making, communicating and escalating, flexibility and strong organizational skills are four core skill sets that are essential to successful project management. You can continue to build on these skills by becoming familiar with industry knowledge that applies to most project management roles. Knowledge of helpful tools and templates and familiarity with popular project management styles like waterfall and agile can help you organize and document the project throughout its life cycle. We'll learn about these throughout this program. Hopefully, you feel better equipped to explain the core skills a project manager should bring to the role. These skills really help enforce team morale and accountability for the tasks of a project. We'll discuss this coming up. See you soon. My name is Rachel. I'm a senior program manager in Google New York. Google hired me out of a bar in the East Village about 12 years ago. For about three years, a group of NY ops and SRE drank at my bar and like everyone at the bar, they asked the bartender for advice. So I gave them advice and helped them through a lot of problems and also became friends with them. I really admired them. They were incredibly smart and charming and really good drinkers and tippers. Eventually, I wanted something different from my life than standing behind a bar all night long and there was an opportunity to apply for an admin role on their team. So I joined Google in 2008. They hired me first as an administrator for site reliability and engineering ops in New York City after about two years transferred into program management. Google's hiring is a little more conventional now, but the skills that I polished while being a bartender inform my everyday work. A wise old bartender that I knew on the Lower East Side once told me that a bar was a room full of tables and chairs and some beer and a meeting room was the same, a room full of tables and chairs. People come into a bar like they come into a meeting room wanting to leave feeling something else. So as a program manager, my job was to help people through that experience, the aesthetic experience of meeting with each other, making decisions, and coming to conclusions together. Very similar to bartending and helping people have a better night. My role as a program manager started by someone taking a risk on me. My engineering partner picked me out of the admin pool because he knew that I could build community with his engineers. When you work at a bar, you have to talk to anyone who comes into the bar. Anyone who walks through that door is your customer. You have to understand what they want, what they want to drink, whether they can continue drinking, whether they might be done drinking, all of these things. When you are working with a subject matter expert, an engineer, a product designer, a UX person, the same things apply. So you have to be able to talk to any engineer on your team, any product manager you need to work with. And you have to understand their unique needs. Program management isn't just about the process and the artifacts that you create. It's about how you relate to people. Understanding what you've learned in other parts of your life, whether it was in a bar or art school, these are the experiences that you bring into the job that make your work unique. Your skills at talking to people or deescalating conflict or understanding what people need. This is what makes you a great program manager. Earlier, you learned about the role of the project manager and the core skills you'll need to be successful in that role. You've also learned more about your role within the project team. Now let's discuss a few key skills that you'll use to build relationships with your teammates and stakeholders. Using your interpersonal skills is key to building relationships with the people involved in your project. By developing these relationships, you'll learn about the needs and concerns of the team. This will help you determine the priorities of the project and motivate your team throughout the process. Possessing strong interpersonal skills is a huge part of good leadership. Even if you've never held a formal leadership position, having these skills will help you when you need to guide a team. This is called influencing without authority, which refers to a project manager's ability to guide teammates to complete their assigned work without acting as their direct managers. There's a few key interpersonal skills that you can use to accomplish this and guide the project outcomes, even without the authority of being your teammate's boss. These skills include communication, negotiation, conflict mediation, and understanding motivations. So let's break these down. First up is a key skill we've mentioned a few times now, communication. In the context of leading a team, communication can include checking in with teammates to understand how they're progressing on a task and providing clear feedback on the quality of a teammate's work. Next is negotiation. Negotiation might include working with a teammate to compromise on a new deadline when they tell you that they won't be able to complete their work on time. Now, trust me, I know this can be frustrating, but you'll need to use your negotiation skills often with your teammates and stakeholders to balance their needs and what is best for the project. Another important skill is conflict mediation. As we mentioned, project plans can change and issues will arise. This can sometimes lead to tension and conflict within the team. So conflict mediation is a great skill to practice and develop to ensure the project does not suffer as a result. This might involve setting up a meeting with two teammates who are struggling to agree upon the best way to handle a shared task. And finally, there's understanding motivations. This means getting to know your teammates and figuring out what pushes them to do their best work. Understanding motivations might also include learning how your teammates prefer to receive feedback and how they like to receive recognition for doing a great job. You would use that individualized information to motivate and encourage each person on your team. So to recap, communication, negotiation, conflict mediation and understanding motivations are all interpersonal skills that will help you influence without authority. During job interviews for project management positions, you might be asked to discuss a time when you influenced without authority. And it's possible that you've already noticed ways that you've used these skills in your personal life without even realizing it. For example, let's say you have a coworker who's constantly late to every meeting. And I mean every meeting. While you can't force them to arrive on time, it's likely that you've thought about ways to motivate them to want to be on time. In doing so, you might have also wondered how to change the way you communicate with your coworker to influence them to be on time. Maybe you've tried asking them to arrive 15 minutes earlier than the rest of the group, or maybe you've told them how this behavior impacts the rest of the team. Both of these strategies are examples of influencing without authority and they serve to encourage specific behavior. Influencing without authority is one of the most critical and one of the most challenging aspects of project management. As you've just learned, you'll need to leverage your interpersonal skills in order to do it effectively. In later courses, we'll review and learn more about using your interpersonal skills to manage various projects. We'll see you in the next video. I'm Ellen and I'm a director of technical program management. And that means I lead a team of program managers at Google. I love project management because I really like this idea that you can do more together as a team with a group of people than you could do alone by bringing in a bunch of people together and getting organized, getting aligned around a common goal. We can do some pretty amazing things. I think a successful project manager is somebody who really knows how to pull together a group of people. To me, there's really two parts of project management. One is this laser-like focus on executing on this goal. Then the other part is the people. And so a successful project manager can do both. When I first started managing project managers, it was really about, you know, everyone works on their own project. How do I just guide them, give them guidance and help them with their projects? Over the years, I've shifted to, you know, to mentoring on project management to mentoring project managers. And what I mean by that is it's different. I'm no longer saying, here's what you should do on your project. I'm really trying to help them think about how to think about their projects. One of the things that I think about a lot as I'm building a project management team is having a really diverse set of folks who with different backgrounds, different experiences, and, you know, we're a global company, so we're really trying to make sure we are a global team as well. And when I talk about diversity of background and experience, like it really is about, you know, working in different types of environments with different types of teams. When I chat with new project managers and they say like, how, you know, how do I continue to grow as a project manager? My answer is like, work on different projects, right? Work on as many projects as you can, but like, don't be afraid to try different areas, different domains, work with different people. With every project you work on, you're gonna really learn something. Nice work. So far, you've started learning all about project managers and the value they bring to their teams. We also introduced you to a few program managers here at Google who spoke about their own experiences working in the field. You also learn more about the day-to-day responsibilities of a project manager and how they guide their teammates to do their best work. And you learned about the types of skills you'll need to succeed in a program management role. As we move forward, you'll develop and hone lots of the skills needed for the daily tasks of a project manager. And hopefully, you've also identified the skills you already have that can help you become a great project manager and an asset to employers. Next up, we'll discuss the project life cycle. You'll learn more about the different phases of a project and the tasks associated with each phase. You'll also learn more about some of the most popular project management methodologies used across industries today and how to choose the best one for your project. See you soon. Welcome back. Before we move on, let's recap what's already been covered. You learn how to define project management, what a project is, what it isn't, and how to explain its value to businesses. You also discussed when and why it's necessary to have a project manager, the role and day-to-day responsibilities of a project manager, and the core skills needed to be a successful project manager. Now's a good time to stop and recognize how much you've learned. By now, you're familiar with the job of project management, and you've started learning what it takes to be an effective project manager. Now you'll go a little further and learn some of the ins and outs of the job. And before you know it, you'll be ready to guide any project successfully. Are you ready? Well, coming up, I'll introduce you to the two most popular approaches to project management, waterfall and agile. We'll also cover the project management, lifecycle and phases, and you'll learn about the different styles, scenarios and factors that can impact a project and its tasks at any given phase. When we're done, you'll be able to explain and follow the lifecycle of a project, define and outline a project's phases and each phase's tasks, compare different project management methodologies to determine which methodology is most effective for a project, and finally, organize how a project is run according to different program management methodologies. Ready? Let's get started. No two projects are exactly the same, which means there are many different ways to manage them. Each project comes with its own needs and factors that impact how you'll take action and achieve your goals. There are many ways to manage projects and not always one right way to do so. Picture this, your project managing a political campaign for a local candidate. To make it happen, you need to think about things like your available resources, the people you'll be working with, the election date and the location. You need to be aware of lots of details to successfully complete your project. Because so many different things can impact a project, it's important to understand its basic structure. We call this structure the project lifecycle. The lifecycle is a great way to guide your project in the right direction, so that you and your project stay on track and end up in the right place. Most project life cycles have four major phases, each with their own set of tasks and concerns. Check it out. The main phases of a project are, initiate the project, make a plan, execute and complete tasks, and finally close the project. Let's talk about the first phase, initiate the project. This is the launch pad for the entire process of your project. In this phase, you'll define project goals and deliverables. Identify the budget and resources you'll need, the people involved in your project, and any other details that can impact the successful completion of your project. You'll document all this information in one place to showcase the project's value and hopefully get approval to move forward with it. Once the project is approved, it's time to get rolling. Next, you'll make a plan for how you'll meet the goals of your project. There are all kinds of ways to plan your project and we'll get into some different methods and techniques later on. But right now, the important thing to know is that for every single project, creating a plan of how you're going to meet your goals is absolutely 100% essential. Think about it. You can't hire a contractor to build a house without planning what it'll look like or how much you have to spend. These same considerations apply to any project that you manage. To be effective, your plan needs to include a lot of things. For example, a budget, a breakdown of all the tasks that you need to be completed, ways to communicate team roles and responsibilities, a schedule, resources, and what to do in case your project encounters problems or needs to change. Now that's just to name a few. Once you have your plan in place, it's time to execute and complete those tasks. It's important to point out that your project team has the job of completing the project tasks. Now, as a project manager, your role is a little different. While you might be in charge of completing certain tasks in the project, your primary tasks as the project manager are to monitor progress and keep your team motivated. You'll also remove any obstacles that might come up so that the tasks are executed well and on time. Finally, when all the tasks have been completed, all the resources have been accounted for and the project has crossed the finish line, it's time to close the project. Why is it important to close? Well, one big reason is so your team has a moment to celebrate all of their hard work, but closing the project is also a chance to evaluate how the project went. You can make note of what worked and what didn't, so you can plan better for next time. Even if the project was a massive success, it's helpful to take time to reflect. Closing the project is also a great way to connect with anyone outside your team who may have had interest in the project's goal. You can let everyone know what was completed and what you accomplished. Some projects, like the campaign example, will have a firm end date. Once the project is finished, that's it. There's no more work to do. Other projects have different finish lines. For example, a project where you're implementing a new ordering system at a restaurant is complete after the system is set up and the employees know how it works. At that point, your goals are completed. Now it's time to hand over the project to another group whose job it is to provide support and make sure the system stays running on a day-to-day basis. Another example of this is, I once project managed the creation of a dashboard that would be used by various stakeholders in my organization. This dashboard would show pertinent information to each stakeholder, depending on the team that they were a part of in our broader organization. I project managed the beginning from writing out the vision for the project to the end where we deliver the dashboard. Now, once I passed off the final product, I transitioned the continued update of each team's data and the corresponding dashboard page to the respective teams. Think of it like turning over the keys of a newly built house to its new owner. The project of building the house is complete and now it's up to the owner to take care of the house's maintenance and the upkeep. So there you have it, the project lifecycle. The exact name for each phase might change depending on the type of project or organization you work for, but the general idea stays the same and following the project processes you will learn in this course will set you up for project management success. Next, we'll take a closer look into what happens during each phase of the traditional project lifecycle. Now that we've discussed the project lifecycle, we're going to explore some of the different tasks that match up with each lifecycle phase. But first, let's review the phases. The project lifecycle phases are initiate the project, make a plan, execute and complete tasks and close out the project. Okay, great. Let's get back to the tasks that need to be accomplished during each phase. For this video, we're going to focus on the first two project lifecycle phases, initiating the project and making a plan. It's important to call out that the name or tasks for each phase might change or may be a little different depending on the type of project or the organization where you work. At Google, we use a mix of different project management methods which you'll learn more about later in the course. But regardless of the method, all projects share a lot of the same tasks needed to get the job done. So let's get into it. The first step of the project lifecycle is to initiate the project. During initiation, you'll organize all of the information you have available to you about your project. This way, when you're ready to continue on, you'll be prepared for the next phase when you can create your plan. Defining project goals makes the details of your project clear so that you and your team can successfully complete the project. For example, if the project goal is to manage a political campaign, then some deliverables, which are specific tasks or outcomes, might be to raise $5,000 or get 500 signatures in support of your candidate's cause. With this in mind, you'll need to do some research to come up with ideas that will help you meet your goals. You'll also need to find out what resources are available. Resources can include people, equipment, software programs, vendors, physical space or locations, and more. Anything you need to actually complete the project is considered a resource. Now, as a project manager, you'll record all of these details in your project proposal and then get them approved by a decision maker or group of decision makers at your company so that you can move ahead with your project plans. Now, in some cases, you may be the decision maker, so be sure to consider the same set of factors when initiating your project before moving to the next stage. No worries. You will learn all the details about how to create a project proposal. We will be getting into more detail of what this is and how to create one later in the course. Voila. Once your project is approved, you'll move into the second step of the project lifecycle, which is to make a plan. In this phase, you'll create a budget and set the project schedule. You'll establish the project team and determine each person's roles and responsibilities. Let's pause for a second. You may be thinking, ugh, why can't we just get started? But that's the thing with project management. Deliberate planning is critical to a project's success. A crucial part of project management is planning for risk and change. An experienced project manager knows that plans always change. This ability to adapt is all about thinking and planning ahead. Scheduling delays, budget changes, technology and software requirements, legal issues, quality control, and access to resources are just some of the more common types of risks and changes that a project manager needs to consider. So it's important to keep in mind that planning is key to reducing those risks. But don't worry, if the idea of risks seems a little overwhelming right now, in later courses, we'll teach you all about understanding risks. Just know that it's really important not to skip this step and to always make a plan. Again, the success of your project depends on it. Once you have a plan, you'll communicate all of this information to your team. That way, each member will know which tasks they'll own and what to do if they have questions or if they run into problems. You'll also communicate your plan with others who have an interest in the project's success so that they are aware of your plans and your progress as the project continues to move forward. Nice job. We've made it halfway through the steps of a project lifecycle. Up next, we'll check out the remaining two phases. Executing and completing tasks and closing the project. Catch you in a bit. Welcome back. We just learned about the core tasks that need to be completed and the first two phases of the project lifecycle. Initiating the project and making plans. Now, it's time to put your plans into action. Remember, it's not your job to actually do all the tasks. Your primary job as the project manager is to manage the progress of the project as a whole. This means you'll oversee your team's efforts and make sure everyone understands what's expected of them, what tasks need to be done and how and when to complete those tasks. It's also your job to help remove any obstacles and to alert the right people if it looks like there might be a delay to the project. This means you'll need to communicate with your team and anyone else involved in your project through meetings, written communications like memos, emails or internal chat tools and other working documents like task reports. Quick pro tip, if in doubt, err on the side of over communication. As your project progresses, you'll make adjustments to the schedule, budget and allocation of resources, clearly communicating updates all along the way. When all the tasks are complete and you've met the project goal, it's time to close the project. This phase is usually overlooked because it's easy to assume that once the project goal has been delivered, everyone can move on, but hold up. There's still a lot that needs to be done. First, check to make sure all tasks have been completed, including any work that was added along the way. Be sure any outstanding invoices have been paid, resources are returned and accounted for and project documentation has been submitted. Next, and this is very important, get confirmation that the final outcome of your project is acceptable to the people you're delivering it to. It is crucial to your project's success that the person who asked you to manage the project is satisfied with the end result. Once your project has been accepted as meeting its goals, take some time to reflect on what went well and maybe what didn't go so well. This reflection is usually called a retrospective and it's a chance to note best practices and learn how to manage a project more effectively next time. Even if everything went great, the notes from your retrospective are also valuable to the people or organization receiving the end result of the project. That's because they can use that information to inform decisions about their business the next time they consider a project. Now it's time to collect all the project documentation that you've created or collected along the way, including all of your plans and reflections and share the final results of your project with your stakeholders. Remember, stakeholders are people who are interested in and affected by the project's completion and success. Depending on the type of project, stakeholders can include a department or organization's management team, clients or customers of your product or service, users of your new tool or process, or even the community at large if you're planning a community town hall meeting. Pro tip, stakeholders play a huge role in the development and success of your project. You'll learn a lot more about these key players later on, but for now, just know that they're like the VIPs of your project. Next, take some time to celebrate the effort your team invested in the project. The celebrations help people feel good about the work they've done and think of the work as uplifting and rewarding because it truly is. Some ideas for small celebrations are a company or a team-wide email, thanking the team and acknowledging individual efforts. Now for big projects, you may even consider a company party to celebrate the team and the project's success. To wrap up, you and your team can formally move on from the project so that you can pursue new projects in the future. Well, as you can see, being a project manager is a lot of work, but it's very rewarding and it's all, well, manageable when you follow through with the project lifecycle. You can see how the organization, communication, and improvements you add to various areas of a project can make the entire team more effective and efficient. And you can have an impact on many areas of a project in a way that's greater than if you focused on any one task on the project. Similar to a coach with a sports team, even though you aren't actually playing a direct role in the game, your guidance, your communication, and your team building can make the difference in a happy, high-performing, and successful team. In later courses, we'll discuss each of these project phases and you'll learn methods, techniques, and tools to help you. For now, we just want you to become familiar with the general project management process and we'll share some of the terms and concepts used in the field that you'll need to know as you develop your project management skills. Up next, we'll introduce you to two of the more popular project methodologies, waterfall and agile. See you soon. Welcome back. As we've already discussed, not all projects are alike. Different types of projects will benefit from applying different project management approaches or methodologies. A project management methodology is a set of guiding principles and processes for owning a project through its life cycle. Project management methodologies help guide project managers throughout a project with steps to take, tasks to complete, and principles for managing the project overall. We will talk through two different types, linear and iterative. Linear means the previous phase or task has to be completed before the next can start. A linear approach would work well for a project like building a house. You'd need the blueprint created before you can begin laying the foundation. You've got to know exactly what the house will look like, its dimensions, and what type and how many resources you'll need. Then you've got to finish the foundation before you put up the walls and the walls before you put up the roof and so on before you have the finished project, which is a bungalow style home. There's also a clear goal. You know exactly what the house will look like. It's unlikely that in the middle of building the house, your client is going to decide they'd rather have a multi-level Victorian instead of a single level bungalow. What's more, even if they wanted the change, it's too late. You already laid the foundation and built the walls for the bungalow. Done and done. A bungalow is what they wanted and a bungalow is what they'll get. Using this type of linear project management approach, completing each step in order and sticking to the agreed upon specific results and being able to deliver just what the client ordered. For a project like producing a new show for a television company, on the other hand, it might be more effective to use a methodology that uses an iterative, more flexible approach where some of the phases and tasks will overlap or happen at the same time that other tasks are being worked on. Your team comes up with an idea for a show and films a pilot. You run several tests of the pilot in different locations and time slots. As your team gathers feedback about the pilot, adjustments to the show are made. At the same time, you're able to make decisions and start working on other parts of the project like hiring permanent actors, starting film production and working on advertising, even while the final version of the show is being worked on. And even though the overall goal is clear, produce a new show, the type of show could end up being different from the original idea. Your team may have started out creating a one-hour show, but during testing, they realized a half-hour show would actually be more popular. Or maybe a supporting character got a lot of positive feedback so you wanna make them one of the main characters. What's more important is that you produce a show that audiences are going to watch. Because of the iterative approach, plans remain flexible and you're able to make adjustments as you go along. Each of these projects benefits from a different approach to how tasks will be carried out in order to best meet the project's goals. Linear projects don't require many changes during development and have a clear sequential process. If you stick to the plan, it's likely you'll finish your tasks within the time schedule and all other criteria. Iterative projects allow for more flexibility and anticipate changes. You're able to test out parts of the project to make sure they work before the final result is delivered. And you can deliver parts of the project as they are completed rather than waiting for the entire project to be done. Over the years, the field of project management has developed many different methods that project managers can choose from that will help them manage most effectively. Google takes a hybrid approach to project management. We mix and match from different methods depending on the type of project. Our project managers are encouraged to adapt their own style to what makes the most sense to their project and their team. So are you starting to see how different approaches might benefit the projects you'll be working on now? Pretty soon, you'll become a pro at picking an approach or combining approaches to fit with your project. Up next, we'll learn about the most well-known and most used project management methods that you can add to your project management toolbox. Two of the most popular project management methodologies are Waterfall and Agile. Each of these methods has a rich and complex history. In fact, you could take an entire certificate on just one of these methods alone. You'll have a chance to learn more about Waterfall and Agile methods in the upcoming courses of this certificate. So be sure to check those out after completing this one to learn more. For now, I'll just give you a brief introduction and provide you with some examples that illustrate how different types of projects can be more successful or easier to manage when you consider which method to use. First, let's take a look at the Waterfall approach. Waterfall, as a methodology, was created in the 70s and refers to the sequential ordering of phases. You complete one at a time down the line like a waterfall starting at the top of a mountain and traveling to the bottom. Remember the definition and example of linear from that last video? Well, Waterfall has a linear approach. At first, Waterfall was used in the physical engineering disciplines like manufacturing and construction. Then software emerged as an important field of engineering and Waterfall was applied to those kinds of projects as well. It still used a lot in engineering fields, including product feature design and application, also known as app design. Over time, other industries like event planning and retail have adapted Waterfall phases to fit their projects. There are now many styles of Waterfall and each style has its own specific set of steps. What they all have in common though is that they follow an ordered set of steps that are directly linked to clearly defined expectations, resources and goals that are not likely to change. Let's take a closer look. The phases of a Waterfall project lifecycle follow the same standard project lifecycle flow that you learned about earlier, initiating, planning, executing, which includes managing and completing tasks and closing. So when would you want to use a Waterfall approach to project management? Well, when the phases of the project are clearly defined or when there are tasks to complete before another can begin or when changes to the project are very expensive to implement once it started. For example, if you were catering an event for a client on a very tight budget, you might want to use Waterfall methodology. This way, you could confirm the number of guests first, then very clearly define the menu, get approval and agreement on the menu items and costs, order the unreturnable ingredients and successfully feed the guests. Because the budget is limited, you can't afford to make changes or waste food. The traditional method won't allow for the client to make changes to the menu once the order has been placed. You can also reserve tables, chairs and dishes because you know exactly how much and what kind of food is being prepared. A well-thought-out traditional approach to managing a project can help you reach your desired outcome with as little pain as possible during the project implementation. By spending extra effort thinking through the entire project up front, you'll set yourself up for success. Now, in an ideal world, following this approach will help you identify the right people and tasks, plan accordingly to avoid any hiccups along the way, create room for documenting your plans and progress and enable you to hit that goal. However, plans don't always go, well, according to plan. In fact, they rarely do. The Waterfall method has some risk management practices to help avoid and deal with project changes. Luckily, there are other methodologies that are entirely built for change and flexibility. One of these is agile, another popular project management approach. The term agile means being able to move quickly and easily. It also refers to flexibility, which means being willing and able to change and adapt. Projects that use an agile approach often have many tasks being worked on at the same time or in various stages of completion, which makes it an iterative approach. The concepts that shaped agile methodology began to emerge in the 90s as a response to the growing demand for faster delivery of products, mainly software applications at that time, but it wasn't officially named agile until 2001. The phases of an agile project also follow the project lifecycle stages we described earlier, generally speaking. However, rather than having to always go in order or wait for one phase to end before starting the next, agile project phases overlap and tasks are completed in iterations, which in scrum are called sprints. Scrum is a form of agile that you'll learn more about in the course focused entirely on agile. And by sprint, we do not mean running a race as fast as possible. In this case, sprints are short chunks of time, usually one to four weeks, where a team works together to focus on completing specific tasks. What's important to understand is that agile is more of a mindset than just a series of steps or phases. It's concerned with building an effective collaborative team that seeks regular feedback from the client so that they can deliver the best value as quickly as possible and adjust as changes emerge. Projects that are best suited for an agile approach are those where the client has an idea of what they want but doesn't have a concrete picture in mind or they have a set of qualities they'd like to see in the end result but aren't as concerned with exactly what it looks like. Another indicator that a project may benefit from agile is the level of high uncertainty and risk involved with the project. We'll talk more about those things later. An example of a project that would work well with an agile approach might be building a website. Your team would build the different parts of the website in sprints and deliver each part to the client as they are built. This way the website can be launched with some parts say the main homepage that are complete and ready for public view while other parts maybe the company blog or the ability to book online appointments continue to get built out over time. This allows the team to get feedback early on about what works and what doesn't make adjustments along the way and reduce wasted efforts. In this same website example the waterfall method will plan for and require the whole website to be complete before it can launch. Having a basic understanding of waterfall and agile will help you figure out an effective way to organize and plan out your project and knowing about these two methodologies will come in handy during future job interviews because you'll be able to demonstrate a solid understanding of the project management landscape. Waterfall and agile are two of the more common and well-known project management methodologies but they are by no means the only or the best ones. In the next videos you'll learn about Lean Six Sigma another way to approach projects. Here at Google believe it or not we select from many of these methodologies for project management. Hey again, now you've got waterfall and agile methodologies in your project manager toolbox. Lean Six Sigma is one more you can add. It's a combination of two parent methodologies, Lean and Six Sigma. The uses for Lean Six Sigma are common in projects that have goals to save money, improve quality and move through processes quickly. It also focuses on team collaboration which promotes a positive work environment. The idea is that when your team feels valued motivation and productivity increases and the whole process functions more smoothly. There are five phases in the Lean Six Sigma approach. They are define, measure, analyze, improve and control commonly known as DM-AIC. DM-AIC is a strategy for process improvement meaning you're trying to figure out where the problems are in the current process and fix them so that everything runs more smoothly. The goal of each step is to ensure the best possible results for your project. Just like with waterfall and agile there are more specific details for using DM-AIC and the Lean Six Sigma approach. But what's great about the DM-AIC process is that it can be used to solve any business problem. Let's break it down. The first phase is to define the project goal and what it will take to meet it. This first phase is very similar to the initiation phase of traditional project management. Let's take a real scenario to illustrate. Imagine that you are brought on as a project manager for a large travel company to help streamline and minimize customer service wait times that have been surging due to a recent sales promotion. Before you begin working on tackling the issue you're gonna need to define the project goal and talk to stakeholders about expectations for the project. In this case, the goal is to take average wait times down to less than 10 minutes on average compared to 30 minutes. Next, it's time to measure how the current process is performing. In order to improve processes, DM-AIC focuses on data. Here you wanna map out the current process and locate exactly where the problems are and what kind of effect the problems have on the process. Using our example, you're trying to figure out why it's taking so long for the travel company to address a customer service issue. To do this, you look at company data like average wait times, number of customers per day and seasonal variations. Then you'll set a plan for how you'll get that data and how often to measure it. This could look something like having the company generate reports on a weekly, monthly, quarterly basis. In other situations, you might have employees or customers fill out surveys or look at inventory shipping and tracking records, things like that. Once you have the data and measurements, you can move on to the next phase, which is analyze. Here, you'll begin to identify gaps and issues. In our example, after mapping out the process and data points, you may see that staffing is inadequate on days where customers are the highest. Data analysis is important for project managers regardless of which method you choose and we will learn more about that in an upcoming course. From your data, you'll have a strong understanding of causes and solutions to get to the next stage. Improve. Oftentimes, project managers may want to leap straight to this phase, but really projects and process improvements should only be made after a careful analysis. This is the point where you present your findings and get ready to start making improvements. In our example, this could be modifying staffing to address customer needs. The last step of this cycle is control. You've gotten the process and project to a good place and now it's time to implement it and keep it there. Controlling is all about learning from the work you did upfront to put new processes and documentation in place and continue to monitor so the company doesn't revert back to the old inefficient way of doing things. To sum it all up, you can remember DMAIC like this. Defining tells you what to measure. Measuring tells you what to analyze. Analyzing tells you what to improve and improving tells you what to control. Lean Six Sigma and the DMAIC approach are ideal when the project goal includes improving a current process to fix complex or high-risk problems, like improving sales conversions or eliminating a bottleneck, which is when things get backed up during a process. Following the DMAIC process prevents the likelihood of skipping important steps and increases the chances of a successful project and is a way for your team to discover best practices that your client can use going forward. It uses data and focuses on the customer or end user to solve problems in a way that builds on previous learning so that you can discover effective permanent solutions for difficult problems. There are many ways out there that break the flow of project management into digestible phases and approaches, all with the same end goal of accomplishing the desired outcome as smoothly as possible and delivering the best value. Like I said earlier, at Google, we follow a lot of different approaches. For instance, an engineering team releasing a customer-focused product may primarily use Agile when creating the product, but decide to plug in some of the aspects of waterfall project management for planning and documentation. A customer service team might focus on using Lean 6 Sigma to improve an experience for our users, like offering new features based on a recent analysis, but the team might develop parts of the code and roll out the features using Agile iterations and sprints to allow for change. Or one of our internal education and training teams may focus solely on waterfall project management to achieve a targeted goal of having all employees complete an annual compliance training. Here, waterfall makes sense since the requirements of the training program are fixed and so is the deadline and goal. The biggest takeaway is to know the various methods and tools to be able to confidently apply what works best for you, your team, and the end goal. There is no real prescription for how to execute a project perfectly because there are always pieces you can't 100% control. But the good news is you can get pretty close with the skill sets you develop through learning about these different frameworks. Congrats on completing this module on the project lifecycle and project management methodologies. So what did you think? Hopefully this introduction to a few of the core project management methodologies and hearing from a Googler about the way we approach project management here at Google has you interested and excited to keep on learning. One of the great things about project management is that it can be really creative and present you with challenging problems to solve that have a rewarding impact. You get to work with teams full of interesting, skilled, and dedicated people who help with the problem solving and idea generating process. Every project is an opportunity to learn and try something new. Waterfall, Agile, and Lean Six Sigma are solid foundations from which to build your understanding of project management. Each methodology has its own set of rules, values, and processes. There is no such thing as a right or a wrong methodology. There is no one size fits all approach to take. And there's almost no limit to the number of ways you can blend different approaches to fit the needs of your project. Your goal in choosing a methodology is to maximize the use of resources and time. The method or combination of methods will help you reach your goal in the most efficient and effective way. This might feel like choice overload right here, but hang in there. With time and practice, you'll become more comfortable with the benefits and limits of different methodologies. And you'll be able to approach your project assignments with confidence. Next, you'll build on these foundations by learning how an organization's structure and culture can impact the way you manage your project. See you soon. Hey there, how are you feeling so far? We're nearing the end of this course. And honestly, you've done a great job. Previously, we talked about the life cycle of a project, the task breakdown of phases, and some different methodologies you can use as a project manager to help ensure your project success. You also heard from my colleagues about some of the ways we manage projects at Google. Here, you'll learn about organizational structure and culture and how they impact the way you set up and execute your project. I'll describe some common types of structures that you're likely to encounter during your project management career. You'll also learn about change management, which refers to the way you present the final project to the organization and get them to accept and implement your project outcome. These are important elements to ensure that your project is adopted and lives on. Are you ready? Let's get into these concepts. Welcome back. In this video, I'm going to talk about the concept of organizational structure and the project manager's role within a given structure. Keep in mind that your role won't be the same for every team or organization because many companies are structured differently. But this overview will serve as a foundation for wherever you work. So what is organizational structure? Organizational structure refers to the way a company or organization is arranged or structured. This structure also tells you how job tasks are divided and coordinated and how all the different members of the organization relate to one another. In other words, organizational structure gives you a sense of who reports to who, but organizational structure is much more than that. Understanding the different types of organizational structures can serve as a map to help you determine where you fit in, who you should communicate with, and how frequently to communicate with them. Now that we have a basic overview of the definition of organizational structure, let's look at the various organizational hierarchies that you may encounter at work. An organization's structure is most commonly mapped out using a reporting chart or org chart, which is short for organizational chart. Reporting charts show the relationship between people and groups within the organization and details who each person or group reports to. There are a few different types of organizational structures, but for this course, we're gonna focus on two of the more popular ones, classic and matrix. Let's start with classic. The classic grouping includes what are usually called functional or top-down structures. The classic grouping follows a typical chain of command where the chief executive officer, also known as CEO, and other executives are at the top, followed by directors or managers, then their direct reports, and so on. Each of these directors or managers typically oversee teams within their function of the organization, like marketing, sales, or human resources. You can see this type of structure in effect by looking at a branch of the military. Take the army, for example. You may enter the army as a private and report up to a sergeant who oversees multiple people in your squad, and that sergeant ultimately reports up to a lieutenant and so on. If your organization works in this structure, as the project manager, you might communicate regularly with your manager, the person directly above you, and also with your peers who work on the same types of projects as you. But it isn't always a straightforward top-down approach. There are other factors at play that make organizational structures a bit more complicated than we can see on paper. For instance, you may have project teams that sit across different functions. This is common in many companies, Google included, and is usually referred to as the matrix structure. You might think of a matrix structure as a grid, where you still have people above you, but you also have people in adjacent departments who expect to hear updates on your work progress. These people may not be your direct bosses, but you are responsible for communicating with them since they may inform changes to your work. For example, at Google, we have the major functions of marketing, sales, and more, with a traditional reporting chain. But we also have programs for our products, like Google Search, where project teams consist of program managers, engineers, user experience, or UX designers, and so on. And each team member reports to their own management chains. Another example is my organization. It's called Global Affairs. I have a direct manager who oversees the work I do in my core role and who is responsible for delivering my performance reviews. But because I work with multiple people across other teams and specialties, I often get asked to manage projects where I'm informally working with lead program managers in other organizations. Similar to my own manager, I provide updates to that program manager, seek their approval, and solicit feedback on our partnership and progress. So to recap, the classic structure follows a traditional top-down system of reporting, and the matrix structure has direct higher ups to report to and stakeholders from other departments or programs. Knowing which kind of organizational structure you're working in plays a major role in how you prepare for and carry out your project, or even in an interview. During an interview, you can ask about the type of organizational structure the company uses and where your role will fit in. This will help you in the interviewer communicate clearly about the people you will engage with daily and the expectations for the role. In the next course, you'll hear from a Googler about a third type of structure, Project Management Office, which you might see in some of the organizations where you work or interview. Enjoy. Hey again, ready to keep going? The previous videos explained that knowing what kind of organizational structure you're working in plays a major role in how you prepare for and carry out your project. An organization's structure provides the framework for accountability and communication. As the project manager, it's vital that you understand who you're reporting to on each project, and just as importantly, who the members of your team report to. Knowing the organizational structure also tells you how and where to get the resources you'll need so you can get the project done efficiently. When you understand the organization's structure, you'll be able to identify how it impacts the way you manage the project. One way organizational structure can impact the way you manage your project is by the amount of authority given to the project manager. Authority has to do with your ability to make decisions for the project that impact the organization. In some cases, you might have the authority to do things like select the vendors who provide services or goods for the project. Other times, you might have a set of vendors selected for you. Your level of authority and responsibility will vary from project to project. Another way organizational structures can impact project management is through resource availability. Managing a project is a lot easier when you know how to access the people, equipment, and budget that you need. Let's explore how different structures can affect the way you manage a project. In a classic structure, you might find yourself with less authority and a tighter scope. You may need to rely on getting approval from the appropriate managers, directors, and department heads in order to move forward and complete certain tasks. In this case, it's likely that these people are in charge of the people on your team and the resources you need. As a project manager, working in a classic structure, you may depend on the managers in your organization to approve resources. In other words, the amount of people working on your project or the budget that you have allocated to your project is decided by the leaders of your department or function. In a classic structure, you may have to go through a chain of approvals and advocate for more resources if you need them. For example, if you need a budget increase, you would report this to your manager. Then your manager might escalate this up to their management chain to get approval. That's the classic structure, a traditional, top-down arrangement of employees and authority. Now, let's explore the matrix structure. The main difference with a matrix structure is that employees often have two or more managers or leaders they'll need to work with and update. Your team members will have their functional manager and you, the project manager. If members are working on multiple projects, they may have even more managers. This can affect your authority as a project manager as you will need to cooperate with more than one leader in the organization. You may need to share resources and negotiate priorities. The key is to make sure you know who your stakeholders are and who controls what. Since the chain of command isn't always as clearly defined as in the classic structure. Because there isn't always a clear chain of command in a matrix structure, you need to make sure you have identified and communicated with anyone you might need to report to and get approval from well before the project begins. Once this is established though, your project within a matrix structure should be able to run efficiently. Matrix structures emphasize a strong project focus from the team and the organization. So you as the project manager, generally have more autonomy to make decisions and gather resources as needed. As I hope you've noticed, the way an organization is structured can have a big impact on the planning and execution of your project. Understanding all of this will help you run and manage a project much more efficiently. Next, I'll tell you about organizational culture. Another factor that impacts how you manage your project. Catch you in a bit. Hi, I'm Lon. I'm a director of program management at Google. A program management director has a team of project managers to help execute and bring products to our users. I work on the project management team or the PMO team for a group called Geo. And in Geo, we bring geospatial products to our users. Things like Google Maps and Google Earth and the team that I'm a part of actually works on all of the data and imagery that powers all of those products. A project management office is a team of project managers. We are a group that coordinates all of the different parts of a project together, including folks who work on our product, engineers, and many business functions. And we help bring all of those ideas to life. My role specifically in working in a PMO is ensuring that we're connecting all of the different parts that are associated with projects to ensure that they're all connected together. Sometimes we find out when projects are happening, there's a piece of it here and a piece of it there and they may not even know about each other. One of the most critical things that project managers get to do is they get to have a bird's eye view of everything that's happening in a project. So that's a lot of my role and what I'm working on with my team is ensuring that all of the pieces that need to connect together actually do connect together. I've had many different roles inside of many different PMOs inside my career. All the way from taking just a piece of a part of a project when I was really early in my career and then expanded that into taking a full end-to-end project which were smaller and then building up my career and then moving into really large, complex projects. And at each stage of these, I had loved every piece of it. So even from the time that I had only a part of a project, I got to go really deep inside of some of those technologies and have really deep and meaningful relationships with the teams that I have been working with. And that's not always possible when you're working on a really large project that has hundreds of people. You won't be able to develop deep relationships across that large group. On the flip side, when you're working on a large, complex project, you get to see all of the different gears turning inside of a large ecosystem of things that are happening. But that took a long time in my career to build up but at each phase of it, I realized I was learning a little bit more and I was learning how to work a little bit more broadly and think a little bit more differently but really ensuring how do you continue to keep the execution and rigor of our project to ensure that ideas were coming to life. One of the biggest benefits I see in working in a PMO is that you get to share a lot of best practices with each other. One of the downsides I think for project management is typically we don't get to work with each other because we're working with a lot of client teams and we're working with other disciplines but a huge benefit in working in a PMO is that you get a connect with other project managers where you can share your challenges and see how somebody else has gotten through it or you can share templates or tools that you may take time to develop on your own but somebody else already has handy so you can borrow or just steal their tool for your own use. But the best part is you have a community of people who think the same way about problems in a very methodical, in a very task oriented, in a very action oriented and goal oriented way which is not typically true if you're working across all other disciplines all the time. Hey again, let's begin with two quick questions. What do you know about culture and how do you define culture? When I hear the term culture, the first things that come to mind are things like languages, food, clothing and types of dress. It's important to note that there are other maybe less obvious but just as impactful parts of culture like beliefs, traditions and customs. When we learn about someone's culture we gain a much deeper insight and more complete picture into who they are and how they navigate the world. The same can be true for organizations and organizations culture provides context and acts as a guide for what their people value, how they operate on a daily basis, how they relate to one another and how they can be expected to perform. There are many ways to define organizational culture. Some definitions emphasize teamwork and innovation while others focus on attention to detail and achievement. Entire thesis papers, workshops and conferences are dedicated to defining and analyzing organizational culture. We only have a few minutes here so I'll do my best to sum it up. Organizational culture is in part the values employees share as well as the organization's values, mission, history and so on. In other words, organizational culture can be thought of as the company's personality. Understanding an organization's culture will help you navigate your team more effectively toward achieving the project's goal. It also impacts the way you plan your project. You'll need to be familiar with an organization's culture so that you can minimize conflict and complete the project with as much support and harmony as possible. An organization's mission and values can provide clues to its culture. If you can demonstrate how the project supports the company's mission or how the project aligns with the company's values, you'll have more support from executives and stakeholders to get the approvals and resources you need. Pay attention to what leaders in the organization value when conducting business. Does the management team care about speed over perfection? How do people within the organization make decisions? Do they thoroughly examine every option for every decision? This will help inform which values are the most important to them and how you can approach your decision-making. If you're ever stuck in your project and need guidance about making a certain decision or are unsure how to communicate with someone in the organization, reviewing the mission and values may help direct you toward the right way to handle that situation. Here's an example. If the company values stability and user feedback, it might encourage expanding the project timeline to allow for testing and then making decisions based on those testing results. If the company values innovation and revenue growth, it might encourage a shorter timeline to get the product out faster and taking some risks to try out new ideas. As a project manager, when you understand the different types of values and what to prioritize, you'll have an idea of how you can better prepare for conversations within the organization. Ideally, you'll wanna have a good sense of an organization's culture before you start the first phase of your project. If you are interviewing for a project management position, asking about the culture is a great way to get more information about the company. It also shows the interviewer that you're knowledgeable about the impact culture can have on a project. To help you gain a better sense of an organization's culture, consider the following questions. How do people prefer to communicate? Is it primarily through scheduled meetings via email, over the phone? How are decisions made? Majority vote or top-down approvals? What kinds of rituals are in place when someone new comes to the office? Are they taken out to lunch, given a tour of the building or introduced to the staff? How are projects typically run? Do they prefer a classic? Do they prefer a matrix or some other style of project management? And finally, what kinds of practices, behaviors and values are reflected by the people in the organization? Is overtime or weekend work an expectation? Are there company-sanctioned social events? Finding out what the company values will tell you a lot about the culture and how to handle communication, manage expectations and identify potential conflicts as you work through your project. Once you begin working on a project, here are some ways to navigate company culture that will help you get the most out of your team and ensure that your project is supported. As I just discussed, make sure to ask questions. As you observe the culture, try asking your peers what they think is going well and what they would change. Your peers may have the same opinion as you, and if not, you may learn something new you didn't learn in the interview process. Either way, you'll be in a better place to assess risk, adjust your current project or be more prepared for projects in the future. It's also a good idea to make observations. It's important to understand how things work and what people like and respect about the company's culture. When working in different geographies, it's also important to be aware of established customs like bowing, shaking hands or wearing head coverings. This will help you gain understanding and form respectful relationships. Lastly, it's important to understand your impact. Be aware of your role as a change agent. A change agent is someone who helps the organization transform by focusing on improving organizational effectiveness and development. You and your project will most likely affect the organization in some way. Sometimes just the presence of a project manager creates changes in the office environment or employee dynamics. If your project requires major changes that the organization must adapt to, be mindful of how extreme those changes could be and seek feedback and approval early on. The company may not agree with certain kinds of changes that don't seem to fall in line with their mission, vision or culture. It's important to recognize the limits or boundaries of changes to implement and understand what would be the most beneficial for the project and the company overall. As you can see, organizational culture has a strong influence over how decisions are made about the project. The way an organization is structured usually influence the type of culture that exists. So it's important to consider both structure and culture when planning and carrying out your project. Coming up, we'll talk about the way your project can create change in the workplace and how to get stakeholders and employees on board with implementing your project. Hi, I'm Amar. I'm a senior engineering program manager at Google Shopping. And on a day-to-day basis, I drive programs which spans across multiple products at Google. The way I look at program management, it's more like life is program management, right? Everything in life is program, having kids, building a house, buying car, everything we do. There's a start and end kind of deal. And what we see across the board in anything and everything we do, there's a tremendous amount of friction in the system, in the decision making, in the budgeting, everything in life, right? And that applies equally to software program management. Or even if you're in a construction industry, if you see right from starting the construction project to really getting the beds and all this stuff, right? There's a tremendous amount of chaos from the perspective of that, okay, you know what? Are the right people connected? Are the right decision making people in the meeting? Are there right number of like approvals that we have in a timely basis? So there are many of these things that I had witnessed during my career and the previous companies and even at Google, that those were not efficient and those were really adding a huge risk or exposing the risk late in the development cycle. And that is what kind of I had seen as a chaotic world and I really felt that, you know what? I can really help out in solving some of those chaos. On a day to day basis, I walk on bringing order into chaos. There's chaotic world out there in the software program development. So we as a program manager make sure that we bring that together. When I started my program management journey, one of the main thing what I was looking for and thanks to the mentors, you know, I really cherished the mentors. One of the thing they taught me that, you know what? Amar, when you are coming to work every day, ask what are the top three challenges that you want to solve today? And to date, I follow. I always follow the thing about what are the top three things that I want to address today? Big ones, impactful ones, as well as I also look at and also help my team understand on a weekly basis how success looks like. Every Monday morning, I'll have meeting with strategic folks, very strategic discussions on how the success looks like in this week. How would we define the week is successful? And that is how I start my week. It work miracles in the program delivery and overall in life. So I love those aspects. Welcome back. Let's talk about change management. Sometimes the deliverable of a project is a new tool or new process that must be adopted by the organization. You've just learned that understanding organizational structure and culture will help you plan for and manage your project. It will also help you roll out changes from your project to an organization. In project management, the process of delivering your completed project and getting people to adopt it is called change management. Understanding change management can ensure that a project is completed successfully and that the organization accepts and adopts the recommendations from the project. For example, if you were launching a new time tracking system for employees, the project wouldn't be successful if the employees didn't adopt the new system. When you understand change management and your role in the process, it can ensure a smooth roll out of changes and easier adoption. Adoption is often the first step to your project having the desired impact once it goes live. So let's get started. As a new project manager, you may not be responsible for planning all of the required change management for your project. But regardless, you can help the success of the project by understanding your role in the process and how your organization may react to that change. It's important to recognize that it's the people in an organization who are directly impacted by any changes in the workplace. Implementing a new project can mean changes to processes, budgets, schedules, and employee roles and responsibilities. Even aesthetic changes, like building a new wing, renovating the lobby, or switching to a new company logo, means employees will have to adjust to something new and different. Something as simple as adding a new logo can lead to a major headache for the employees who have to swap out all the old stationery and make sure everyone in the office is using the new logo correctly. When you consider the success of your project, it's important to keep in mind the changes that people will need to implement as a result. Thinking through these changes will set you up for success in getting your project accepted and adopted. There are many change management models and strategies and a quick internet search will provide you with more explanations and examples than you will probably ever need. While we have additional readings on change management coming up, feel free to read on any articles on the topic from well-respected project management organizations to keep learning. Though there are lots of different models, they all share the same general concepts. Change management and project management is centered around three core concepts and best practices. The first core concept is creating a sense of ownership and urgency around the project. Ownership means getting others to feel like they are empowered to take responsibility for the successful completion of their tasks. Urgency means getting them to understand that the project is important and to identify what actions need to be taken to move the project along. When team members feel a sense of ownership and urgency around a project, it increases interest, motivation, and engagement with the project outcome. Another core concept is to figure out the right combination of skills and personalities when selecting the people who will work on your team. Find people whose knowledge and skills complement one another. If your team is selected for you, see if you're able to choose who gets assigned which tasks. And if that's not possible, then it's extra important for you to find ways to connect with your team. This will get them excited about the project, so then they can be advocates for change when it's needed. One effective way of motivating your team is to communicate clearly your vision and approach for the project. Then you can share how you see everyone working together as a team to make it happen. Communicating this idea clearly allows others to share in your vision and take ownership in bringing it to life. The final core concept is that ever important one, effective communication, and I can't stress this enough, communication is key. Having effective communication with your team means being transparent and up front with your plans and ideas and making information available. Make sure your team, along with the rest of the organization, is kept up to date on your progress. This will allow everyone to feel like they are included in part of the project. Once your project is complete, you may experience some resistance or a few roadblocks. Remember, change doesn't happen overnight, so don't give up on it yet. If you do get some pushback, you can move the process along by helping folks adjust, rewarding their efforts, and reminding them of the overall value the project is providing long term. Understanding the change process can help you determine how you can support a successful response to your project. For example, understanding the importance of communication will help you be mindful of clearly communicating project plans to your team, as well as communicating the expected impact of the project with the rest of the organization. Remember learning about agile project management? Well, since it's a popular methodology that you'll probably use at some point, I wanted to point out that many of the principles of agile project management align with successful change management. How might an agile team approach change management, you ask? Well, being receptive to change is a core value in agile teams. So you will often find that they are in a state of evolution or are constantly adapting to change. If this seems like a lot to remember, no stress. We'll continue learning more about these concepts throughout the course. Just know, as the project manager, you can enact effective change management approaches in all of your interactions. In the next video, we'll discuss the differences between managing and participating in the process. See you soon. Hey, welcome back. In the previous video, we talked about the process of change management. Change management is actually a huge undertaking and a project in itself. As mentioned, you may not always be responsible for leading and planning the entire end-to-end change management process. Instead, you may ask a member of the project team, your manager, or another senior leader to help take on that transition. If you are participating in change management, then someone else is responsible for successfully implementing the changes. Let's say you've just completed the project of creating the new check-in system. The project is now at the point where it needs to be installed and adopted by the organization, but you don't have the formal authority or influence to enact this change. Your role as a project manager, then, doesn't include getting employees to use the new system. That's someone else's job. But just because you are not the one directly calling for or leading the change, there are still ways in which you can and should participate. And that's what this section is about. The process of handing off the project and the ways in which you, as the project manager who created the new system, can stay involved. Being empathetic to the challenges of change management can help you support the process in subtle ways. In this case, participating in change management might mean communicating with employees throughout the project about how the system will provide a better experience for their customers. You support the process by providing employees with information so they feel prepared to adjust to changes once the system is ready to launch. Since participating in change management is such a big part of being a successful project manager, I wanna take you through a few examples so you can see how this might play out in different types of organizations. You'll see how to combine your knowledge of organizational structure and culture to make decisions about planning for the change management process. Let's explore the same pharmacy check-in project in two different organizational structures and with different team cultures to understand how these ideas are applied. Say the pharmacy chain is a classic organizational structure and has an informal corporate culture. The final project requires a name change from the old check-in system called speedy care to the new system called speedy check-in. Getting this change implemented is an example of change management. As the project manager, you need to participate in the change management process by communicating the project needs through the appropriate channels. In this case, the chief executive officer or CEO sends an email to the C suite. Now these are all the chief level officers in an organization. The CEO lets them know that the name must be changed and to please inform their teams to implement the name change. Since this is a classic structure within a hierarchical organization, the budgets are managed separately and the marketing department needs to request an extra $10,000 to change all of their printed posters for the stores. This request goes back up to the chief financial officer or CFO. There may be other cost adjustments and process changes that need to happen across the organization to ensure a successful system name change. In this instance, you may need to have multiple meetings with others to help them understand what is changing and why. Now suppose that the pharmacy chain is a matrix organization structure and has a formal corporate culture. What does change management look like in this scenario? Well, you might meet with representatives from marketing and technology to explain the overall budget impact for all the necessary changes. With the formal culture, you might write a document that describes all budget, timeline and training impacted by the name change. Then you might circulate that document to get feedback and alignment from all the stakeholders and share that feedback with the CEO so they can understand the full scope of the name change. The feedback and alignment from the stakeholders will tell the CEO how the change management process went. Did everyone agree on the implications? Was the feedback positive or was there resistance? Then when the CEO needs to communicate the name change to the entire organization, she may have someone on her team write up a formal memo that describes why the name change needs to happen and share out the memo to her staff and their teams. Keep in mind, these are just examples and every organization's structure, team culture and change management processes are going to be different. But understanding this framework can help you navigate how to effectively participate in and support change management. This understanding can allow you to ask yourself questions that will inform change management such as how will the organization react to change? Which influencers can affect change? What are the best means of communication? What change management practices will lead to the successful implementation of my project and so on? The answers to these questions will help you prepare for a variety of possible scenarios and craft solutions to effectively support the adoption of your project. They will also help you navigate possible challenges along the way and lead your project through a successful change management process. I know this is a lot, but you're doing a great job. We'll continue to talk about these concepts throughout the course. So no sweat if you're still processing all this new information, see you in a bit. Hi, I'm Lon Harmon, and I'm a program management director here at Google. During my career journey here, I've supported products like Google Maps and Google Earth, and I've had a ton of fun creating maps for our users. Earlier in my career, I held many different roles that were not project management jobs, busing tables at a chain restaurant, interning at the Forest Service, and working as a business analyst, and I was even a software engineer. My journey into project management has not been the most straightforward, but it has been fulfilling. Your career journey will be a unique one as well. Once you complete the project management program, you'll have a new set of skills and knowledge that hiring managers look for in project managers. Deciding what you'd like to do with all that new knowledge is an exciting prospect, and the great thing about project management is that it's a life skill that's useful at almost any organization. Wherever your interests lie, whether that's gaming or biotech or something totally different, there's a good chance that your desired industry needs project managers. Finding the right job takes effort, consistency, and a little expert advice to help you along the way, and that's why I'm here. Throughout the program, there will be a collection of career-based videos included to help you find your next opportunity in project management. We'll cover some basics, such as building a resume and interviewing. We'll also include additional tips for creating an online professional presence through sites like LinkedIn, as well as tips on communicating and interviewing remotely. While you can find a lot of general job search and career information online, the purpose of these videos is to give you insight into specific, industry-relevant information as it relates to project management. In addition to what you have already learned about searching for these types of roles, I'll offer some of my own tips and best practices on how to take it a step further to help you navigate through the job search process, breeze through the interview, and land your next opportunity. Sounds exciting, right? Enjoy the rest of the content, and I'll see you soon. Congratulations on completing course one Foundations of Project Management. You're off to a strong start. You've just learned a lot of new information, and you're already starting to apply that knowledge to the field of project management. So let's do a quick recap. In this course, you learned what project management is along with the role and value of a project manager. Next, you learned the life cycle of a project and the tasks to manage a project from start to finish. Then you learned about different project management methodologies and tips for choosing the right method for your project. You also learned how creating simple team connections can lead to a successful project outcome. Lastly, you learned how organizational structure and culture can impact your project. These topics provide the foundation for beginning any new project, and you now have the knowledge and tools to build informed plans and set up your projects for success. After all, that's why we created this specialization to give you the new project manager the tools you need to confidently move forward with your career. This is just the beginning. Keep at it and you'll have more opportunities to put your learning into action and develop the skills and mindset you need to manage lots of types of projects. The skills you've learned so far give you a big picture of you of project management. You'll use these skills to focus your learning for the next course where you'll start creating, analyzing and making decisions about project plans all on your own. In the next course, we're going to kick off the project life cycle and break down all you need to know and do to get a project off to a great start. It's time for me to say so long. It's been a blast being your guide to project management and sharing my passion for projects and people with you. Best of luck. And maybe I'll see you on a project someday. Hi there, welcome. This course is all about initiating a project successfully. If you haven't gone through our foundational course yet, we recommend checking it out. It covers the foundations of project management and contains lots of helpful information for anyone wanting to start a career in this field. There are lots of people around the world like you who are hoping to learn the skills to get a project management role. Maybe you prefer to take a specialized certification rather than a four-year degree. Maybe you're looking for an affordable way to stand out among competition. Maybe you're interested in changing your career. Whatever your reason for being here, we are glad you've joined us. This program is rooted in the belief that a strong foundation in project management can help anyone start a great career as a project manager. Before we begin this course, let me introduce myself. My name is Joanne and I'll be your instructor for this course. As a senior program manager at Google for the past eight years, I have worked on cross-functional projects involving product managers, software engineers, user experience designers, network operations, customer support, and more, to build software used at Google and used by Google Cloud customers. I began my career working as a liaison between customers and engineers, documenting requirements on software development projects. As it became involved in larger projects, I started to manage the timelines of the projects and coordinate the work of the different teams that had to get involved to finish the project. Before I knew it, I was the de facto project manager. I have accumulated my knowledge through formal and informal training, finding practical application in finance, insurance, and tech companies. I'm super excited to be sharing with you more about the project management discipline. During this course, you'll learn all the steps for kicking off a project. We'll start with an overview of initiation, which is the phase that allows ideas to come together and form the beginnings of a plan for a project. You'll identify the individual components of initiation, like the project scope, goals, and deliverables. You'll also learn how to measure the success of a project. This is a super important piece of the puzzle. After all, you want to be able to meet or exceed all of the requirements for a successful project, right? Later, we'll talk about how to identify stakeholders. Stakeholders have a direct interest in the project's completion and success. We'll teach you about some really helpful tools you can use to define project roles and responsibilities, and more tools and resources you typically need to complete the work of a project. Finally, we'll introduce documentation that can help your team prepare for project kickoff. Exciting, right? The skills you learn in this course will help you start projects of your own. We can't wait to get into these topics with you. So let's get started. Meet me in the next video. Welcome back. In the last course, you learned that initiation is the first phase within the project lifecycle, followed by planning, executing, and closing. Makes sense, right? Regardless of your chosen methodology, all projects have to start somewhere. Let's talk more about initiation and why it's important for the success of a project. Because initiation is the first phase of the project, it's really important to get it right. A well-planned initiation results in a strong foundation for your project and sets it up for success. Initiation begins after a problem or opportunity has been identified within an organization. Often, stakeholders like senior leaders at a company will initiate a project to address a specific need for the business. For example, perhaps the company would like to roll out a new product, improve employee well-being, or reduce costs in a certain department. It's your responsibility as the project manager to help identify the project goals, resources, and other details based on initial discussions with the project stakeholders. Even though someone else might come up with an idea for the project, it's still your job to figure out all the important pieces that need to come together in order to get the work done. The initiation phase is a crucial time for asking stakeholders to write questions, performing research, determining resources, and clearly documenting the key components of a project. Doing this will help you solidify the scope or the boundary of the project. If this seems a bit overwhelming, don't worry, we'll talk more about project scope later on in this course. If a project isn't initiated properly, things can go wrong pretty fast. For example, without sufficient understanding of the project's goals, you might underestimate what resources you need or how long the project might take. Or without agreeing with stakeholders on what success looks like, you might think the project was completed successfully while the stakeholders might think it didn't accomplish their goals. Getting on the same page and gaining clarity during the initiation phase can save a lot of time and extra work for everyone throughout the project. Proper initiation also helps ensure that the benefits of the project outcomes will outweigh the costs of the project. To determine this, you'll do what's called a cost-benefit analysis, which is the process of adding up the expected value of a project, the benefits, and comparing them to the dollar cost. To do this, you will work with stakeholders to consider a few questions. To determine the benefits of a project, those questions might include, what value will this project create? How much money could this project save our organization? How much money will it bring in from existing customers? How much time will be saved? How will the user experience be improved? And to determine the costs of a project, those questions might include, how much time will people have to spend on this project? What will be the one-time costs? Are there any ongoing costs? What about long-term costs? The benefits of a project should always outweigh the costs, so it's really important that you consider these questions early on. Coming up, we'll talk more about the initiation phase and explore the key components of initiating a project. Bye for now. Hello, and welcome back. You just learned about the initiation phase of the project lifecycle and why it's so important to get it right. Next, I'll teach you about the key components that make up initiation and how these pieces lead to the planning phase of a project. There are several key components of initiation that you need to consider in order for your project to be successful. Goals, scope, deliverables, success criteria, stakeholders, and resources. First, you need to consider the goals of a project. The goal is what you've been asked to do and what you're trying to achieve. All projects should have clear goals and often those will be determined by senior company leaders with your help. From there, you will begin to consider the project scope. This is the process to define the work that needs to happen to complete the project. You also need to think about project deliverables. There are products and services that you will create for your customer, client, or project sponsor. Deliverables can be anything from product features and functionalities to documentation, processes, and more. Anything that enables the goal of your project to be achieved. Deliverables are submitted to help you reach your project goals. Also, it's important to keep in mind that deliverables can be tangible or intangible. An example of a tangible deliverable might be submitting a chapter of a manuscript if the goal is to publish a textbook. Or if your project goal is to finish implementation of a new point of sale software at a retail store, scheduling staff training sessions could be an intangible deliverable. Once the goals, scope, and deliverables are determined, you need to consider success criteria. Success criteria are the standards by which you measure how successful a project was in reaching its goals. Another important consideration is your stakeholders. Stakeholders are key to making informed decisions at every step of the project, including the initiation phase. There are the people who both have an interest in and are affected by the completion and success of a project. As a result, they're often instrumental in determining the goals, objectives, deliverables, and success criteria of a project from coming up with the idea to outlining the expectations of its results. As you move through the initiation phase, it's your job to ensure that you understand the needs of the project stakeholders early on. It's also your role to ensure that all stakeholders are in agreement on the goals and overall mission of the project before moving on to the next phase. Now, let's talk about resources. Resources generally refer to the budget, people, materials, and other items that you'll have at your disposal. It's super important to think carefully about these pieces early on. No one wants to get started on a project only to realize halfway through that they don't have enough money or enough people to complete the work. That would be a mess. Finally, once you've established your goals, scope, deliverables, success criteria, stakeholders, and resources, it's time to create a project charter. A project charter is a document that contains all the details of a project. Project charters clearly define the project and its goals and outline what is needed to accomplish them. A project charter allows you to get organized, set up a framework for what needs to be done, and communicate those details to others. Once you've drafted the charter, you will then review the document with key stakeholders to get their approval to move into the planning stage. Coming up, you'll learn more about project charters and even get the chance to create one yourself. Hopefully, you're starting to see how the key components of initiation help lay the foundation of a solid project. To quickly recap, you'll gather information about your goals, scope, deliverables, success criteria, stakeholders, and resources, and you'll document that information in the project charter. During the rest of this course, we'll talk more about each of the components outlined so far. You've come so far and learned so much. Keep up the great work. Hi, my name is Afsheen. I'm the Director of Core Capacity at Google, where we support some of our key products, such as Google Maps, Google Photos, Google Search, and many more. Ultimately, what we're doing is we're managing the supply and demand for our products in the resource space. So specifically, compute, storage, machine learning, and networking resources. Ultimately, our goal is to provide the fuel for these products so we can support our billions of users. I often look at establishing the project goals and tying to the goals is discussing the criteria. What's a successful project? What are the measurables involved in the project space? And then lastly, I always wanna look at the stakeholders that are involved, maybe our clients, our key stakeholders, and so on, and make sure that they're thought of during the formation of the project. I'm meeting with the stakeholders. I'm trying to understand what they're trying to achieve, what we're trying to achieve, and the goal, if you will, is a critical aspect of setting the scope. When I'm trying to set the goals of a project, I apply very in-depth active listening. I'm doing a lot of socializing with stakeholders. I'm meeting a lot of players to understand what's the landscape like. I really am, it's an active listening experience. I have a recent example of a project that in my view did not do the proper initiation phase. Last week, in fact, a group approached me with a process or a feature that they were gonna launch. I reviewed it and immediately realized that they were so far off. They had not discussed the topic with any of my team members or myself, and they were day minus one from launching the feature. It was a total mess. And it really illustrates the point about when you initiate a project, you can't invest enough time in meeting with stakeholders. Meeting with your colleagues, listening to them, actively listening, someone taught me recently the value of building that listening to learn muscle. And in the project initiation phase, to me, that is such a valuable talent. There are those that have it, there are those that haven't learned it, and there are those that'll never do it. And I believe it's a trainable skill, but it requires you to really slow down and look at the landscape in front of you. Nice work. You're on your way to becoming a great candidate for roles in project management. We're so glad you've stuck with us, and we hope you're proud of the progress you've made so far. In the last few videos, we've given you a primer on kicking off a project successfully. To recap, you learn more about initiation, the first phase of the project lifecycle. Hopefully, you're starting to see how important this phase is for the overall health of a project. As we talked about earlier, a lack of preparation during the initiation stage can lead to problems later on in the project lifecycle, like a budget shortage, a misdead line, or too few teammates to complete the work. But with early planning, you can set your team up for success. We also introduce you to the major factors you should consider during the initiation phase, including goals, scope, deliverables, success criteria, stakeholders, and resources. All of these come together in the early plans for a project and are documented in a project charter. Now that you understand the basic elements of initiation, let's dive deeper. Next up, we'll talk about identifying goals and deliverables, and learn more about measurement and success criteria. You're doing great, and we'll see you soon. Welcome back. By now, you should have a better sense of how the different parts of initiation come together to form the beginnings of a project. So far, you've outlined the key components of project initiation, and most importantly, you've learned that a lack of preparation during the stage can lead to problems later on. We're going to continue honing your project preparation skills. Once we're done here, you'll be able to define and create project goals and deliverables, the guiding stars of your project. You'll also be able to define project scope, the boundaries of your project that state what is and is not part of your project. You'll be able to identify what's in scope and out of scope for a project, and you'll be able to recognize scope creep, something you need to keep a close eye on to help you reach your project goal. Finally, you'll be able to explain different ways of defining and measuring your project success criteria. Before we get started, I'd like to talk through an example that will follow for the rest of this course. Imagine that you're the lead project manager at Office Green, a commercial landscaping company that specializes in plant decor for offices and other businesses. The director of product at Office Green has an idea for a new service called PlantPals to offer high volume customers, small, low maintenance plans like little cacti, leafy ferns for their desks. As the project manager, you've been tasked with managing the rollout of this new service. As we go through this course, we'll return to your role as the project manager at Office Green to help teach you about project goals, deliverables and success criteria. You'll also see the role your team and stakeholders play in creating and following these three important components. At the end, you compile everything you've learned into a shared document that you can use as a portfolio to share with future employers. After this course, you move on to the next phases of the project lifecycle, and so will your Office Green project. Enjoy. Welcome back. In this video, I'll define project goals and deliverables and explain why they're important. Then I'll teach you how to determine whether a goal or deliverable has been well-defined, which means it's got enough detail and information to guide you towards success. First things first, to set up a project for success and to make your job easier, you want to figure out what needs to be done before you actually get started. You need to define exactly what your goals and deliverables are so that you'll be able to tell your team members what to do. You need a clear picture of what you're trying to accomplish, how you're gonna accomplish it, and how you know when it has been accomplished. Let's define project goal so that you can start to figure out what your project team needs to reach it. The project goal is the desired outcome of the project. It's what you've been asked to do and what you're trying to achieve. For example, your goal could be to improve the response time to customer increase via email by 20%. The goal of your Office Green project might be to increase revenue by 5% through a new service called Plant Pals that offers desk plans to top customers by the end of the year. Goals are important because they give you a roadmap to your destination. Without a clear goal in mind, how can you know where to go or how to get there? Now, one of the biggest differences between what makes a good goal and a not-so-good goal is how well it's defined, meaning how clear and specific is the goal? If the goal is your destination, are you confident you'll know when you've arrived? The examples I mentioned before to improve the response time to customer increase via email by 20% and to increase the Office Green revenue by 5% are two well-defined goals because they tell you what you're trying to achieve. But wait, there's more. These goals also tell you how to do what you've been asked to do. In this case, it's via email and through a new service offering. And that's not all. These goals clarify the goal even further by saying to improve by 20% and increase by 5%. Now we know where we're going. Well-defined goals are both specific and measurable. They give you a clear sense of what you are trying to accomplish. Really great goals have even more detail, but I'll get to that soon. When you start a project, take time to review your goals and make sure they're well-defined. To do this, you might need to get more information from your stakeholders. Talk to them about their vision for the project. Ask how this aligns to the company's larger goals and mission. By the end of that conversation, you and your stakeholders should agree to support the project goals in order to avoid running into issues later on. Here's an example from my own experience as a project manager. Our team have finished a new product feature. Our stated goal was to deliver an early version of this feature and collect user feedback. When we delivered the feature to one of our key customers for user feedback, the customer didn't have anyone available to try it out. Our team debated whether or not we had met the goal if we hadn't collected user feedback. Some felt that we hadn't achieved the stated goal while others thought we did. The customer was satisfied with our team's ability to deliver a feature in the timeline stated, but our internal team wasted valuable time going back and forth about it. That said, make sure that before you start your project, you, your stakeholders, and your team are all clear on the project goals so that you know you're making the right kind of progress. I'll teach you a process for how to do this coming up. Once you have the goals nailed down, it's time to examine the project deliverables. Project deliverables are the products or services that are created for the customer, client, or project sponsor. In other words, a deliverable is what gets produced or presented at the end of a task, event, or process. Take the goal to improve customer response time. A deliverable for that goal could be the creation of email templates for responding to typical questions. Your office screen project goal to increase revenues could have these two deliverables. Launching the plant service and a finished website that highlights the new kinds of plants being offered. These are considered deliverables because they describe tangible outputs that show stakeholders how additional revenues will be generated. There are all sorts of project deliverable examples. A pretty common one is a report. When a goal is reached, you can visibly see the results documented in a chart, graph, or presentation. Deliverables help us quantify and realize the impact of the project. Just like needing well-defined goals, you need well-defined deliverables for pretty much the same reasons. Deliverables are usually decided up front with the stakeholders or clients involved in the project. They hold everyone accountable and are typically a big part of achieving the goal. Make sure to ask questions about what the deliverables should be and have everyone share their vision and expectations of the deliverables so that you're all on the same page. Coming up, you practice the art of defining your goals even further following the smart method. Enjoy. Welcome back. By now, you know that goals are important to the success. Hi there. So far, you've been learning to define and create measurable project goals and deliverables. As you broaden your understanding of project management and the different tools available to help you succeed, I want to teach you about a popular tool used in many organizations and here at Google. Objectives and Key Results or OKRs. In this video, I'll discuss what OKRs are, how they are used by organizations, and how they help focus a team's time and effort on activities that drive success. You've just learned about and practiced a smart method for defining project goals. Like the smart method, OKRs help establish and clarify goals or objectives for an organization, department, project, or person. OKRs take smart goals a step further by combining a goal and more detail metrics to determine a measurable outcome. They not only state clearly what the goal is, they provide specific details that allow you to measure the success of the goal. One way to think about OKRs is that they separate the different components of a smart goal and clarify them even further rather than grouping everything into one statement. Let's break this down. The O stands for objective and defines what needs to be achieved. It describes a desired result or outcome, such as an increase in customer retention or an improvement in the employee onboarding process. KR stands for Key Results. These are the measurable outcomes that define when the objective has been met. For example, if your objective is to improve customer retention, then a key result might be to have 90% customer satisfaction rating by the end of the first quarter. Recall that one of the smart criteria is attainability, which means it's practical to achieve the goal. Key results, however, should be a little more ambitious. Here at Google, we actually use OKRs to set stretch goals as a way to challenge ourselves to do something we haven't accomplished before. If we actually accomplish all of our key results, we may have made our OKRs a bit too easy. Let's review quickly. Objectives define what needs to be achieved and describe a desired outcome. Key results define how you'll know whether or not you've met your objective. So how do OKRs work in practice and how do you use them to manage a project? Organizations often set OKRs at different levels, such as the company level, department or team level and project level. Company level OKRs are commonly shared across an organization so that everyone is clear on the company's goals. They are usually updated on an annual basis to help drive the organization in the direction it wants to go. These high-level OKRs support the mission of the organization. Project-level OKRs should support and be aligned with company-level OKRs. An example of a company-level objective at OfficeScreen is increased customer retention by adapting to the changing workplace environment. This is a big, big aspirational goal that applies to the entire company and all of its endeavors. In order to focus their efforts to reach this objective, OfficeScreen might develop key results that include 95% of phone, chat and email customer support tickets are resolved during the first contact. Top three most requested new offerings for distributed office environments are in pilot by the end of the second quarter and sales and support channels are available 24-7 by the end of the year. Some of these company-level key results could become the basis for projects. For example, the key result, top three most requested new offerings for distributed office environments are in pilot by the end of the second quarter could become the PlantPals project. Team or department-level OKRs support the company's broader OKRs and help drive team performance. Departments may develop OKRs that are more specific to their job function as well. For example, the company-level key result, sales and support channels are available 24-7 by the end of the year could lead to a related sales department objective like increase the sales team presence nationwide and the key result, new sales offices are open in 10 cities by the end of the year. Project-level OKRs are set during the initiation phase to help define measurable project goals. They're tracked throughout the planning and execution stages to measure project success. Project-level OKRs need to align with and support both company and department-level OKRs. For example, in order to align with office screens, company-wide objective to increase customer retention by adapting to the changing workplace environment, a project objective for PlantPals might be to enroll existing customers in the PlantPals service. A key result for this objective might be 25% of existing customers sign up for the PlantPals pilot. Let's recap. OKR stands for objectives and key results. They combine a goal and a metric to determine a measurable outcome. Objectives define what needs to be achieved and describe a desired outcome. Key results define how you will measure the outcome of your objective. Company-level OKRs are shared across an organization so that everyone can align and focus their efforts to help the company reach its goals. Project-level OKRs help define measurable project goals. They need to align with and support both company and department-level OKRs. Great, now that you have a better idea of what OKRs are and how they function, you can practice creating OKRs on your own. Welcome back. Project SCOPE is a really important concept that I wanna tell you about. You'll hear it come up time and time again throughout each phase of the project lifecycle. In fact, you may even find yourself defending it. So let's get acquainted with SCOPE. In this video, you will learn how to define and determine SCOPE. Simply put, your project SCOPE includes the boundaries of a project. The way we define it at Google is an agreed upon understanding as to what is included or excluded from a project. SCOPE helps ensure that your project is clearly defined and mapped out. That means knowing exactly who the project will be delivered to and who will be using the end result of the project. You also need a firm understanding of the project's complexity. Is it straightforward with an easily manageable list of tasks? Or will it require extensive research, multiple rounds of approvals and a large-scale production process that will take years to complete? SCOPE also includes the project timeline, budget, and resources. You need to clearly define these so that you can make sure you're working within those boundaries and what's actually possible for the project to work. Poorly defined SCOPE or major changes to your SCOPE can cause changes to the budget, timeline, or even final outcome of the project. Let's look at the scope of your office screen project as an example. As a reminder, the new PlantPals service offers customers small, low maintenance plans like cacti and leafy ferns that they can place on their desks. Customers can order them online or from a print catalog, and office screen will ship the plant straight to the customer's work address. Things to consider for your SCOPE then might be whether or not to provide replacement plants, which customer segments will be offered the service, whether or not the online catalog is an app, a website, or both, and how to ensure customers can purchase from the online catalog, whether by phone, PC, Mac, iPhone, or Android. You might also consider the dimensions of the paper catalog and whether it needs to be in color or black and white and on what kind of paper. Now, how do you actually figure out the scope of your project? It's simple. Talk to your sponsors and stakeholders, understand what their goals are and find out what is, and this is really important, what is not included in the project. We've covered a number of different ways to help you determine SCOPE. Here are a few more helpful questions to add to the list. Where did the project come from? Why is it needed? What is the project expected to achieve? What does the project sponsor have in mind? Who approves to find no results? Now you really be set. As for timing, defining project scope should happen during the initial planning stage. You wanna start figuring out the scope early on so that everyone can agree to the same set of expectations. It will help mitigate the risk of big changes down the line, although you can always adjust the scope as planning continues if you need to. Once you understand your project scope, you want to document all the details so that anyone can refer back to it throughout the life cycle of the project. We'll talk about some best practices for that at the end of this module. Let's recap. A clearly defined scope describes all the details of a project and regulates what can be added or removed as it progresses. While it's ultimately the project manager's responsibility to monitor the project and make sure all the work and resources fall within its scope, team members and stakeholders can be encouraged to do their part by focusing on the tasks that are the most important to reaching the project scope. The next video talks about the concepts of in scope and out of scope and the phenomenon called scope creep. All three will help with ensuring your project stays on track and within budget. Stay tuned. Hi there. As you now know, an important part of project management is keeping an eye on your project scope and knowing which tasks are truly part of the plan and which aren't. Tasks that are included in the project and contribute to the project's overall goal are considered to be in scope. Tasks that aren't included are called out of scope. It's your job as a project manager to set and maintain firm boundaries for your project so that your team can stay on track. For example, if the copywriters or designers of the Plant Pals catalog came up with the idea to expand the type of plans being offered to top customers, you would have to point out that their suggestion is out of scope and would take extra time and add to your budget costs. As you progress through the project lifecycle, you're going to encounter unexpected challenges or have new details or ideas brought to your attention that could impact your project's success. Changes, growth, and uncontrolled factors that affect a project's scope at any point after the project begins are referred to as scope creep. Scope creep is a common problem and it's not always easy to control. It's one that we struggle with on every single project. It can happen on any project in any industry. Imagine you're working in a tech company and your project involves working with designers and engineers to update the language icons design on a mobile keyboard app for a smartphone. While the team is making the update, they realize that the search icon and the voice input icon also need a design refresh. These are very small features and while technically not in scope, the team feels it would take minimal effort and provide lots of value. So they go ahead and make the updates. During a stakeholder review, it's pointed out that there is a keyboard in English but no keyboards for other languages and the suggestion is made to design additional keyboards. At this point, the project scope is in danger of expanding from a fairly simple icon update to a complex rollout of multiple keyboard layouts. Adding the keyboards would impact the team's timelines, causing the project to take longer to finish. It would also impact resourcing because you would need to hire more people or existing team members would have to work overtime. And it would increase the budget since the team did not anticipate costs for extra working hours or keyboard translations. This is just one example of scope creep. Sometimes it's subtle, just design one or two more icons or more obvious. Hey, can you tack on designing keyboards for other languages? By identifying scope creep and being proactive, you protect your project and your project team. To help you combat scope creep, it's good to know that there are two major sources from what she comes, external and internal. External sources of scope creep are easier to recognize. For example, if you're working on a project with one main customer, the customer might request changes or the business environment around you might shift or the underlying technology you're using might change. While you can't control everything that happens, there are some useful tips to keep in mind. First, make sure the stakeholders have visibility into the project. You want them to know the details of what's going to be produced, what resources are required, how much it will cost and how much time it'll take. Also, get clarity on the requirements and ask for constructive criticism of the initial product proposal. It's important to get this information before any contracts are signed. Be sure to set ground rules and expectations for stakeholder involvement once the project gets started. Come to an agreement on each of your roles and responsibilities during execution and status reviews. Once you're clear on the project scope, come up with a plan for how to deal with out-of-scope requests. Agree on who can make formal change requests and how those requests will be evaluated, accepted and performed. And finally, be sure to get these agreements in writing. This way, you always have a documentation to point to if you, a stakeholder or the customer have a disagreement down the line. One of the leading causes of external scope creep is not being clear on the requirements before defining the scope and getting formal approval to move forward with the project. This is where those specific and measurable goals and deliverables come into play. If the requirements aren't specific and if you haven't agreed on the project's processes, deliverables and milestones, then you're almost guaranteed to be dealing with scope creep once the project begins. Internal sources of scope creep are trickier to spot and harder to control. This kind of creep comes from members of the project team who suggests or even insists on process or product changes or improvements. It's possible that a product developer will justify a decision on the grounds of making the product better, even though it's going to cost more. Or a team lead might decide that a certain process is more efficient without realizing the impact the change in process will have on other team members tasked with different parts of the project. What you need to make clear to your team is that any change outside of the project scope comes off the bottom line, threatens the schedule and increases risk. There are no small impacts to project scope. Anytime a team member takes on an unplanned task, more is lost than just the time spent working on that task. It's your responsibility as the project manager to maintain the limits of the project. The best defense is to know the details of your project in and out so you always prepare it with the most appropriate response to a new idea or request. Let's recap. Monitor your project scope and protect it at all costs. Even the most minor change can be major risk to your project success. Coming up, I'll tell you about the triple constraint model and how you can use it to help determine how your project changes affect scope. Stay tuned. Hi, and welcome back. In this video, we're going to talk about managing project scope. Managing scope goes hand in hand with goal setting. For example, redefining the scope can change the goal and a revision of the goal can change the scope. The concept of project scope is important throughout the project. While your project will have its own specific goals, the overall goal for you as the project manager is to deliver the project according to the scope agreements. This includes delivering the project within the given deadline and the approved budget. You'll quickly find that this is easier said than done. As you progress through your project, you will continually need to make compromises and weigh trade-offs as new challenges and changes and factors present themselves. Anytime a team member takes on an unplanned task, more is lost than just the time spent working on that task. In order to decide if a scope change is acceptable and what impact it will have, project managers usually refer to the triple constraint model. The triple constraint model is the combination of the three most significant restrictions of any project. Scope, time, and cost. We've talked a bit about what scope is, so let's focus now on time and cost. Time refers to the project schedule and deadlines. Costs includes the budget, and it also covers resources and the people who will work on the project. Both time and budget have to be carefully managed alongside scope. All three of these are linked. You can't change one without having an impact on the others. For example, a decrease in costs means a change in time or scope. An increase in time means a change in scope or cost, or both. Understanding how changing one impacts the other two constraints is key. It's important to consider what trade-offs you're willing to make as the project progresses. To do this successfully, you need a clear understanding of the project priorities. You have to know what is most important when it comes to scope, time, and cost. If there's a specific deadline that must be met, then you'll need to limit any changes to the scope that might cause the project to go past that deadline. If the product must look or function in a certain way, then the requirements are a priority, and you could justify changes in costs or time in order to meet the scope requirements. But just because you can make a change, that doesn't mean you necessarily should make a change. And even though the limits of scope, time, and cost have been set, you can still make changes if there's a good reason to do so. Don't worry, you all have to decide on these changes all by yourself. If there are scope decisions that need to be made, the project manager will likely need to consult with the project sponsor and stakeholders to get their approvals. Let's go through a few scenarios so you can get familiar with weighing the value of a trade-off and understanding the impacts of any changes. In the first scenario, a request has been made to improve the plant pal's product features. The director of product at Office Green wants to use pots that indicate when the plants need to be watered. Making changes to the product is a scope change. You know that you can't change the budget, but you can extend the timeline. So you can accept the scope change request and extend the timeline as long as the budget doesn't increase. Here's another possible scenario. A request has been made to reduce the budget without making any changes to the scope. The final outcome of plant pal still needs to look and function as you all originally agreed. If you're going to reduce the budget and keep the scope, you may need to extend the timeline. Okay, here's another scenario. There's a request to tighten up the timeline and finish early, but you can't increase the budget. In order to do this, you'll need to make changes to the scope like limiting shipping options. Doing this will give your project more time because you'll have one less shipping contract to negotiate. The end result won't be exactly what was originally agreed on, but it means getting it out earlier as requested and within budget. Let's try one more. In this last scenario, the director of product informs you that the project deadline must be met. It's the most important thing. In this case, your stakeholders are willing to increase the budget and make any necessary changes to the scope requirements in order to meet the deadline. In the end, it's all about prioritizing which element of the triangle matters the most in the project. Are you getting the hang of trade-offs? Keeping in mind scope, time, and cost as you manage your project will help you navigate different conditions while still achieving your goals. Remember, change is inevitable when managing projects. And understanding this framework can set you up to plan and communicate accordingly so your project will succeed. When you understand the triple constraint model, you'll have the tools to evaluate scope changes. Understanding how changes will be evaluated, accepted, and performed is key to scope management. Don't worry if you still have questions. We'll be sure to talk more about this concept in course four. Up next, we'll talk more about successfully launching and landing your project. See you soon. Hi, I'm Tori and I'm an education program manager at Google. Specifically, I work on our digital literacy curriculum called applied digital skills that helps learners of all ages learn the practical digital skills needed for the jobs of today and tomorrow. So scope is important because if you have a well-defined scope in the beginning of a project, it'll help make sure that your team members, your stakeholders are all aligned and on the same page right from the start. And you can avoid any issues down the line that may come up that you might not have been aware of. Some challenges of staying within scope could be what we like to call scope creep. And these things can happen if, for example, you have some stakeholders that have some certain needs, desires, or requests that may actually end up changing the scope. Scope creep is when the scope changes after you've already started the project. And this can be really challenging to manage if you don't keep an eye on it from the beginning. I was recently working on a project where we were hoping to actually reach underserved communities with our digital literacy curriculum and the initial project scope started off focusing on middle and high school students. But at some point down the line after the project started, there were some stakeholders who actually wanted to expand the audience to adult learners. And so we had some trouble trying to figure out how we were gonna manage that. Were we going to change the scope? Were we gonna keep it the same? And ultimately we decided to keep the scope the same and referenced back to our original goal in the beginning because if you think about it, changing the audience would make the project goals and our strategies for reaching those audiences drastically different. So ultimately we ended up keeping the scope and communicating that to our stakeholders. Some best practices for managing scope is just make sure you document everything in the beginning and share it with all of your stakeholders and team members and make sure everybody's in agreement on that scope. There are times where the scope may need to change and that's okay, but you have to be able to make sure that you can also change and potentially change your timeline, your resources or even the budget to accommodate that scope change. Welcome back. At this point, you've learned a bit about setting smart goals along with defining and managing the scope. It may be tempting to think that you're ready to kick off this project with these two important pieces, but there is one common element that ensures you'll achieve these goals within scope and that key element is knowing when your project is delivered and you can call it a success. Many people think the time to decide if a project is successful is when you've produced the final outcome and presented it to the client. That's getting close. Delivering the final result of your project to the client or user, it's what's called a project launch. You've finished building or creating a project, the tasks are completed, and the deliverables are done. You've hit your goal. The project is successful and consider complete in that sense, but does it work well? Did it achieve your desired outcome? The real deciding factor of project success is when you put the final outcome to the test. Landing is when you actually measure the success of your project using the success criteria established at the outset of the project. This is a crucial part of goal setting that is often overlooked in the initiation phase. For example, think about taking a trip on an airplane. It's not enough for the pilot to be able to get the plane off the ground. To arrive safely at your destination, they've got to know how to land. Your success has to continue beyond the point of delivering the final project. You need to be able to measure whether the project functions as intended once it's put into practice. Let's take the example of your project plan pals. You've managed to launch the new service with SSS. The website has launched, the catalogs have been printed and delivered, orders have been received and revenue is starting to go up. It would be easy to call this a win and move on, but what happens if the customers are unhappy once the plants are delivered? What if the plants start to wilt in this color after a couple of weeks? Just because launching the project and getting it out the door looks like success on paper, that doesn't mean the project has managed to land. For most projects, a launch itself isn't a meaningful measure of success. It's what comes after the launch that really counts. Launches are only a means to an end and looking beyond the launch is important to ensure the launch achieves your overall goals. If you start off looking beyond the launch to the landing, you're more likely to get where you're trying to go. Since landing is a concept and not a finite definition, it's important to define what a successful landing looks like for a particular project. Luckily, we have a way to measure and help you ensure the success of your project. It's called success criteria. And if you can manage to follow it through the life cycle of your project, you'll ultimately have a smooth landing. The success criteria includes all the specific details of your goals and deliverables. And it can be a guide so you know whether you've accomplished what you set out to do. Success criteria will set the standard for how your project will be judged. In the next video, I'll outline what you need to know about defining success criteria and communicating project success. See you in a bit. Hello again. We've learned about the differences between launching and landing. And we've also learned about the differences between delivering your project and finding out if the outcome performs as expected. But how exactly do you know that your project is a success? How do you know if you've actually landed? At the beginning of the project, you define goals and deliverables that are measurable, meaning that you can determine if they were met. Similarly, you need to define success criteria that can also be measured. So you'll know whether they were met. The success criteria will tell you whether or not the project as a whole was successful. They are the specific details of your goals and deliverables that tell you whether you've accomplished what you set out to do. They are the standards by which the project will be judged once it's been delivered to stakeholders and customers. Defining success criteria also clarifies for your team what they're trying to accomplish beyond just launching something to users. Is it to increase customer satisfaction with the service so they can continue to purchase more products? Enhance an existing feature to retain customers? Depending on the project, the answers will be different. But it's important that a team is aligned and working towards a shared goal, sometimes forcing the conversation and clarifying what the end result looks like can bring to like questions and areas of disagreement. There isn't a set process for determining success criteria, but I'll break down a couple of key points to consider. Remember the measurable part of your smart goals? One of the questions to ask when making your goals measurable is how will I know when it is accomplished? The same question applies to your project. How will you know when it's done? Only in this case, you want to ask, how will I know when it's successfully accomplished? You can measure to determine your project success in a similar way to measuring a goal. So go through your project goals and deliverables, review the scope, and identify the measurable aspects of your project. These are going to be any of the metrics used in the goals and deliverables, along with your budget and scheduled details. Another thing you'll need to do is get clarity from stakeholders on the project requirements and expectations. This is key. There are lots of people involved with any project, and that means lots of ideas about what success looks like to each person. You want to ask questions, such as who ultimately says whether or not the project is successful? What criteria will be measured to determine success? What's the success of this project based on? Once you've collected clarifying information, document and share all of it so that you, your team, and your stakeholders can refer to it later. Let's try creating success criteria with the Office Screen Project. For example, the goal is to increase revenue by 5% by the end of the year. One of the deliverables is a website with a gallery of the different plan selections that are offered. It's not enough just to make a list of criteria. You need a process for measuring success from start to finish throughout the entire project lifecycle. This way, you can make adjustments and ensure success by the time you're ready to land. There are many metrics you can use and for some products, it will make sense to use more than one. The metrics you choose should be as closely aligned to your project's goal as possible. For example, happiness metrics, measure user attitudes and satisfaction, or perceived ease of use. And you can measure these through surveys. For the Plant Pals project, we may consider a customer satisfaction rate of 85% within the first three months of launching as a way to measure success. You can also consider customer adoption and engagement metrics along with more business-oriented metrics that track things like sales and growth. Adoption refers to how the customer uses and adopts a product or service without any issues. Engagement refers to how often or meaningful customer interaction and participation is over time. Adoption metrics might include launching a new product to a group of users and having a high amount of them used or adopted. Engagement metrics might include increasing the daily usage of a design feature or increasing orders and customer interactions. Using the office screen example, tracking how many customers initially sign up for and use the Plant Pals service is an adoption metric. Tracking how many customers renew their Plant Pals service, post about it, or share feedback are engagement metrics. Once you've defined the metrics that you'll be measuring, think about how you track these metrics. Evaluate which tools can help you collect the data you need to ensure you're staying on track. For example, if you're measuring business metrics like revenue, consider tracking that in a spreadsheet or dashboard where you can easily spot gaps and trends. If you're measuring customer satisfaction, you can think of a way to incentivize customers to participate in regular email surveys and create a system to measure their responses when they participate. You can also utilize your project management tools to check on efficiency metrics, like what percent of tasks are completed or whether the project is progressing alongside the planned timelines. It's smart to measure success with your team as the project or product is in progress. For example, you can hold a project review once a month, have team members complete task checklists by certain deadlines, or hold live feedback sessions with your users or customers. There are many different ways to measure success. The key is to pick the methods that work best for your success criteria. It's a good idea that, along with each success criteria on your list, to also include the methods for how success will be measured, how often it's measured, and who's responsible for measuring it. Share your success criteria document with your stakeholders and ask if they agree with how the project's success will be determined. It's also a good idea to have the appropriate stakeholders sign off on the success criteria. This way, everyone will be clear on who is responsible for which tasks and you'll all thoroughly understand what the path to success entails. Keep this documentation visible throughout the duration of the project and clearly communicate it with your team every step of the way. They're the ones who will be attempting to meet all the different requirements, so don't keep them in the dark about what they're supposed to do or how they're supposed to do it. If done correctly, defining your success criteria should create greater alignment within the team and give everybody better visibility into how to achieve success. Clarity around success metrics also helps teams prioritize which efforts are most impactful to their users. Defining project success is a complex but crucial part of project management. With more and more practice, this process will come more natural to you in the planning stages and throughout your project. We'll continue exploring and talking more about these concepts throughout the course. Nice job. You're almost done with module two. I'll see you in a bit to review what we've covered. You're doing great. You've completed this module and have set yourself up for success. Way to go. Defining goals and managing scope and ensuring a successful landing might seem tricky to master at first, but the smart method and the triple constraint triangle, tools and methods for measuring success criteria and clear communication will help you every step of the way. In the next module, we will talk about the roles and responsibilities that come along with each project so that everyone knows how they contribute to reaching the project's goals. Welcome back. In this module, we'll learn all about stakeholders and their importance to a project. In the last set of videos, you learned the ins and outs of project scope. While exploring how a project can be in scope or out of scope, you learned about setting smart goals. We also discussed launching a project, getting it started versus landing a project, whether or not it was successful. And there are a lot more exciting topics to come. In this module, you'll learn more about stakeholders. Remember that stakeholders play a pivotal role. They are people who are interested in and affected by the project's completion and success. You'll see that each person involved has a set role and set responsibilities to help bring the project to a landing. Those roles include project sponsors, customers, team members, and of course you, the project manager. You'll also find out about things like stakeholder mapping and analysis and race charts. These are tools that help clarify roles and responsibilities and prevent confusion on who takes ownership of which tasks. Throughout this module, you'll have plenty of hands-on activities, discussion prompts, and readings to really help you master how to start a project. As we go through each new skill, imagine checking off a to-do list. There's almost nothing more satisfying than crossing off a to-do. Hello, nice to meet you. My name is Holly and I will be your accessibility instructor for this course. Accessibility should be incorporated into every role at a company, whether a product designer, communicator, developer, or yes, project manager. In my role of accessibility education program manager at Google, I help ensure all Googlers are educated on accessibility from building accessible products for the entire world to communicating accessibility with you throughout this course. I'm deaf myself, so I'm able to share my experiences as a person with a disability too and help others understand that having a disability isn't a barrier in itself. It's the world around us that we must strive to make accessible for everyone. Accessibility can be defined a number of different ways. To me, it means actively removing any barriers that might prevent persons with disabilities from being able to access technology, information, or experiences and leveling the playing field so everyone has an equal chance of enjoying life and being successful. A disability is often defined as a physical or mental condition that substantially limits a major life activity such as walking, talking, seeing, hearing, or learning. Over one billion people in the world have a disability. One billion. That's more than the population of the United States, Canada, France, Italy, Japan, Mexico, and Brazil combined. Disability is diverse and intersectional. Someone can be born with a condition or acquire it later in life. Disability can affect us all in some way, whether directly or indirectly, and at any time, from permanent, like deafness, to temporary, like a broken leg, to situational, like trying to operate a TV remote control in the dark. When you create solutions for persons with disabilities, you are not only serving the critical audience of people with permanent disabilities, you are also unlocking secondary benefits for everyone who may move in and out of disability over time. As you progress through this course, it's also important to keep in mind your fellow classmates, setting the expectation that you'll be interacting with others that learn and work differently is a key strength of working with accessibility in mind, asking others what they need from you to learn and communicate, and also sharing what you need if you have a disability yourself, is important to working well together as a team. In project management, you yourself, people on your project team, or people highly invested in your project may have a disability, whether visible or invisible. As a project manager, you are responsible for making sure a group of people can come together to achieve a common goal, using shared tools and systems. In order to be successful, you need to make sure the infrastructure and culture you set up works for everyone. Knowing this is a key element of project management, I'll teach you how to make your work and content accessible. I'll also help you become a better project manager by considering accessibility in your future projects. I'll offer tips and best practices throughout the program, starting with this one. Did you know that many technologies that we all enjoy started out as an accessibility feature? Think about the Google Assistant, which allows you to control your home with your voice, or close captioning, which makes it possible to watch the TV above a crowded noisy bar. By considering accessibility, you can impact everyone's lives for the better. I'm excited to share more with you throughout the program while you learn more about project management and prepare for a career in this field. See you later. In this video, I'll take you through the process of choosing the roles and responsibilities of all the people on your project team. In order to decide who does what on a project, we have to consider and outline our needs. Choosing the right people for a team is a big task and one every project manager should take seriously. After all, these are the people who do the work on the project, so we wanna make sure we have the right people lined up. When identifying people resources, we need to carefully consider the project needs and use that info to guide our decision-making. First, a project manager will make a list of roles that they'll need on their team to complete each task. In the same way that a project manager is accountable for the overall initiation, planning, execution, and completion of a project, the person in each role is accountable for specific tasks within the project lifecycle. For example, a home construction project team might include roles on their list like an architect, a site manager, and multiple construction workers. Once the tasks are clearly laid out, the project manager decides how many people they'll need on their team. This can vary greatly depending on the project size. For small projects, a team may only need three or four people to complete the deliverables on time. And for larger projects, a team might include dozens. At Google, we sometimes have hundreds of Googlers working on the same project. Getting the team's size right is important for a bunch of reasons. For example, when there's a lot of people on a project, communication sometimes becomes difficult. That makes it more likely for someone to miss important details. But if your team is too small, there might not be enough people to finish all the tasks. Once you know how many people you need on your team, you have to think about who does what. To decide on the right person for each role, a project manager needs to think carefully about skills. Makes sense, right? If you're managing the construction of a house, you want to know that the construction workers who are building the frame or installing the drywall have the skills needed to do it properly. It's on the project manager to ensure that everyone on the team has the right skills to do the job. But it's also important to remember that skills can be taught. If someone doesn't have a certain skill initially, they might still be a great fit for the team. Maybe this person brings a positive attitude and attention to detail, perfectly good reasons to have them on your team. Just keep in mind that if a teammate doesn't have the necessary skills, it's important that they are trained in time so not to cause project delays. When choosing teammates, a project manager also has to factor in each person's availability and whether they'll feel motivated to complete their assigned tasks. For example, you might know a fantastic site manager who'd make a great asset to the team. But if they're already staffed on another big project, they might not have the time to commit to yours. Or even if they do have the time, they might not feel like this project will give them the visibility they need for a promotion. Motivation is a key ingredient to great work. So it's a good idea to pick people who are excited to get involved. But of course, we don't always get to choose our resources. Sometimes another manager or team lead might just assign people to roles. When this happens, it's the project manager's challenge to deliver the best work with what we're given. Let's check in on our project at office screen where we're rolling out a new service. As a project manager, it's up to you to decide who you need on your team. You have to ask yourself questions on things like staff experience, availability, the workspace, team member workload on other projects, and more. For example, who on the team has office landscaping experience? Who's local to the city where the launch will happen? Who can be fully dedicated to this project for the next eight weeks? There's no exact formula for putting together the right team, which makes it a little tricky. Every situation is different and calls for a different set of skills, experience, and perspectives. It can be helpful to look deeper into each task on the project. Always ask yourself these key questions. How many people do I need on my team each step of the way? Which team members do I need and when? Are those experts already busy on other projects? Who makes the final decisions on project resources? So there's a lot to think about when putting together your dream team. Up next, we'll learn more about all the different roles on a project. See you there. As we mentioned in the last video, when you're managing a project to meet certain goals, having the right team around you is a must. Why is it so important? It's because there can be so many moving parts on a project. That means you really need to have confidence and trust that the people around you have the skills and motivation to do the work well. To feel confident in your team, you need to know each person's role from the start. Clearly laying out the responsibilities for each role helps everyone know what project tasks they're accountable for. The odds are you can't complete this project on your own, even if you're the best project manager of all time, which we know you will be. Before we jump into the specific roles on a project, we want to call out that some roles aren't fixed. Sometimes team members need to adapt and take on more than one role at a time. This usually happens if the company is small or resources are limited. For example, at a small firm, you might be the project manager, designer, and marketer. Whether they're fixed or not, we always have these project roles, project sponsors, team members, customers or users, stakeholders, and of course the project manager. Let's learn more about each of them. A project sponsor is the person who is accountable for the project and who ensures the project delivers the agreed upon value to the business. They play a vital leadership role throughout the process. Sometimes they fund the project. The sponsor will probably communicate directly with managers and key stakeholders. Team members are the heart of the operation. They're the people doing the day to day work and making the project happen. The customers are the people who will get some sort of value from a successfully landed project. Since the project aims to deliver something useful to the customers, the customer's needs usually define the project's requirements. You can think of them as the buyers of the project. In some situations, we have both customers and users for a project, and we need to differentiate between the two. Simply put, users are the people that ultimately use the product that your project will produce. To make the distinction nice and clear for you, think of it this way. A software company has created a type of software that allows teams to communicate with each other in an instant message application. The software is purchased by Corporation ABC. They are the customer. But the users are everyone within Corporation ABC that will be using the instant message application every day. Stakeholders are anyone involved in the project. Those who have a vested interest in the project's success. Primary stakeholders are people who expect to benefit directly from the project's completion, while secondary stakeholders play an intermediary role and are directly impacted by the project. Secondary stakeholders may be contractors or members of a partner organization. But both primary and secondary stakeholders help project managers define project goals and outcomes. And finally, we can't forget the project manager, the person who plans, organizes, and oversees the whole project. That's you. Let's now plug these roles into our office screen project. Recall that office screen is a commercial plant company that does interior landscaping and plant design for offices and other commercial businesses. We're launching our new plant service. So if you recall our SMART goal, which must be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound, is to roll out a new service to provide office plants to top clients by the end of the year. There's a lot to do when launching a new service. Plants need to be ordered and delivered every few days. New clients will need to be familiarized with office screen and its procedures. And there will be ongoing updates to the website and app. For Office Greens launch, our project sponsor is the director of product. They approve the project's budget and ensure that everything stays aligned to the vision, which in this case is that inexpensive and easy to maintain live plants are provided in order to improve the employee work environments. The teams made up of people from across departments, and they're all working together to support the project. For example, the marketing department has assigned some people to the team because they'll need to tell customers about this new service. On this project, the landscape designer is also the website designer. This is an example of where a team member plays more than one role. And you, you're the project manager. You're the one managing the information, people, and schedule to carry this project to a successful landing. Our customers for this project are buyers at offices who might be interested in office green services, such as office managers or procurement teams. However, the users are the employees who work at the offices because they're the ones who enjoy the plants. And finally, all of these people are project stakeholders. Secondary stakeholders won't play active roles throughout all phases of the project, but still need to be informed as they are a component of what the project needs to succeed. For example, these include office screens investors who are helping to fund the new service launch, and the office screen receptionist who will answer a lot of customer questions about the new service once it's launched. So now that we know why it's so important to decide on these roles early on and how these roles work within a project, let's put them into action. My name is John Filey, and I'm a technical program manager for Google and the Chicago office. I've worked at a couple of different companies. I've worked at startups. I've worked at grocery companies, and I've worked at Google. And what I've found is that some companies, what you find is that there's engineers that kind of come in. And what they're looking for is direction. They want to be told what to do. They want to be handed the task and just execute on it. At Google, people are really invested in their product. We call Google a bottom-up kind of culture. You know, a lot of companies, you have this directed from the top saying, this is what we're going to do. But at Google, people are so passionate about the industry and what they're working on that the ideas really come up and bubble up from the bottom. What I always tell folks is that the technical and hard skills of program management, you can pick up in a book. You can learn about agile. You can learn about extreme programming. You can learn about all these things, planning, retrospectives, all these great terms and tools and stuff like that. At the end of the day, that's all they are, though. They're just a tool and you can't use a hammer for a screw. It's the same thing with program management. You can't use the same tools for every project. You have to learn what's going on in a given team, a given project and a given group of people. And so at the end of the day, really the challenge is understanding the dynamics of the people that you work with. I like to say that the key about program management is people and context. You have to understand the people that you're working with, you have to understand the context and only then can you apply the skills that you learned. You won't always have the opportunity to pick and choose what people you want to work on a project and that's okay because you can just use those tools that you gained in the past to understand the backgrounds and the style and the personalities of the people that you're working with. The most important part about program management is understanding the personalities of the people you work with so that you can tailor your approach to make sure that you're working effectively with them. Think about this way. You might be working with an introverted person. That person needs different types of attention than an extroverted person. An extroverted person wants to talk about their ideas and their project plans in a meeting. An introverted person, you might want to get their feedback offline or have an async form or opportunity for them to voice their opinion. It's really not gonna be cut and dry every time you work on a project and that's why it's really, really important that you're flexible in your approach. You wanna have people that are challenging the choices that we make but at the end of the day we all need to agree on a common goal and a common vision so that we can move forward. We don't want distractions because that's the thing that the one thing that can slow things down. At the end of the day, technical problems aren't that hard. People problems are really hard and making sure that your team is sold and bought in on a vision and the project is super, super important. It's your goal and your job role as a program manager to motivate the team and make sure that everyone's on the same page. We just saw how important the stakeholders are to the project and how both primary and secondary stakeholders help project managers define project goals and outcomes. As a quick refresher, primary stakeholders are people who will benefit directly from the project success while secondary stakeholders are indirectly impacted by the project's success. Having all these different people involved on a project can get confusing and that's where a stakeholder analysis comes in handy. This is a visual representation of all the stakeholders. It helps you avoid surprises, build necessary partnerships and ensure you're involving the right people at the right time. When done well, your stakeholder analysis helps you see all the opportunities for success and the potential risks. It illustrates which stakeholders are taking on which responsibilities and it can help you include the right people and important conversations, which is key to getting the support you need throughout the project. There are three key steps to kicking off a stakeholder analysis. First, make a list of all the stakeholders that the project impacts. Then, determine the level of interest and influence for each stakeholder and finally, assess their ability to participate and find ways to involve them. In the second step, we talk about influence and interest. What do those terms mean here? Influence measures how much power a stakeholder has and how much the stakeholders' actions affect the project outcome. In our office screen example, the director of product who first initiated the project and oversees new products and services has a huge amount of influence, while the vendor providing the greenery has less influence. Interest is pretty much what it sounds like. How much are the needs of the stakeholder affected by project operations and outcomes? For example, office screens human resources department may not have as much interest in the product launch as the sales department does. The power grid is a super useful two by two grid used for conducting a stakeholder analysis. We use the power grid to assign each stakeholder's level of importance to the project, measuring their interest and influence. The position of the stakeholder on the grid usually determines their active role in the project. The higher the interest and influence, the more important the stakeholder is to the project's success. Without their support, it's unlikely that the project will successfully land. These people are our key stakeholders. Now that you have a better idea of each stakeholder's position on the team, we can plan how to best manage everyone. There are four different techniques you can use for managing stakeholders. The first group of stakeholders are the key players or key stakeholders. You'll find these people in the top right corner of the grid. To best manage key stakeholders, you wanna closely partner with them to reach the desired outcomes. Of course, not everyone's a key stakeholder, but each role, even the non-key stakeholder, gets a spot on the grid. You'll find stakeholders with higher influence but lower interest in the top left corner of the grid. To manage these stakeholders, you want to consult with them and meet their needs. Their opinions and input are important to the project. The director of product has high influence but may not be vested into day-to-day activities. And therefore, we'll have a lower interest. Stakeholders with lower influence but high interest are in the bright bottom corner of the grid. For these stakeholders, you wanna show consideration for them by keeping them up to date on the project. It's unlikely they'll need to say in what's going on but keeping them informed is important. For example, the customer success team may have lower influence but high interest since they'll work directly with clients on the new product. Last up, we have stakeholders with low influence and low interest. You'll find these in the bottom left corner. They're the least important of the stakeholders but this doesn't mean that they don't matter. It might just be that for this particular project, they aren't as integral. So for this project, you mainly want to monitor them, keeping them in the know. Creating a grid like this is an effective way to track who should be communicated with and when. This grid here is an example of how that might play out depending on the project and the stakeholders. You may also want to create a steering committee made up of a high influence and high interest stakeholders. These people will be the most senior decision-making body on any project. They have the authority to make changes to budget and approve updates to timeline or scope. The project manager isn't a member of the committee but they're responsible for bringing the right project information to the steering committee so that decisions can be quickly made. How you engage your stakeholders from this point on depends on your particular situation. There are different ways to involve each stakeholder and you have to be strategic to get helpful and relevant input from the right people at the right time. You want to meet with some stakeholders every single day and others you'll just send periodic updates to. Stakeholder buy-in is the process of involving these people in decision-making to hopefully reach a broader consensus on the organization's future. To get stakeholders to buy in on the project, you have to pay particular attention to your high impact stakeholders and make sure they feel looped in. You want to explain to them how the project will help them achieve their goals and you want to have their support later on if any issues come up. Here are some important things to keep in mind when communicating with stakeholders. If you have one main stakeholder, that stakeholder is likely to be highly influential and needs constant communication but if you're on a larger project with numerous stakeholders, they won't be quite as involved in the day-to-day tasks. For stakeholders who need time to make decisions about the project, over-communicate early on. For example, hold frequent meetings and send daily end-of-day progress emails. This way, they have enough time to weigh the options and make decisions. Think about the level of project details each stakeholder needs. You don't want to spend time diving deep with stakeholders that just need a project summary. For example, the facilities team that delivers the product doesn't need daily updates on vendor pricing or website issues. On the flip side, do spend time updating key members that need frequent updates. The sales team will need to know pricing and availability changes so a weekly check-in might make sense here. Great work. You just completed your own stakeholder analysis. Up next, we'll check out another tool, racy charting. See you there. In the last video, we saw how a stakeholder analysis shows us how to best work with stakeholders and when to communicate with all the different people involved in the project. In this video, we're going to check out another handy tool called a racy chart. A racy chart helps to define roles and responsibilities for individuals or teams to ensure work gets done efficiently. It creates clear roles and gives direction for each team member. There are four types of participation included in a racy chart. These are responsible, accountable, consulted and informed. Let's take a look at each. Responsible refers to those doing the work to complete the task. Accountable refers to those making sure the work gets done. Consulted includes those giving feedback like subject matter experts or decision makers. And lastly, we have informed, which includes those just needing to know the final decisions or that a task is complete. Here's an image of how this breaks down in a chart form. When creating your racy chart, you will need to write down each task or deliverable for your project and then assign it the appropriate role for each stakeholder. To do this, first think about who's involved in the project. Write the roles or people's name in a row across the top of your chart. Pro tip, use roles rather than names if some people might take on more than one role. Next, write down the tasks or deliverables in a column on the left. Try not to get too specific here. You want the chart to be simple and easy to read. After that, go through each task and deliverable and ask who's responsible for doing this? Who's accountable if it doesn't get done? Who will have strong opinions to add and therefore should be consulted about how this gets done? And who needs to be informed of the progress or decisions made about this? Assign the letters R, A, C and I based on your answers. For example, as a project manager on Office Screen's new service launch, one of your tasks is to create different price points for different packages and delivery frequencies. The head of finance will be accountable because the project needs to stay in budget and make money, but it's the financial analyst who's responsible as they're the person doing the work in determining optimal pricing. The director of product will be consulted on the matter as they oversee the product offerings. And finally, team members like those on the sales team need to be informed of the final pricing. It's possible there are several roles that fall into the informed and consulted categories. One thing that will always remain constant is there will never be more than one person designated as accountable. This prevents confusion because having one person accountable clearly defines ownership. However, the same person that is accountable may also be responsible. There are several other factors that can cause role confusion. For example, there might be unbalanced workloads, which means some people might be doing more work or less work than others on the team. Or there could be an unclear hierarchy when people aren't sure who to seek help from if a task doesn't get done. Or unclear ownership of decisions where people aren't sure who makes the final call on a project. Another issue could be overlapping work. This is when teams or individuals feel that they're responsible for the same work. When this happens, things can get confusing fast. And the same goes for excessive communication. While communication is usually a good thing, too much communication can actually make things more complicated. It can cause information overload where people don't know what to pay attention to and so they miss something important. Wow, there's a lot of things that might cause confusion, but all these issues can be resolved or even prevented with a racy analysis. Be proactive and do this work upfront and you'll help ensure the success of your project. If something is stumping you or you feel stuck at a certain aspect, there's always someone else who's going through the same thing. Anytime I started to feel overwhelmed by information or like I just wasn't getting it, I wasted so much time being unsure of myself that I should have just listened to my friends and family when they said just do it, you can do it. One of the greatest thing that helped me to get back motivated is the accessibility of the course on my phone. I was just able to go into the app and listen to a few videos because I can learn on the go. Having a network of people that motivates you, it's so fundamental, even if it's a friend or if it's a family member that you can get from the beginning and it can be there for you on your corner like a coach. And don't be afraid to ask for help, whether it be from your peers, from your coaches, friends, family, there's always someone who knows more and you can learn from them. Go's, you finished another module. That was a fun one. We covered a lot of topics that were likely new to you. So let's recap. In our first video, we checked out each individual rule associated with projects. You learn that as a project manager, you'll have to ask yourself key questions to make sure you build a successful team. You have to consider things like team size, necessary skills, availability and motivation. Then you completed a stakeholder analysis. This helps you understand how you might manage communication with each person on the project. Next came the racy chart, which define rules and responsibilities for individuals or teams. This helps people get work done efficiently and it creates clear lanes and instruction for each team member to operate within. It does this by assigning which roles are responsible, accountable, informed and consulted. Overall, you learn some really useful concrete tools to help you stay organized throughout the project. You can use these charts as you work with your stakeholders. And if your project is ever evolving as some are, stakeholder mapping and racy charting will help you stay on top of the tasks and communicate effectively. In the next module, you'll learn about other useful resources for managing projects and discover how to know which tool to use when. See you soon. Welcome back and congrats on completing that graded assessment. In the previous module, you learned all about project roles and responsibilities. And we introduce you to some tools that you can use to ensure team accountability like stakeholder analysis and racy charts. Coming up, we'll talk about project tools and resources and the value of documentation. By the end of this module, you'll understand the types of resources available to a project manager. You'll be able to document information in a formal project charter and you'll be able to compare and use various project management tools. Ready to get started? Meet me in the next video. So far, you've learned how to determine project goals and scope and how to identify the right stakeholders for a project. Now it's time to add another important ingredient, resources. As a project manager, understanding your resource needs is crucial to achieving your goals. So during the initiation phase, it's important to ask yourself, what are the things we still need to acquire in order to complete our project? Project resources usually include budget, people, and materials. You'll use tools to manage all those resources. As you think about the goals and the scope of the project, you'll figure out the different resources you will need to meet those goals. It's important to figure out your resources before the project gets rolling. This makes it easy for everyone on your team to get their work done. And that's your job as a project manager. You won't be doing the work directly, but you'll support the people who do. Figuring out resources early on also helps you avoid accidentally understaffing your project, which can seriously slow down team progress and eat away at the overall timeline. Even worse, if you're not careful with your resource planning, you could wind up underestimating the budget, meaning you might not have enough money to purchase necessary materials, hire vendors, or support overtime requests. Planning your resources early is a great way to set your team up for success because when your teammates have what they need to do their work on time and on budget, they're better set up to meet the project's goals. Now let's break down some of the resources that project managers typically work with. First, let's talk about budgets. A budget is an estimate of the amount of money a project will cost to complete. Almost all projects have budgets because they need funding for expenses, like buying the right materials or software, hiring vendors to complete jobs, or doing marketing once the project's done. During the initiation phase, you'll talk to the stakeholders and the people working on the project to figure out the tasks needed to get the project done. Here, you might ask questions to help uncover hidden costs. For example, are there any taxes on products that you need to account for? What about extra fees? All this information will help you create a budget, which you can use to source and compare proposals from vendors, figure out upcoming costs, and track all the money moving in and out of your project. You often include the budget and the project charter and the stakeholders review it for approval. We'll talk more about what goes into creating a project budget and creating a project charter later on. When we talk about resources, we're also talking about the team of people who help execute the tasks of a project. For example, you, as the project manager, are a resource. So is the marketing manager who might create advertisements for this new product. Other resources can include people outside of your company who have unique skills and can do certain tasks that people in your organization can't do personally. Then you have materials. These are items you need to help get the project done. For example, project materials might include a lumber needed to complete a construction project. Okay, so you know that project resources include budget, people, and materials. How do you organize these resources? That's actually a nice transition into our next topic, which is tools. Tools are aids that make it easier for a project manager or team to manage resources and organize work. They help you do things like track tasks, manage budgets, and collaborate with teammates. There are all kinds of tools out there, including productivity tools like Google Docs and work management software like Asana. We'll talk more about these tools later in this program. Tools are essential for tracking progress. So you want to keep them top of mind at all phases of your project. Let's talk about how you might determine your resources during the initiation phase of your project at Office Screen. As a reminder, the Plant Pal service offers customers small, low maintenance plans like cacti and leafy ferns that they can place on their desks. Customers can order them online or from a print catalog and Office Screen will ship the plant straight to the customer's work address. The project goal is to increase revenue by 5%. So how do you get started? Well, you might do some research to figure out the costs of launching the new plant service. That might include the estimated prices of developing a new website and new promotional materials as well as shipping and delivery costs. You also might want to budget for specific tools like a project management software that will help you track progress on this complex project. With that information, you can start to build a realistic budget and you'll also need to figure out who's working on this project with you. To do this, you might make a list of people and external vendors who will help complete all the project's tasks. For example, the person who manages client communications with customers or a new plant supplier that can provide you with your product. Great. Hopefully you're getting more comfortable with the types of resources you will need not only to get stuff done but to achieve your project's goals too. In the next video, we'll talk about documentation, another important topic for anyone who manages projects professionally. By now, you've probably noticed that a big part of project management is guiding decision making. Even if you're not the one making final decisions on major aspects of the project, it's still your job to keep track of every new decision and use those decisions to create a plan. And as you've learned, there are a lot of important decisions to keep track of. That includes everything from identifying project goals and deliverables to choosing the right people to add to a team. It's way too much for any one person to mentally keep track of. It's also important information for everyone on the team to be aware of, not just the project manager. If a decision affects a member of the team's tasks, they'll need to know about it, right? That's why documentation is such an important part of a project manager's role. While your team may work deeply on specific areas of the project, you might be the only person on the team who is aware of and communicating across all the different areas of the project. Clear and consistent documentation can ensure transparency and clear communication. Documentation helps set the stage for the project. It communicates the answers to key questions. For example, what problem are you trying to solve? What are the project goals? What are the scope and deliverables? And who are the project stakeholders? And lastly, what resources does the team need to complete their work? This is all crucial information for anyone who's working on a project, regardless of their role. Documentation also helps preserve decisions made early on in the project and can serve as a reference point for team members who might join later in the project lifecycle. It's your job to ensure that this information is easily accessible through some kind of formal documentation like an email, a presentation, or a digital document. Also, documenting decisions can help you uncover tasks, timelines, or costs you hadn't previously considered. And lastly, this process provides a historical record that can be reviewed at the end of your project. You can apply the lessons you've learned in the future. Okay, let's get into different types of documentation. Up next, we'll look at project proposals and project charters, two types of documents that can set you up for success early on. See you soon. Hello, and welcome back. Earlier, we discussed the value of documentation in effective project management. Now, let's talk about two common types of documentation you could use to keep track of details and keep your stakeholders informed. These are the project proposal and the project charter. A project proposal is a form of documentation that comes at the very beginning of the project. This document's purpose is to persuade stakeholders that a project should begin. And typically, a senior organizational leader creates the proposal. So you might not need to worry about creating the proposal, but you will have to keep track of the proposal's progress. The project proposal is a great starting point to help you understand the desired goals and impact. A proposal may be a formal document, a presentation, or even a simple email to get others on board with the idea. Then, we have the project charter, a formal document that clearly defines the project and outlines the necessary details to reach its goals. A project charter helps you get organized, set up a framework for what needs to be done, and communicate those details to others. So how do these documents differ? A project proposal is created earlier in the project lifecycle than the project charter. The proposal kicks off the initiation phase by influencing and persuading the company to move forward with the project. The project charter serves a similar purpose and often comes at the end of the initiation phase. However, its goal is to more clearly define the key details of the project. Another difference between these two documents is that a charter will often serve as a point of reference throughout the life of a project. The proposal is only used at the earliest stages. Now that you know the difference between these two documents, let's take a closer look at the project charter, which you'll learn more about in this module. The project charter makes clear that the benefits of a project outweigh the costs. As you learned earlier in this course, there are a few questions you might ask yourself when performing a cost-benefit analysis. That includes questions like, what value will this project create? How much money could this project save my organization? And how much time will people have to spend on this project? You will include the answers to these questions in your charter. Including this type of information ensures that you and your stakeholders agree on the project value. The charter also helps ensure that you and your stakeholders agree on the details of the project. Project charter approval means that management is supportive. And it's also a key step to ensure that the project matches the needs of the organization. After the stakeholders and project sponsor has reviewed and approved the project charter, you now have the authority to move forward with the project. Project charters can be formatted in a few ways and can contain different information depending on the project and the organization. The information in a charter might also be tailored to its audience or the needs of specific stakeholders. For example, if you're writing a project charter for a stakeholder who is a marketing executive, the charter might include information about how the project will impact the organization's brand. Or if the stakeholders achieve technology officer, the charter might include information on the costs of engineering resources needed to maintain the project. Regardless of the format or the audience, creating a project charter is the best practice for ensuring that everyone agrees on how to move forward before entering the planning phase. The project charter is a living document. This means that it can involve as the project progresses. As the project manager, you'll review and refine the charter throughout the process. Now that you know more about the value of a project charter, it's time to learn how to create one. Meet me in the next video to get started. Hi again, let's talk about how to create a project charter. In the last video, we discussed how project charters are a valuable document for project managers. Project charters are key for securing approval from stakeholders and moving forward. Project charters can also be formatted in many different ways, and there are many different templates available online for you to choose from. Here, we'll use a template that's similar to one that program managers often use at Google. And to fill in each section, we'll use details from your project at Office screen. Ready? Let's take a look. At the top of your charter, you want to add in the name of your project. Let's add in the name of your project at Office screen. It's called Project Plant Pals. You also want to add in a brief summary. Let's type that in. Our plan is to offer high volume customers small low maintenance plans that can thrive in an office environment. Next up, let's fill in the section labeled Project Goals. Remember that goals should be smart. Let's add in the goal for Project Plant Pals, which is to increase revenue by 5% by rolling out a new service that provides office plants to top clients by the end of the year. Great, now let's add in the project deliverable. Remember that a deliverable is a tangible outcome from a project. As you learned earlier, our deliverables for this project are to send 1,000 plants to 100 customers and to launch a new website for orders and customer support. Okay, now let's add in the business case which captures the reasoning for initiating this project. Let's type in, this is a top requested service from our customers and it will also improve customer satisfaction and retention. The business case is supported by the cost benefit analysis and we'll add that in now. Let's start with the benefits. The benefits or expected gains of the project include improving customer satisfaction and an increase in revenue. Now we'll move on to the costs. The costs include the price of the sourcing products, developing a website and marketing materials. Let's type in $250,000 for the estimated budget. Nice, we've now outlined some of the benefits and costs of this project. Keep in mind that these are simple examples to teach you the basics of filling out a charter. When running a real project, you perform a more detailed analysis to determine the benefits and costs. The key takeaway here is that benefits should always outweigh the costs. Fantastic, let's keep going. Next, we're going to add in the project scope as well as what's considered out of scope for this project. Remember, scope is an agreed upon understanding of what is included or excluded from a project. An item that is in scope includes creating a service to deliver small plants to last year's top clients. An item that is out of scope and therefore not available to customers includes plant care after they're delivered. Amazing, hopefully you can see how stating what's in scope and what's out of scope helps everyone working on the project understand where they should focus their efforts. Great, now let's add in your project team. Let's see here, the project sponsor is Office Green's director of product. So let's add that in. Who is the project lead? Well, that's you. The project team may include marketing associates, website developers, and external plant vendors, and more. So we can add in a few important project team members here. Awesome, let's move on to additional stakeholders. Additional stakeholders may include the vice president of customer success who is accountable for customer feedback and corresponding product requests. We can also add in the account manager who will leverage their existing relationships with top clients. And let's also add in the fulfillment manager who will help acquire the plants needed to launch this service. We're almost done. Let's add in how we'll measure success. Here, we'll type in that we want to see a 5% increase in revenue by the end of the year. Let's also type in that we want to hit a customer satisfaction rate of 95% three months after launch. That's it, the project charter is filled in and now it's ready to be reviewed by your stakeholders. Now you're done, you've seen how documentation helps form the roots of a project and how it contributes to the project's ultimate success. Like nurturing a plan, you're learning to nurture a project to ensure it's the best it can be. Up next, we'll talk about the tools that project managers rely on to guide their teams and ensure that they complete their tasks. See you soon. As a project manager, tools are some of the most helpful resources you have at your disposal. They're essential for tracking progress, so it's important to keep them top of mind throughout the entire project. Let's talk more about why tools are so useful and why it's important to choose the right ones for your needs. There are lots of different tools out there and you'll learn more about them later. As a reminder, tools are aids that make it easier for a project manager or team to manage resources and organize work. They're useful because they can help you track detailed information about all kinds of tasks and they make it easy to communicate with lots of different people. And remember, effective communication and tracking are huge parts of a project manager's day-to-day responsibilities. Just think about how much tougher your job would be without help from collaboration tools like email or digital documents created in Google Docs or Microsoft Word. Let's imagine this in the context of our project at Office Green. As lead project manager, you have tons of information about the company's plan to provide office-friendly plans to top clients. But what would happen if you wrote every project detail on a whiteboard instead of a shared online document? Well, every member of your team would have to stop by your desk to get the latest information. And that's definitely not the most efficient use of anyone's time. But if you store this information in easily accessible online documents, you save everyone on the team time, energy, and a major headache. Today's tools have made it so much easier to share information with teammates. Even better, with project management tools, information sharing goes both ways. That means team members can also easily update you on their progress without the need for extra meetings or phone calls. How great is that? When you choose to write tool for a project, you make it easy for teammates to let you know if a task is on schedule or if it's delayed, which lets you quickly see how any changes might affect the rest of the project. Project management tools increases visibility and transparency for everyone, including stakeholders. You can use a variety of tools to accomplish many different things, like tracking progress on tasks, deliverables, and milestones. Tools can also help you manage a budget, build helpful charts and diagrams, manage contracts and licenses, and keep stakeholders informed. Tools can be straightforward, like digital spreadsheets or documents, or they can be more sophisticated, like scheduling and work management software. It's important to think about the needs of the project when choosing which to use. One thing to keep in mind is that if you choose a more sophisticated tool, your teammates and stakeholders will need some time to get familiar with it. For small projects, that might be more trouble than it's worth. So for small projects, a straightforward tool might be more effective. But if a project has a big scope, then it might be worth the team's time to learn and ultimately work with a more sophisticated project management tool. You should also keep in mind that sometimes you won't have a choice about the types of tools you use. If an organization has already decided to use a specific tool, then you will need to work with what they give you. It's all about remaining flexible. Are you starting to see how you can use tools to keep projects on track? Whether they're straightforward or sophisticated, tools have the power to help you communicate and manage more effectively. Next up, we'll cover some of the most common types of tools for effective project management. See you there. Hi there. So you've learned about how tools can make you more effective. Now let's learn more about the different types of tools used in project management. These include scheduling and work management software and tools for productivity and collaboration. Let's get started. One common tool type is scheduling and work management software. There are lots of different types of work management software on the market, including popular tools like these. Certain tools may work better for your project depending on a bunch of things. For example, the project methodology you're running or the number of tasks and people involved. So why would you choose to use scheduling and work management software? Well, it can be really useful for assigning tasks to multiple teammates and for tracking progress on that work. It can also help you visualize your team's progress. For example, if you're using work management software to assign and track tasks, you're more likely to notice if your team completes 50 tasks one week and just three tasks the following week. That's a clear sign that you need to check in to see if there's a problem that's blocking progress. If you hadn't been tracking their tasks, you might not have noticed the issue. That's part of the reason why work management software is so useful. It provides an overview of how the project is going so you know when you need to check in with your teams to get tasks back on track. Another type of project management tool we'll discuss is tools for productivity. Productivity tools can be very helpful for you and your team. This includes work processing tools like Microsoft Word or Google Docs. You can use these to create shared documents with the team like the project charter we taught you how to fill out earlier. You can also use these tools to build documents like meeting agendas and status updates and we'll talk more about these in a later course. Spreadsheets are another useful productivity tool. They're versatile and you can use them to make documents like racy charts and project plans as well as other helpful charts you'll learn more about in a later course. And presentations created in tools like Microsoft PowerPoint, Keynote or Google Slides can be a great way to package your project in a visual easily digestible way. Now let's discuss collaboration tools which you'll probably rely on to work closely with your teammates. These include tools you're probably familiar with like email and chat. Tools like this can help you quickly and efficiently check in with each other on questions, comments and other topics related to the project. Productivity tools like documents and spreadsheets and collaboration tools like email and chat are all pretty simple which means they're great for smaller projects with fewer tasks and teammates to keep track of. Scheduling and work management software is better for bigger projects with a larger number of tasks and a bigger team of people to manage. Cool, you've learned more about the types of tools available to you including scheduling and work management software, productivity tools and collaboration tools. We'll spend the next video diving a bit deeper on some of the most popular project management tools out there. Meet you there. Earlier, you learned about different types of project management tools from scheduling and work management software to tools for productivity and collaboration. Now let's discuss a few popular tools you might be expected to use or at least be familiar with. There are many different types of work management software that automatically make project planning and tracking a lot easier and that are much more efficient than manual project tracking. One tool that we'll focus on in this program is Asana. Asana is a work management platform that helps teams plan and coordinate their work from daily tasks to strategic initiatives. Asana provides a living system and a source of truth where everyone's work lives. With Asana, everyone can see, discuss and manage team priorities, giving teams clarity on who is doing what by when. It's great for building project plans, assigning tasks, automating workflows, tracking progress and communicating with stakeholders. As a project manager, you can use Asana to create a log of tasks like gathering cost estimates from external vendors and assign a task to people on the team. All tasks are visible and organized in the format of the project manager's choice like in a list or on a calendar and designed to drive transparency and connection with all the tasks related to the overall goal. It's easy to use with external stakeholders as well because within Asana, you can share status updates and other communications with people outside your company. Another great tool we'll focus on throughout this program is the spreadsheet. Spreadsheets are extremely versatile and you can use them for a wide range of tasks from creating timelines and building charts to managing budgets and tracking tasks. You can add and view project information in a variety of formats depending on what you need in the moment. For example, let's say you enter a list of tasks, due dates, completion statuses and task owners into a spreadsheet. From there, it's very simple to sort the list by due date to see what's due next. You can then filter the list of tasks by task owner so that you'll only see the things you're responsible for. You can also highlight the rows of the sheet and different colors to visually illustrate the tasks with the least progress. With spreadsheets, you can easily transform, visualize and manipulate information. Spreadsheets and more comprehensive tools like Asana are just two options for effective project management. And it's a good idea to get a basic understanding of a variety of software options out there. Then if your company doesn't have a standard software tool, you can choose the right one for the project needs. Being able to recommend the right tool for the job can be a great way to add value to your team at the beginning of a project. Keep in mind, however, that software options are constantly changing from the addition of new features to the launch of new tools. There's no way for you to know every software available and no company would expect that of you. Many of these tools have similar functionality like task tracking and task assignment. So if you understand one tool deeply, you should be able to easily adapt to a new tool on the job. Now that you've learned a bit more about Asana and the power of spreadsheets, take some time to explore these tools since we'll be working with them later in the program. Coming up, you'll hear from a project manager who will tell you all about their experience using tools during their day-to-day role at Google. Stay tuned. Hi, I'm Amar. I'm a senior engineering program manager at Google Shopping. And on a day-to-day basis, I drive programs which spans across multiple products at Google. As a project manager, tools are our best friends. Tools and the tools which will help us drive the execution, those are really, should be near and dear to us. And those are near and dear to me. What I look at is what tools which help me create the body of work. There are like a lot of open source tools as well as free tools, like Google Spreadsheets are there, Google Docs is there. So many of these tools are out there. And there are some others supporting tools also like JIRA and all. These will help you create the body of work. This will help you define that what needs to be delivered and when. This will help you create the timeline. Like there are timeline tools like Gantt chart, Gantt tools that you will find out. And then there are tools which will help you drive the visibility across the board and to drive the dependent ecosystem. We wanna make sure when we are starting at the project, we'll look at the available tool set so that we are not defragging the system that much. We are not really kind of adding too many complexities or new tools in the ecosystems. We wanna make sure that, okay, what are the current tools which are out there? Have a look at those tool set, find out are those supported, find out what's the current adoption rate and look at what are the gaps. If there are gaps, go for new tools, propose new tools to improve productivity. But if there's existing tool set which our team is following, which your team is following, try to learn those tools because those are the tools which will get quick adoption and those will be an amazing tool set to have with you. Nice work. Getting through all this material is a huge accomplishment. Take a moment to consider how much you've learned so far about the ins and outs of successfully kicking off a project. You dunk deeper on initiation, the first phase of the project lifecycle and how important it is to determine your project scope, including what's in scope and what's not. You also learned about project goals and deliverables and you learned how to measure project success by creating success criteria early on. Then you learned to define project roles and responsibilities. Choosing the right people for a project team is a big decision and one you'll always want to consider carefully. You now know how to create a stakeholder analysis that tells you how and when to communicate with different stakeholders. And you learn how to create and track team accountability using a race e-chart. You also study the final steps of the initiation phase, identifying resources, creating documentation and selecting tools. You learned about the resources that project managers rely on to achieve the goals of a project, from budgets to people to the materials needed to complete a deliverable. You also learned the value of documenting your work using a project charter, which is a key step to getting approval to start your project. Lastly, you learned about the many types of tools that can help you be a more efficient project manager from straightforward tools like email to sophisticated tools like Asana. Completing this course is no small feat and you've put in hours of work. Give yourself a pat on the back, you've earned it. In the next course, you'll jump right into the next phase of the project lifecycle and my colleague Rowena will be your guide. Get ready to have some fun as Rowena shows you the ropes of serious project planning. Hello, welcome to this course called Planning, putting it all together. If you've already completed our previous courses, then you have a great foundation for what it takes to initiate a project and kick off the planning phase. Before we get started, let me introduce myself. My name is Rowena and I'll be your instructor for this course. I work as a senior program manager in Google Cloud on a variety of projects. I mostly focus on systems and productivity enhancements for my team, which consists of around 100 full-time employees and more than 300 contractors around the world. Some of the largest-scale projects that I work on impact Google Cloud's sales and global sales support teams, which are made up of thousands of people. But I didn't start out building solutions for thousands of people at a global company. I left school at the age of 17 with no college degree and no real plan. Before Google, I worked in retail, hospitality, and even in the airline industry as a crew member. When I joined the corporate world, I noticed something. The processes were just as messy as the stock rooms of the retail stores where I'd worked. There was so much room to improve. I came to realize that every business is complicated and that there's always room to create order. So I started thinking about ways to automate my day-to-day tasks. I was emailing ideas to my manager and colleagues working with teams across the company, brainstorming solutions to problems, coordinating training for my co-workers, and so much more. That's when it became clear. I was project managing. I transferred into a role focused entirely on program management at Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California. In my job interview, I focused on examples of how I applied these transferable skills for my previous roles and how I could leverage the knowledge I gained from my experience. Four years later, I'm here and I'm so excited to be partnering with you on this learning journey. From the outside, big global companies can seem as though they have it all figured out, but there's always room for new processes and you likely have the skills and insights from your previous experiences that can be useful. So keep going. You're heading in the right direction. This course is focused on the planning phase. I'll share the tools and techniques to complete this phase. First up, I'll demonstrate how to kick off the planning phase. Then we'll explore the importance of setting and reaching milestones. For every milestone, there'll be a set of tasks to complete. So I'll teach you some tips for breaking down and distributing the workload. Later, we'll discuss the budget and how the overall budgeting process works. We'll learn about people or companies outside of your organization that may play a role in determining the budget. And we'll discuss the importance of sufficiently documenting your budget. Then we'll discuss the various risks and the possible impact those risks can have on the project. Nothing ever goes quite as planned, but risk management is a great way to make sure you know what could go wrong and how you'll address it. This includes communicating possible risks to your stakeholders, creating a mitigation plan, and then keeping an eye on those risks to make sure they don't store your projects. Last but not least, documentation ties it all together. Keeping all your project plans documented and organized not only helps you, but it also helps those involved knowing their responsibilities. Documentation also provides stakeholders with a window into the development of the project. It has always been important to the success of my own projects at Google. And I'm excited to explore this topic with you. Ready to get started? Meet you in the next video. Hi again. In the previous course, you learned about the initiation phase. During the initiation phase, the project manager is gathering all of the necessary preliminary information needed to get stakeholder approval and plan the project. A few key things need to happen during this time. First, the project manager gets assigned. That's you. Then the goals of the project have to be approved, as well as the scope of the project and its deliverables. A number of people will need to be assigned to the project, and you'll have a good sense of their individual roles and responsibilities. You'll also need stakeholder sign-off on your project charter. If all of these criteria have been met, then you're set to begin planning. Planning is a significant part of ensuring a project success. So let's take some time to discuss why it's so important. Planning is important for any project, large or small. While planning your project, you and other members of the team will determine the processes and workflows needed to meet your goals and put together ideas about how to make the project a success. While planning, you might draw from previous project experience, but don't be afraid to think of new ways to get results. Every project is different, so new and different approaches may be just the thing you need. Planning has many benefits. As we've discussed, planning helps you map out the full project. It helps you understand the work needed to achieve your goals. Planning also helps coordinate efforts and timelines with other teams, contractors and vendors. Another huge benefit of planning is that it gives you time to identify and prepare for risks that could impact your project. Those might include things like a delay in the timeline, the departure of a critical team member or a change in project direction from a primary stakeholder. Planning also gives you the chance to brainstorm ways to mitigate or address those risks. There are less obvious benefits too. For example, the planning phase can help you get buy-in from key members of the project team. Getting buy-in means that you've gained their support for your plans. Planning also demonstrates to stakeholders that the team is taking care to start the project with a detailed plan. But one of the most significant benefits of planning is teamwork, which will help you push your project across the finish line. By working together in the planning phase, individuals assigned to the project can become a strong team by the time the planning is done and the work is about to start. Planning together creates a shared understanding among all parties involved in the project. So to recap, planning has many benefits from helping the team to understand the work needed to achieve their goals to providing project plans to the stakeholders. Now that you know a bit more about planning, we'll learn how to launch the planning phase. I'll meet you in the next video. Hello again. In the last video, we discussed the importance of planning. Now, let's get into the details of how to launch the planning phase. As you learned earlier, the planning phase is the second phase of a project's life cycle. This can be a challenging time for a project manager because there's so much to consider. But it's important to know that project plans don't have to be perfect the very first time. And even if you do a great job with your plans the first time around, it's likely that the plan will change as the project evolves. The planning phase may differ from project to project, but generally three big things are worked out during the stage, the schedule, the budget, and the risk management plan. We'll discuss each of these in greater detail later on in the course. But for now, here's some general information so you can understand why these three elements are so crucial to planning. Let's start with the schedule. The schedule is basically a timeline of the project. It includes the start date, the end date, and the dates for things that will happen in between. You'll use time estimation techniques to determine these dates. Let's imagine scheduling in our example project at Office Green. As a reminder, you're the lead project manager for Project Plant Pows, a new service that will provide top clients with desk-friendly plants. You want to launch the service by the end of the year, so the planning phase for this effort should include a number of key dates. Those dates might include when you'll request proposals from plant vendors. They might also include the date you'll kick off with the web designers and developers who are creating a new website for the service. It should also include important dates during the project execution phase, like when the plants need to be ready for delivery or when the new web page design needs to be approved. And you'll need to include the target date for the launch of the service. Another part of the planning phase is setting the budget. The budget will account for the total cost to complete the project. The total cost needs to be broken down to determine how much has to be spent on different elements of the project. For Project Plant Pows, the budget will need to include items like the cost of designing and launching a web page, the cost of hiring your plant vendor, and much more. The third component of the planning phase is risk management, which means searching for possible problems and planning ahead to mitigate these risks. Let's face it, risk is inevitable in every project. What's not inevitable is how the risk impacts your project. Good project planning means searching for places where trouble might occur. Where might the schedule get off track? Where might the budgets exceed your estimates? You'll work with your team to consider answers to these questions and prepare a risk management plan based on whatever you discover. Let's go back to the office green example. While putting together the initial schedule, you may realize that your estimates from your developers put you way beyond your launch date. To manage that risk, you might try to reduce or adjust the project's scope to still meet your deadline or even negotiate a new launch date with your stakeholders. These are two simple examples of how you might mitigate a scheduling risk. So to recap, you'll spend the planning phase building your schedule, setting your budget, and preparing your risk management plan. But first, you need to get the whole team on board. Next, we'll discuss the project kickoff meeting, which is where the project really gets going. Meet you there. Hello again. In this video, you'll learn how to schedule a kickoff meeting once you're ready to shift into planning mode. It's important to schedule a meeting that will serve as a formal start to project planning. You might be wondering what a kickoff meeting is and how it differs from other types of meetings. That's a great question. A project kickoff meeting is the first meeting in which a project team comes together to ground everyone in a shared vision, gain a shared understanding of the project's goals and scope, and to understand each person's individual roles within the team. So who's invited to the kickoff meeting? Well, that would be the team members identified in a racy chart created during the initiation phase. As a reminder, a racy chart helps to define roles and responsibilities for individuals or teams to ensure that the work gets done efficiently. During the kickoff meeting, team members will learn more about how they'll contribute to the project and how they'll gain a deeper understanding of how the team will work together to reach the project's goals. You should also invite your stakeholders and your sponsor to the meeting so that they have a chance to understand the high-level plan for the project, can share their perspective, and you can ensure that everyone is on the same page. Now, you might be wondering, why do I need a kickoff meeting? Can't my team learn everything they need to know from the project charter? We get it. Meetings can be time-consuming, and there are definitely situations when a quick email or a chat to a teammate will suffice. But when you're kicking off a project, especially larger projects with multiple people involved, it's important to get together to establish a shared vision, align on the scope, and build team rapport. This is also an opportunity for teammates to ask questions and offer insights. And it's a great time for you to set expectations with the team about how each person will individually contribute to the project. Now, let's discuss how to plan and run a kickoff meeting. There are lots of templates for kickoff meeting agendas online, but most follow a similar structure and last about an hour. Keep in mind that this is just a suggestion, and you should feel free to schedule as much or as little time for each agenda item according to the needs of your project and the team. Most meetings start with brief introductions. You can allocate about 10 minutes for everyone in the group to introduce themselves and their roles. And if time allows, share a fun fact to help build team rapport. Then you'll spend about five minutes giving an overview of the background of the project. This covers details like how the project came to be and why the project matters. You'll also use this time to set a shared vision. Next, spend about five minutes sharing the goals and the scope, which refers to the boundaries around a project. That includes making it clear what work is considered in scope and what work is considered out of scope. This is also a good place to share the target launch date and highlight any important milestones the team need to be aware of. Once you've covered goals and scope, it's time to discuss everyone's roles. It's a good idea to spend about five minutes making sure that everyone is clear on what work they'll be responsible for throughout the duration of the project. Next, it's time to address collaboration, which is how the team will work together on the project. This is a great time to go over tools that'll serve as a communal source of information for the team, like a project plan created in a spreadsheet or work management software tool like Asana. It's also a great time to determine how the team will communicate with one another, like through daily email updates, a team chat room and weekly team check-in meetings. You should spend about 10 minutes on this topic. When that's all set, it's time to discuss what comes next. Now that you've discussed the details of the project thus far, you should spend about 10 minutes setting expectations with your teammates for what's coming up. You'll also use this time to make clear to each teammate what actions they'll need to take next. Finally, it's really important to set aside about 15 minutes for questions from the group. This is your team's chance to gain clarity on any of the topics you've discussed so far. It's also your chance to hear from the team and ensure that the project is benefiting from diversity of thoughts, experiences, and ideas. For example, in addition to fielding questions out loud in the meeting, I might invite teammates to input their questions or feedback in a shared document. This practice can help create space for collaboration. I also like to poll my teammates for confidence on the topics discussed that day. I ask what their confidence level is on a scale of one to five. One being I'm not confident at all and five being I'm extremely confident. If they're not confident, I ask them what I can do to help change that. This practice can give the team a stronger sense of support because they know I'm there to help them through roadblocks. If you try this practice in your meetings, be sure to deliver on any promises you make there. Your reputation as a project manager to get things done and remove roadblocks is critical to building and maintaining relationships. So to recap, the kickoff meeting will cover introductions, project background, goals and scope, roles, collaboration, and what comes next. And the meeting will leave time for questions from the group at the end. Once you've finalized the meeting agenda, document this information into a meeting agenda template and send it to attendees a day or two ahead of the meeting. As the project manager, you'll be leading the majority of this meeting. And when you're presenting, it's difficult to take notes and present at the same time. So at the start of the meeting, ask a teammate to take notes on key points you discussed throughout the session and to record each teammate's action items. In some cases, it may be beneficial to record this meeting so that attendees can revisit it later, especially if you have a large or dispersed team. Just be sure to get each attendees permission to record ahead of time. After the meeting, don't forget to send a follow-up email to the group summarizing key points and outcomes from the meeting, as well as any action items to the attendees. In your follow-up email, be sure to also invite attendees to reach out if they have any additional questions. While there's a lot that goes into the kickoff meeting, remember that this is an exciting moment for the team and especially for you as the project manager. All of the careful thinking and hard work that you've done during the initiation phase comes together to form the foundation of your project. Coming up, we'll learn about milestones, tasks, and how they differ. Meet you in the next video. Hi again. As we've discussed throughout this program, the project manager is responsible for assigning work to the team and keeping track of the project's progress. When we discuss assigning work, we'll use a few key terms, project milestones and project tasks. Let's break these down. A project milestone is an important point within the project schedule that indicates progress and usually signifies the completion of a deliverable or phase of the project. These are significant checkpoints in your project and keeping track of them helps ensure that your project is on schedule to meet its goals. For example, a milestone might include completing the first draft of a report and the goal may be to ultimately publish the report. Another example of a milestone is receiving sign-off or approval from your customer on a major deliverable. Let's discuss how milestones differ from project tasks. A project task is an activity that needs to be accomplished within a set period of time. The work of a project is broken down into many different tasks. In order to reach a milestone, you and your team must complete multiple tasks. For example, if a milestone is completing the first draft of a report, the tasks required to get to that milestone might include hiring a writer, conducting research, and drafting different sections of the report. Let's imagine milestones and tasks in the context of project plant powers at Office Cream. One of your project deliverables is to launch a website for your new service where customers will be able to place orders and get customer support. Some of the milestones leading up to that launch will include securing approval on the website design and implementing feedback from user testing. To achieve those milestones, your team needs to complete multiple project tasks. For example, in order to reach the design milestone, your website designer will need to create initial mockups of the proposed website design. You'll need to review those mockups and the designer will need to implement your feedback. Each of these items is a project task and you won't reach your milestone until they're complete. To review, milestones are important points within the project schedule and project tasks are activities that need to be accomplished within a set period of time to help reach those milestones. Milestones and project tasks are interconnected. Tasks ladder up to milestones which are crucial for project tracking. Now that you know more about milestones, project tasks and how the two differ, we'll learn more about the importance of milestones in the next video. I'll meet you there. Great to see you again. So you've learned that a milestone is an important point within the project schedule that highlights progress and usually marks the completion of a deliverable or phase in the project. But now, let's talk about why setting milestones within your project is so important. While it might seem tempting to make a quick to-do list and get on with the project, it's really important that you take the time and effort to break your project down piece by piece. Here's why. First, setting milestones gives you a clear understanding of the amount of work your project will require. The act of setting milestones forces you to break your project down into more manageable chunks. The further you go, the better you'll be able to see how much work will be needed to meet the project goals. At first glance, it might seem simple to launch a new website, but it might be more work than you think. And if you break that deliverable down into milestones and those milestones into tasks, you'll have a better sense of the true amount of work that needs to be done. This will help you better manage the project workload. Another reason milestones are so great is that they can help keep your project on track. When you set a milestone, you assign clear deadlines for when certain project deliverables need to be completed. Then, as you work through the execution phase, you can look back at these deadlines to make sure that the project is progressing at the right pace. A third reason you'll want to set milestones is that they help you uncover areas where you might need to adjust scope, timelines, or resources to meet your goals. For example, if you realize that reaching a milestone will require more tasks than you'd anticipated, you might ask a stakeholder for permission to reduce the scope of the project and cut down on the number of tasks. And finally, there's one more reason milestones are so important. Actually reaching milestones can seriously motivate your team and illustrate real progress to your stakeholders. With big projects that go on for months, you'll want to keep the team's motivation high. A milestone signifies the completion of an important chunk of work and provides a moment of celebration for the team, even if there's more work ahead. Milestones also serve as a great check-in point to highlight your progress to stakeholders. It gives them the opportunity to see the work that's been completed so far and lets them see everything is on track and up to their standards. It's also important to remember that milestones must be completed on time and in sequential order, because usually reaching the next milestone is dependent on completing a previous milestone. Think about this in terms of project plant powers at Office Green. As we discussed earlier, in order to launch a website for a new plant service, there are a few milestones you need to hit like securing approval of a website design, completing development of the website, and implementing user feedback. These milestones must happen in this order. Here's why. The web developer can't build the website if the design hasn't been approved by stakeholders and you can't implement feedback from user testing if there's no website to test. So we know it's important to reach milestones in sequential order, but it's just as important that you reach them on time. If the team misses the mark to complete a deliverable tied to a specific milestone, it could set back your project schedule, meaning your team might need to work over time or add additional resources to catch up. For example, if you need to secure a stakeholder approval on a website design by Friday, but the web designer hasn't completed the design yet, you might have to wait until after the weekend secure stakeholder approval. This will delay the start of the development phase, giving your team less time to build the website. Even worse, this delay could affect the project budget if completing this deliverable directly ties to a payment from the client. If you miss the deadline, you'll likely delay receipt of that payment. You might even risk losing the payment altogether. Though deadlines are sometimes flexible, it's important to be extra mindful of milestones where the deadline is non-negotiable. And that's that. Hopefully you understand why milestones are important to any project. Coming up, we'll discuss how to set milestones for your project. See you there. Hi again. Okay, so you know that milestones are pretty important. They help give you a clear picture of the amount of work required. They help your project stay on track, uncover areas where you might need additional resources, motivate your teammates, and show progress to your stakeholders. So now let's talk about identifying milestones within your project and how you can set deadlines for each one. The first step to setting a milestone is to evaluate your project as a whole. It helps to refer back to your project charter to remind yourself of the project goal. Then make a list of what your team needs to do to achieve that goal. The big items that indicate progress are your milestones. These are the key points within the project schedule that signify the completion of a project deliverable or a phase in the project. Smaller items, like any item that a stakeholder wouldn't need to review, for example, are tasks. Your plan for these, once you've separated them out from the milestones. So let's go back to our office green example. One of the project deliverables is a new website and as we determined earlier, some milestones for our office green website scenario include securing approval of website design, completing development of the website, and implementing user feedback. Mocking up initial designs or building a landing page are smaller items on your list. So those are marked as tasks. Try to keep in mind that some projects might have many milestones, while others might just have two or three. There's no one right number of milestones to set. The number will vary from project to project. Once you've determined your milestones, the next step is to assign each one a deadline. Reaching each of your milestones is dependent on the completion of multiple project tasks. So to make sure you give your team a fair amount of time to complete each of those tasks, you'll need to space your milestones out accordingly. For a larger months long project, like project plant pals, you shouldn't expect to meet multiple milestones in the span of a week. Mocking up website designs and collecting insights from user testing are big tasks that take time. You need to space milestones out to give your team room to complete their work. To get a good sense of timing, you can connect with teammates to discuss the tasks required to reach each milestone and get their estimates for how long these tasks will take. With those estimates in mind, you can make an informed decision about reasonable deadlines for each milestone. When you set deadlines for milestones, you'll also want to consider the needs of your stakeholders. Ask yourself when they'll expect to see a certain project deliverable and consider the answer when choosing a deadline. Your stakeholders will want to see regular indications that the team is making progress and milestones are a great way to show that progress. So to recap, you set milestones by looking at your project as a whole and pulling out important checkpoints that show progress. Then you assign deadlines to each milestone while keeping the needs of your stakeholders top of mind. Next up, we'll discuss a helpful tool for breaking down the tasks that ladder up to each milestone. See you there. So we've discussed how to set milestones. Now we'll learn how to account for the many tasks that ladder up to each milestone. You can do this by creating a work breakdown structure. Let's start with the definition. A work breakdown structure, often abbreviated to WBS, is a tool that sorts the milestones and tasks of a project in a hierarchy in the order they need to be completed. This is a helpful tool because it helps break down the sometimes intimidating challenges of a project into more manageable chunks. Big projects like publishing a report or organizing a conference seem a lot less daunting when the work required to get there is broken down step by step with a clear pathway from the beginning of the project to the end. Let's look at an example of a basic work breakdown structure. There are lots of different ways to design a work breakdown structure, but one common way is to create a tree diagram of project tasks. Let's say that we're creating a work breakdown structure for the Project Plant Power's website launch. At the top of the diagram is the name of the project. The second level of our diagram breaks the project down into three milestones. These include securing design approval, developing the site, and implementing user feedback. At the third level of the chart, we can see each of those milestones gets further broken down into a series of project tasks. For example, tasks listed beneath your design approval milestone include mocking up designs and collecting feedback. This is a very simple example of a work breakdown structure. Here, we've only created a work breakdown structure for a new website, which is just one of the Project Plant Power's deliverables. Keep in mind that in future project management roles, you'll likely create a WBS that outlines the tasks for an entire project. It's also important to note that while creating a work breakdown structure is a helpful exercise for visualizing the tasks of a project, you wouldn't typically include this type of diagram in your official project plan. Instead, you'd input the tasks identified through this exercise into a spreadsheet or your chosen work management software where you can more easily assign owners to each task. Okay, so after completing a work breakdown structure and organizing those tasks in a spreadsheet, a few things should be clearer to you. First, you should have a set of discrete project tasks that ladder up to each of your milestones. You and your teammates will know exactly what needs to happen to reach your first milestone and the milestones after that. Second, you're now in a good position to assign those tasks to members of the project team. Each person should have a clear understanding of the tasks they own and the order in which they need to complete them. Let's break down how to assign tasks. Tasks are typically assigned according to a person's role in the project. For example, in our office green scenario, the web designer is assigned to the task of mocking up the initial website design. You are assigned to the task of reviewing that design and providing feedback. And the designer is assigned to the task of implementing your feedback. A web developer will be assigned to the next task of developing the site itself. Sometimes your team will have multiple teammates working in the same type of role. To assign tasks between two or more team members with the same roles, you might take into consideration each person's familiarity with the tasks at hand. For example, if you have multiple web developers working on the new website, you might task one developer with creating the landing page and task the other developer with creating the Contact Us page. When assigning tasks, you should also consider each teammate's workload. Think about how much time they're meant to be spending on the project compared to work outside the project that they might also be responsible for. It's important to keep everyone's workloads balanced. You'll want to make sure that a single teammate isn't assigned more work than others. You'll also want to make sure that no one is assigned more work than they can handle. When people feel overloaded, the quality of their work may suffer or they might need more time to complete the number of tasks, putting the timeline and the overall project schedule at risk. As the project manager, you'll ensure that your teammates are clear on their assigned tasks. You can do this by assigning tasks with help from project management tools, like Asana, which I use a lot in my day-to-day role at Google. When you manage a project in Asana, you'll add tasks to represent actionable pieces of work needed to complete the project. As a best practice, it's good to start each task with a verb. For example, instead of just typing website, make clear the task is to mock up the website or add images to the website. Another thing to think about when assigning tasks is timeline. Be sure to add an assignee and a due date to each task so it's clear who's doing what by when. Finally, be sure to include as much detail surrounding the task as possible to avoid miscommunication. In Asana, you can click into the task details to add helpful information. Here, you can add a description, link to corresponding files or attachments, or even comment on the work related to the task. There's so many benefits to assigning tasks, but the biggest one is that it frees you up to focus on managing a project. This way, you can feel confident in the knowledge that your teammates are responsible for specific work. But there's also some less obvious benefits of assigning tasks. Let's explore these more now. One less obvious benefit of assigning tasks is that it creates a sense of personal responsibility for members of the team. When you assign a teammate to a task, you enter into an agreement with that person that they'll own the task until it's completed. Creating a sense of ownership for members of the team is important because it makes them feel more invested in the project. It also gives them space for personal growth. Plus, it supports your own skill building as a manager who's a supportive delegator. And on top of that, it keeps your team motivated and invested in completing their work on time. And while each team member should have a sense of responsibility for their assigned task, a complete sense of ownership might feel overwhelming for some teammates. If that's the case, it's a good idea for a project manager to encourage teammates to support one another on their tasks. This is also great for building overall team rapport. Got all that? Great. So to recap, you've learned about work breakdown structures and how to assign tasks to people on your team. Meet us in the next video for a recap on what we've covered over the past few videos. Hi again. Over the past few videos, we've discussed how to launch the planning phase of the project lifecycle. This is where you'll build your schedule, set your budget and prepare your risk management plan. You also learned about an important part of the planning phase, the project kickoff meeting. This is a key moment where you can meet with your team and stakeholders to establish a shared vision, a line on scope, build rapport, ask questions and set expectations. We also discussed milestones, which are important points within the project schedule that indicate progress. And we also learned about tasks, which are activities that need to be accomplished within a set period of time. Then you learned about the value of milestones and how to set them. And you learned how to take those milestones, break them down into tasks and record that information in a work breakdown structure. Next, we'll explore estimating time and setting a schedule. See you soon. Hi, my name's Clinita and I'm a senior engineering program manager at Google. So the planning phase of project management is essentially the time where you take step back and you reflect on what's the scope of the project. So what are the problems that we need to solve? When you look at planning for projects, it's critical to understanding what you're building, who you're building for and how long you have to build it. We look at our risk to make sure that we know what potentially could derail the project. And if possible, create mitigation that would circumvent any risk that we may come in contact with or just be aware of things like scope. We also look at timing. Is there a timeline that we need to hit? And if so, do we have enough time to hit that deadline? We assess the work that needs to be done to understand if the work that needs to be done in order to meet the requirements fits into the timeline that we have. We also look at testing, what the testing plan looks like, what is success gonna look like? So we know what the target is so that when we hit the target and we validate it, we already know what metrics we expect to get. I'm a planner, it's just in my nature. Planning, it's a tone for what we're actually doing together, it creates a sense of team. The planning also aligns everybody to understanding what it is we're all shooting for, what it is our goals are, what success is gonna look like. It really is the place where we come together to ensure that we're all on the same page and we're all going in the same direction. When you don't have that, things get lost. You're not talking to the right people, you have miscommunications, things get delayed and you don't really understand why. People aren't comfortable communicating what progress is happening, they really aren't comfortable in communicating when their problem comes up. So you wanna just set a tone of like, we're all in this together, we're all going to be successful together and we are gonna run into roadblocks, we are gonna run into problems, but we're gonna work it out and figure it out as a team. Hi, welcome back. In the previous section, we learned more about the planning phase, which is the second phase of the project lifecycle. We introduced you to kick off meetings, which is the first meeting for the project team. We also discussed milestones, tasks and how to set these within a project. Coming up, we'll explain why it is necessary to create and manage a project plan. We'll discuss the definition of a project plan and we'll learn what typically goes into one. This includes the project schedule, which will help guide your team to the finish line. We'll also share how to use time estimation methods to prevent project failure. We'll introduce you to a few time estimation techniques, which can help you build an accurate project schedule. And finally, we'll examine tools and best practices you can use to build out a project plan. Ready to get started? Meet me in the next video. A project plan can be useful for any project, big or small, since it helps you document the scope, tasks, milestones and overall activities of the project. At the center of the project plan is the project schedule. The project schedule can help you estimate the amount of time it'll take to complete the project and it can provide the team with a way to track the project's progress against your goals. What goes into a project plan may vary from company to company, but most plans contain these five basic elements. These are tasks, milestones, people, documentation and time. Let's break those down. A project plan will include tasks and milestones. Two topics we discussed before. Tasks are activities that need to be accomplished within a set period of time. They're assigned to different members of the team according to their roles and skills. And milestones are important points within the schedule that indicate progress. They usually signify the completion of a deliverable or phase of the project. A project plan will also include the people working on your team and their roles. It's important that each team member understands their role and the tasks they're responsible for completing. Ensuring that everyone is clear on their assigned task frees you up to focus on managing the project and creates a sense of personal responsibility for members of the team. A project plan is a good place to link to relevant documentation. This includes documents like your racy chart, which helps to define roles and responsibilities for individuals on your team. You can also link to your charter, which clearly defines the project and outlines the details needed to reach your goals. Relevant documentation can also include documents like your budget and risk management plan. We'll discuss more about those later on in the course. Lastly, a project plan should include the estimated time that will be spent on the project. This forms the basis of the schedule, which is the anchor of your project plan. The estimated time includes dates on which tasks should be started and completed and the dates when you hope to reach various milestones. It also includes the start and end dates of the project, which are important in determining which resources you'll need and when you'll need them. So how exactly do you estimate how long these things will take? Meet me in the next video to find out. As the project manager, you aren't responsible for completing every task. What you are responsible for is identifying and helping assign those tasks and then estimating how long they'll take to complete. These estimates come together to determine the overall project schedule. So how do you estimate the amount of time a given task will take? You do this with the help of your team. Time estimation is a prediction of the total amount of time required to complete a task. Effort estimation is a prediction of the amount and difficulty of active work required to complete a task. Effort estimation differs from time estimation in that effort quantifies the amount of time it will take a person to complete work on a task. On the flip side, time refers to the overall duration of the task from start to finish. That includes inactive time. Here's an example. The effort estimation for painting a wall might be 30 minutes, but time estimation might be 24 hours. That's because in addition to the 30 minutes of active painting time, there are also 23 and a half hours of inactive drying time. It's important to understand the difference between time estimation and effort estimation because it can help you be more efficient with your available resources. If there's idle time baked into a given task, your teammate is effectively free to do other things. A painter can do other tasks while the wall is drying, like painting the mailbox or the window trim. An unrealistic effort estimate can negatively impact a project's schedule. Generally, this happens when you underestimate the amount of time it will take to complete a task. Often, the culprit for underestimating effort is optimism. And listen, optimism is a wonderful trait for a project manager to possess, but too much optimism can lead you to overlook potential risks that could set your plans behind schedule. Though it might be tempting to make the optimistic assumption that tasks will be executed exactly according to plan, there is always a possibility that there will be setbacks. So how do you try to avoid making unrealistic effort estimates? You can do this by communicating with teammates assigned to each task. Your teammates will have the most realistic understanding of the amount of work required to complete a task and should be able to provide you with the best estimate. Let's imagine this scenario in the context of our Plant Pals project at Office Green. As a reminder, you're launching a new service to provide top Office Green customers with small, low-maintenance plants that they can place on their desks. You might assume that creating a contact list of top customers is relatively straightforward and can be completed in a single day. But it's important to really consider certain subtasks required to complete work in your planning. Subtasks refer to smaller tasks that are required to complete a larger task. For example, this might include meeting with the global sales team to identify clients gathering contact information, determining client language preferences, and building a spreadsheet to house this information. Asking the teammate assigned to the task for their estimate is likely to yield a more accurate estimation since they'll have a deeper understanding of the work and the nuances of what's required to complete the task. You might learn that creating the contact list may take two days to complete, which could be double the time you originally expected. Of course, you can usually ask follow-up questions or even gently push back on their estimate as needed. Later on, we'll discuss more of the techniques you can use to get more accurate estimates from your teammates. Now, even though task owners tend to have the strongest sense of how much time they'll need to complete a task, the fact is that effort estimates are just that. Estimates, meaning that sometimes those estimates won't be accurate. For example, in our plant power scenario, your teammate estimates that it will take two days to create a contact list of top customers. But let's say that the sales team is out of the office for a team building exercise and unable to meet about the client list until after the weekend. This will create a task delay. And as a result, the original estimate is no longer accurate. Luckily, there's a helpful tool called a buffer that you can use during the planning phase to protect against inaccurate effort estimates. A buffer is extra time added to the end of a task or a project to account for unexpected slowdowns or delays in work progress. Buffers are important because they can provide some leeway, just in case your time and effort estimates turn out to fall a bit short. With a buffer, you can add extra time into your schedule and your project shouldn't fall off track when task delays inevitably arise. There are two types of buffers you can use when planning your schedule, task buffers and project buffers. First, we have task buffers, which refer to extra time tacked onto a specific task. Task buffers should be used primarily for tasks that are out of the project team's control. For example, you might ask a potential plant vendor to provide you with a cost estimate by Monday. You might assign them this deadline knowing that you won't actually need the estimate until Thursday. The time between Monday and Thursday is your buffer and it provides your team with extra time just in case the vendor sends their estimates to you a day or too late. Task buffers should be used more sparingly for tasks within the project team's control. For example, you might choose to add buffers only to tasks that are difficult to complete or that have an element of unpredictability, like the length of time it will take plants to grow. Adding a buffer to every task could lengthen your project schedule unnecessarily, leaving you, your team and your stakeholders with an unrealistic timeline. This is where project buffers come in handy. Project buffers differ from task buffers in that they provide extra time to the overall project schedule. Rather than adding a buffer to every task, you can add extra time as a buffer towards the end of your project schedule. Then you can use that extra time, two to three days, for example, as needed throughout the project. For instance, if a teammate misses a deadline here and there, the project buffer gives you space in the overall schedule to make up for lost time. I use buffers often in my day-to-day role at Google. For example, on a recent project at Google, I was working with a new hire who was great at coding but kept missing deadlines. I realized they weren't giving themselves enough buffer time to do testing. I started to ask questions about their current workload and the complexity of their tasks, and based on their answers to those questions, I was able to gather insights about their work and determine where I needed to add buffer to their tasks. Ultimately, my goal is to ensure that I'm setting a realistic timeline for the project. After all, if you hit your project goal two months later than expected, your organization may not consider the project a success. Time estimation, effort estimation, and buffers can help you build realistic plans for reaching the project goal. Hi again. Okay, so we've discussed time estimation, which is a prediction of the total amount of time that will be required to complete a task. And we've also discussed effort estimation, which is a prediction of the amount and difficulty of active work required to complete a task. These techniques can help you estimate the length of time it'll take to complete a task. Once you have that information, you'll need to determine if you have the right number of people to get the work done. To figure this out, you can use a technique called capacity planning. First, let's define capacity. Capacity refers to the amount of work that the people or resources assigned to the project can reasonably complete in a set period of time. A person can only do so much, and it's important to keep in mind each person's capacity when assigning work. This is where capacity planning comes in. Capacity planning refers to the act of allocating people and resources to project tasks and determining whether or not you have the necessary resources required to complete the work on time. During this process, you might find that you need more resources to speed up the project timeline, like a second web developer or a third writer. Let's imagine capacity planning in the context of our Plant Pals project at Office Green. If you know that you'll need to deliver plants to 100 customers over a period of five days, then you'll need to determine if you've hired enough delivery drivers to meet that deadline. If one driver averages four deliveries within an eight-hour workday, then you know you'll need to hire at least five drivers to complete the work on time. Even if a person on your project team is spending 100% of their time at work on your project, they'll have limited capacity for the amount of work they should be expected to complete each day. Between meetings, unexpected urgent tasks and other elements of a typical workday, there's only so much each person can complete. So how do you decide where a teammate should focus their priorities and make the most of their capacity? You can prioritize their time by plotting the critical path of your project timeline. The critical path refers to the list of project milestones that you must reach in order to meet the project goal on schedule, as well as the mandatory tasks that contribute to the completion of each milestone. Anything else is considered off the critical path. For example, tasks on the critical path for launching project plant powers might include hiring plant vendors, developing a new website, and fulfilling deliveries. A task like adding flowers to your product lineup is nice to have, but might not have much impact on the overall success of your project because this task isn't crucial to your launch. These tasks aren't part of the critical path. To summarize, your critical path includes the bare minimum number of tasks and milestones you need to reach your project goal. If your team is unable to complete any of those tasks on time, that might result in a project delay. To determine the critical path of a project, you'd start by listing all the tasks required to complete the project and the milestones they feed into. This is a perfect time to think back to your work breakdown structure, or WBS, which is a chart that sorts all the milestones and tasks of a project into a hierarchy according to the order in which they need to be completed. This includes a detailed overview of every project task. Then, you determine which tasks on the list absolutely can't begin until another task is complete. This is called a dependency, and we'll discuss this topic in more detail later on. Next, you'll work with your team to make time estimates for each task and map each task from start to finish. The longest path is your critical path. There are a few factors that can impact capacity and capacity planning. First, you need to be able to identify which tasks can happen in parallel, which means they can happen at the same time as other tasks. You will also need to identify which tasks can happen sequentially, meaning they must happen in a specific order. When you identify which tasks can happen in parallel, it helps you create efficiencies within your project schedule by demonstrating where you can complete multiple tasks at the same time. Identifying sequential tasks help you identify the tasks that you need to prioritize early on in the project. For example, a sequential task for your plant pals project may include needing budget approval before hiring a vendor, and two parallel tasks might include hiring delivery drivers and the development of a website. These tasks have no relationship to one another as they focus on different portions of the project and can be completed by different members of the team. That means that one task can begin even if the other task hasn't been completed, and so the work to complete these tasks can happen at the same time. You also need to determine which project tasks have a fixed start date. A fixed start date refers to the date on which you must start work on your task in order to achieve your goal. Identifying whether or not your tasks have a fixed start date can help with capacity planning because it helps ensure that you'll have the right number of people available to complete tasks on time. For example, let's imagine that your contract says you'll need to deliver 100 plants on a specific date. That means that the task of picking up those plants has a fixed start date of one day prior to delivery. Alternatively, some tasks might have an earliest start date. An earliest start date refers to the earliest date in which you can begin working on a task. Identifying an earliest start date can set accurate expectations for when vendors and team members will be up and running on the project. This can help you plan your work and prioritize your work accordingly. For example, if you're working with a new vendor, you need to wait until contracts are signed and the purchase order is approved and created before the vendor can start. Let's say that at Office Green, this process can take about three weeks. Based on this information, you can determine that the earliest start date for your vendor will be three weeks from the kickoff meeting with your vendor. Another best practice for capacity planning and creating a critical path includes identifying if a task has float, also sometime known as slack. Float refers to the amount of time you can wait to begin a task before it impacts the project schedule and threatens the project outcome. These are high priority tasks that have low to no wiggle room. This helps reinforce what is and what is not on your critical path. For instance, tasks on the critical path should have zero float, meaning there is no room for delays. And tasks that do have float are not a part of the critical path. For example, the shipment of plants to a priority customer who's requested their delivery on a specific date is a task that has zero float. Great, you've now learned a bit more about how to define capacity, capacity planning and critical path. We also discussed the techniques used to identify critical path in a project and the various factors that can impact capacity and capacity planning. In the next video, we'll continue learning how to create viable estimates in a project plan. You'll also find out how your soft skills can help the effectiveness of your team. Meet you there. Hi again. Ready to get back into it? Let's go. Time estimation, effort estimation and capacity planning are all helpful techniques for creating your project schedule. And at the center of all this planning is your team. Throughout the schedule planning process, you're working with teammates to gather estimates and you're taking into account each person's capacity when building the project schedule. It makes sense to involve your teammates at this stage. After all, the person assigned to the given task is likely to have the best sense of how long it will take to complete that task. They'll also have the best sense of their own capacity for taking on the work. But these conversations are a two-way discussion and you'll need to tap into your soft skills to get the most accurate estimate from your team. Soft skills are personal characteristics that help people work effectively with others. These include crucial communication and interpersonal skills we've discussed over the course of this program. Soft skills can be important when trying to understand what might be blocking someone's ability to do their best work. Let's go over three ways to use soft skills and gather accurate estimates from your teammates. These are asking the right questions, negotiating effectively and practicing empathy. Let's start with asking the right questions. Think of conversations around the time estimation as a kind of interview. You're connecting with your teammates to learn more about how they work on specific tasks and you'll use this information to build your schedule. To aim to get the most relevant information from these conversations, you'll want to be certain that you're asking effective, open-ended questions that lead to the answers you're seeking. An open-ended question is a question that cannot be answered with a yes or a no. The answer provides the relevant details of what you need to know. Let's imagine this in the context of your project at Office Green. You've discussed the design of a new website with your web designer and you'd like to know how long it will take them to mock up designs for your review. Now let's say you start the conversation by asking a question like, can you complete the mock-ups in one week? This is a closed-ended question and might elicit a simple yes or no answer which doesn't tell you much about the task of designing a website or about your teammate's working style. Now, imagine if you had started this conversation with an open-ended question. For example, you might ask the web designer something like, how long does it typically take you to mock up a website design like this one? This is an open-ended question and is more likely to elicit a more detailed response. From there, you can ask follow-up questions like, how complex are the steps to complete this task? What are the risks associated with this task and when do you think you can have this ready? By asking your teammates effective, open-ended questions about their assigned tasks, you can learn more about how they work and what they do. As you have more of these conversations, you'll develop a better sense of your teammate's roles and their tasks and you'll be able to rely less on your team to make accurate estimates. Another way to use soft skills to gather estimates from teammates is to negotiate effectively. Part of your job as the project manager is to bridge the gap between high-level goals of the project and the day-to-day perspective of your team. While your project might be your number one priority, it's possible that people on your project team have competing priorities on other teams to keep track of as well. Negotiating effectively can help you influence a team member to make your project their priority by collaborating to find an outcome that works for everyone. For example, let's imagine that the website designer estimates it will take them two weeks to mock up the website design for review. But perhaps you were hoping that their estimate might be closer to one week. To arrive at an estimate that works for both you and the designer, you might gently challenge the estimate by asking follow-up questions. Perhaps you'd ask if their estimate includes mocking up designs for multiple pages. If so, you might ask if the designer is able to share one or two pages with you sooner than their proposed deadline. By asking questions, you can determine if their estimate is flexible. Or if you need to bring in an additional designer to support the schedule. By negotiating effectively with your teammates, you can create a sense of shared ownership over the project outcomes and create a schedule that aligns with everyone's workload. Now let's discuss the value of practicing empathy. Empathy refers to a person's ability to relate to the thoughts and feelings of others. Practicing empathy at work can be a very effective way to build trust with your team. Your teammates are humans and each person can only do so much. When you're discussing estimates with the team, you might practice empathy by asking each person about their workload, including work outside of your project and the overall work-life balance. You might also ask if they've scheduled vacation or leave during the duration of the project or if there are crucial holidays in which they won't be working. This can help you avoid assigning tasks when teammates are unable to complete them on time. For example, the web designer might tell you that they're also designing a website for another team at office screen and that the timeline for both projects overlap. So to avoid overloading your designer with work, you might work with the other project manager to balance workloads across the teams. People like to feel their work is valued. So part of empathy is remembering to always be appreciative of the work, collaboration and support that you're getting from the team. So to recap, asking the right questions, negotiating effectively and practicing empathy can help you get viable, accurate estimates from your teammates about project tasks. Coming up, we'll discuss putting these estimates to good use in the project plan. Hi, my name is Angel and I'm a program manager at Google. I'm a mechanical engineer by degree and my first boss out of school said, you're an okay engineer, but your people skills are off the charts and having a technical background and having really good people skills is hard to find. Soft skills to me have a lot to do with emotional intelligence. So being able to read other people and then ultimately really knowing yourself and being able to read the team, read what they need, but then at the same time, what am I doing? Either influencing the team in a good way, in a bad way or just a different way. Just asking sometimes people that don't usually kind of raise their hand to give input goes a long way because a lot of times the folks that are maybe a little more quiet are genuinely thinking about the problem and may have a lot of insights that if you didn't kind of catch on that or ask them, you could miss out. And so to me, soft skills just means just really understanding kind of the emotional needs of the team and that can really help with, whether it's estimations or costs, whether it be labor or dollar wise, get kind of the full view from the team of what that might look like. When it comes to task estimation and time estimations, the other thing is just asking good questions. So not just, I need you to go faster, but really saying, hey, how much faster could you go if I gave you this? What is stopping you from going faster? What teams would you need to get involved to kind of help this, right? Or, hey, we have an issue, are there similar issues in other parts of this project and do we need to get together in a larger group to kind of bring that together? I think as a program manager, that's really your role is to kind of see patterns in a project and see kind of where things are either slowing down or at a complete stop and having those soft skills to be able to bring the team together to solve that problem and to even just see it, right? Just to acknowledge that there is a problem and instead of blaming is really just digging in kind of how do we learn from this? How do we fix this? How do we move on? Some of the things that also help is just relating to your team members. And if you've either been in a similar situation or just trying to get to understand what their process is, sometimes just having people walk through the estimate out loud can sometimes come up with realizations of, oh, we could save more time or could improve this just by talking it out. I've been a project manager for machines that make labels to locomotive engines to how you make plywood. So project management skills don't necessarily need to be all about kind of the field that you're in. It's really more about kind of the method and the process and kind of how you structure a team and get people to work together. Hi again. In the previous videos, we took you through a few different time estimation methods. Now you can relate how to use time estimation methods to prevent project failure. Let's discuss how to pull all of this information into a project plan to help you and your team stay on track to meet your goals. Even the simplest projects can benefit from a clear plan and an anchor of a good project plan is a clear schedule containing all the tasks of a project, their owners and when they need to be completed. Once you have your project schedule, you can build a solid plan around that schedule using tools like spreadsheets and a sauna. We'll explain these tools in a few moments, but first let's discuss building a project schedule. There are many helpful tools that you can use to create a project schedule, but let's focus on one that we sometimes use here at Google called a Gantt chart. A Gantt chart is a horizontal bar chart that maps out a project schedule. Fun fact. The chart gets its name from American engineer Henry Gantt who helped popularize the chart in the early 1900s. So why did people working in project management find this chart useful? Well, it's a highly visual representation of a project's tasks with clear breakdowns of who's responsible for the work and when those tasks are due. For many people, a visual aid that builds upon written directions can be a helpful way to understand and synthesize the work they need to do, when they need to complete it and how their individual tasks connect to the other tasks in a project. Gantt charts are almost like calendars. They feature the start and end dates of each task and the bars align with how much time is devoted to each of those tasks. For example, let's say that your teammate Leon is tasked with creating a project charter and another teammate, Kylie, is tasked with reviewing and editing the charter when Leon is finished. Using a Gantt chart, you'll use colored bars to illustrate the days that they'll be working on these tasks. With this method, you and the rest of your team can determine that Leon has Friday, Monday, and Tuesday to work on the chart and Kylie has Wednesday to complete any revisions. The bars cascade down the chart to illustrate the passing of time and the blocks of time in which the tasks are completed. Gantt charts can be a helpful tool for tracking schedules, but what kinds of tools can you use to make a Gantt chart? There are a few options, but we're going to focus on the straightforward spreadsheet. Creating a Gantt chart in a spreadsheet is pretty simple. You can organize your left columns by items like task title, task owner, start date, due date, duration, and percent of task complete. This is a great place to list the tasks and milestones previously identified in a work breakdown structure. You'll include relevant information in the rows below, organized by start date. On the right side of your sheet, you'll order your columns by the weeks estimated to complete the project from start to finish. In the rows below that, you'll include bars representing the dates when certain tasks will take place. Kinda neat, right? Spreadsheets are helpful here because they can hold more information than just the Gantt chart. Though the project schedule serves as the central component of the project plan, you can use separate tabs on your spreadsheet to house or link to other documents you'll want to include in your plan, like a racy chart or a project charter. You may also opt to include your plans for risk management and communication here too. With a spreadsheet, you can simply add a tab for your documents. Keeping every document for the project in one spreadsheet saves time, helps everyone stay organized and reduces the burden of having to search through emails for information. Alternatively, you can also opt to use a digital document to link out all the relevant documents. While Gantt charts are a useful tool, they are far from the only option for your project plan, and there are plenty of reasons why this form of documentation might not work for you or your project team. For a simple project, you might find that your team responds better to a digital document that features a list of tables or tasks, their owners, due dates, and links to other relevant planning documents. Or perhaps your team works best with Kanban boards, which uses cards to track and visualize the progress of your tasks. Regardless of your chosen tool, if your plan includes the project's goals, its tasks, owners, start and end dates, and relevant planning documentation, then you'll be able to keep everyone on the same page. Now you know a bit more about the tools that can be used to create a project schedule. Up next, we'll discuss best practices for building a project plan. Meet you in the next video. Hi again. Earlier, you learned about creating a project plan based on a project schedule that lists all of the milestones, tasks, and deadlines of a project, and that clearly outlines the people responsible for each task. You also learned about Gantt charts, which are simple visual ways to create your schedule. So how can you help make sure that your plan works for you and your team? Let's discuss five best practices for building a great project plan that will remain useful throughout the execution and closing phases of your project. Those include ensuring careful review of project deliverables, milestones and tasks, giving yourself time to plan, recognizing and planning for the inevitable, things will go wrong, staying curious, and championing your plan. First, you'll want to ensure that you've carefully reviewed the project's deliverables, milestones and tasks. During the initiation phase, you'll recall that you created a project charter with important information regarding your project, like your goal, scope and deliverables. When a project enters the planning phase, your plans become more granular. Let's discuss this in the context of your project at Office Green. In your plan, you need to break this information down further. You're creating a new website for the service, so you'll need to break that deliverable down into smaller milestones, like kicking off a meeting with the web developer and gaining stakeholder approval. And those milestones will break down into smaller tasks, like mocking up a design of the new website and developing a landing page. Each of these tasks will be assigned to a teammate and given a start and end date. Now, a new website isn't the only project plan powers deliverable. You will need to break down every deliverable into milestones and tasks to ensure that you and your team have a clear picture of what needs to be done to meet your project's goals. Your plan revolves around completing each and every tiny task, so you should take your time to get this piece right. This brings me to my second tip. Give yourself time to plan. Side the project is a reason that planning is its own phase of the project lifecycle. It's a time intensive process, especially for larger projects with multiple deliverables. Planning gives you and your team some time to think realistically about what your team can and cannot accomplish within a certain timeframe. You're not a machine and neither are your teammates. There are limits to the amount of work any one person can do in a given timeframe. Using the strategies that we've shared earlier, like effort estimation and capacity planning, can help you and your team get a realistic sense of how long the project will take and when you'll be able to hit your milestones. It's also important to allow for buffer time since projects rarely go exactly as planned. Later in the project, you'll be grateful that you initially planned for some built-in flexibility around timing. That leads nicely into my third tip. Recognize and plan for the inevitable. Things will go wrong. Even with thorough planning, your projects will still experience unexpected setbacks and bumps in the road. You can't plan for every problem, but the team can identify the risks that will most likely occur and create plans to prevent or mitigate those risks. As we mentioned before, Buff is a helpful tool for mitigating issues related to slowdowns in progress. You'll learn more about how to create a risk management plan that goes into your project plan later on in this course. Onto my fourth tip. Stay curious. Though you may be the sole expert on your project overall, it's extremely unlikely that you're an expert on every task of the project. That's why it's so important to sit down with your teammates during a planning phase and ask lots and lots of questions. As we mentioned earlier, asking your teammates questions about their work can give you deeper insights into their tasks for the project. Their input will help you build a stronger plan and the back and forth dialogue will help you build trust between you and your teammates. To keep the project running smoothly, it's also important to understand the expectations, priorities, risk assessments, and communication styles of your stakeholders and vendors. For example, you might ask stakeholders how to best keep them in the loop on the project's plans, and you might ask your vendors about their availability to complete work for the project. Now, onto my fifth tip. Champion your plan. While deciding how to organize your plan, you'll want to ask yourself a few questions, like, can your teammates use the tool you used to build your plan? Is the information clear enough for your stakeholders? Well, using this plan as a single source of truth, save your team and stakeholders the time and energy when they need to find information on the project. If the answer to each of these questions is a strong yes, then you're on the right track. To achieve buy-in from your teammates and stakeholders on your project plan, champion it. Tell your team why it benefits them to stay on top of the plan. By doing so, you may influence your teammates to stay on track and update the plan regularly. So to recap, you can set your project plan up for success if you review your deliverables, milestones, and tasks. Give yourself time to plan, prepare for things to go wrong, stay curious, and champion your plan once it's finalized. Coming up, we'll recap what you've learned over the past few videos. See you there. Nice work. Let's recap what we've just covered. First, we took you through why it's necessary to create and manage a project plan. At the center of the project plan is a project schedule, and we discussed methods for determining realistic time and effort estimates for each task. You also learned more about the power of soft skills to help you gather time and effort estimates from members of your team. We also introduced you to a Gantt chart, which is a useful tool for visualizing a project schedule. And I shared my best practices for creating a project plan that will serve as a useful source of information throughout the planning phase and execution phase. Coming up, we'll take you through managing costs and budgets. See you soon. Welcome back. Previously, we learned about creating and managing a project plan and using time estimation to prevent project failure. Coming up, we're going to shift the discussion to the inner workings of a project budget. So let's discuss money. As mentioned before, a lot of project management skills may overlap with common skills that you already use in your everyday life. And you may already have some kind of budgeting experience. Budgeting in the project management world is a complex process, involving many different parties and documentation. I'm going to teach you how to create and manage a real world project budget. We'll discuss the many components of a budget and how stakeholders play a role in the budgeting process. You'll learn about the importance of procurement in project management. If you don't know what that means yet, sit tight. You'll understand that concept soon enough. You'll also learn about vendor management and procurement in both the agile and the traditional methodology settings. There will be several new concepts around legal and contractual documentation introduced throughout, such as NDAs, RFPs, and SOWs. You'll learn that project managers are fluent in acronyms and soon you will be too. I will explain each of these acronyms coming up. We'll also teach you about the role that legal teams and ethics play in procurement. I'll give you a hint. It's a big one. Starting a new project and sourcing materials and vendors without considering the ethical implications can get project managers into hot water. So you'll learn more about legal teams and ethics to help you avoid these tricky situations. The best part? You'll get pretty hands on here since you'll create your own documentation using our templates. Are you ready? We'll get started in the next video. Let's get back to budgeting. You may already set a budget to help you stay on track with your monthly expenses in your personal life. Many people do because it allows them to feel prepared and in control of their finances. The same is true about project budgeting. Project budgeting is a little more complex than your personal budget. We'll help you understand and go a little deeper into what a project budget entails. A project budget is the estimated monetary resources needed to achieve the project's goals and objectives. When reviewing a project budget, you need to consider all of the potential and projected costs needed to complete the project. You break the budget down by milestones, which are important points within the project schedule that indicate progress and usually signifies the completion of a deliverable or phase of the project and list activities and tasks alongside their associated costs. This ensures that you calculate the correct expenses for a particular period of time. This is considered a forecast. A forecast for your project budget is a cost estimate or a prediction over a period of time. You'll frequently review your project budget and it will evolve throughout the project lifecycle. These budgets usually contain items such as labor, operating costs and costs associated with obtaining necessary materials like hardware, software or equipment. The importance of a project budget focuses on more than just saving money. In project management, a budget is considered a deliverable. It is a success metric. The project budget is a tool to communicate exactly what is needed and when it is needed with stakeholders. The budget will have a direct effect on the company's financial viability. So, as you can probably tell by now, it's an integral part of project management. Budget creation takes place in the initiation phase of your project. Keep in mind that the budget will be adjusted as needed throughout the lifecycle of the project. Depending on your role in the company, you won't always be the sole creator of the budget. Your ownership over things like budget and vendor relationship may vary depending on factors such as size of the company or support team or the team organizational chart. Although you may not always manage the budget from start to finish, budget and milestones go hand in hand. So, it's important for you to know the ins and outs of the budget throughout the project. As a project manager, you may be tasked with obtaining approvals for spending. Most companies have a signing or spending policy. This usually outlines who has the authority to commit resources or incur costs or other obligations on behalf of the company. This is important because you won't be able to continue with some of your deliverables or action items if you don't know how much certain activities will cost and whether you have the necessary funds available. It wouldn't make any sense to rent a property without checking on the rental cost first, right? That's especially true if the rental price is higher than your budget. The same thinking is applicable for your project budgeting. The budgeting process usually happens in conjunction with the scheduling process because the steps of the scheduling process are highly dependent on the costs. The project manager will collaborate with people on the project to create their estimations. For the most part, after the cost estimating process has been completed, it's common for the project sponsor or another key stakeholder to review and approve estimation costs. And if necessary, adjust and reallocate funds for the project. This could mean that either the CEO or the COO are the ones giving the okay or the final sign off. For example, in our office green project, the director of product has sign off approval. As we mentioned before, the project manager will most likely need some kind of sign off from the finance department. This may vary from company to company, so just make sure you're aware of your company's processes. Project budgeting is never a one size fits all operation. As the project manager, you'll have to prioritize where you allocate funds within the project to ensure maximum output. Ultimately, most projects are created to improve workforce productivity, increase revenue, or attempt to save costs within an organization. Budgeting is one of the most important aspects of project management. And when you start to stay on budget is one of the trickiest tasks. It's important not to go over budget and cost the company extra money. And it's equally important not to be under budget either, since that might affect the company's budget for the next year. When it comes to high profile businesses, such as publicly traded companies like Google or public sector organizations, such as your local education department, they may have a requirement to report on their financial performance to shareholders or auditors. Going too far over or under budget will change the way the company budgets for the next year, potentially leaving you with less money to work with in the future. In other words, a project manager must show the requested amount of money was used in order to secure enough budget for future projects. For smaller businesses, there may be a tighter budget, in which case it's especially critical to be careful about spending too much money on a project than initially allocated. It's really helpful to your overall success as a project manager to understand budgeting. So in the next video, we're gonna learn the specific ins and outs of what's included in a budget. See you soon. Now that you have an understanding of what a budget is, let's discuss some specific components in a budget. There are so many things to factor into project budgeting. Unfortunately, it's not quite as simple as a company saying, we have $5,000, so that's our budget. When you go to the grocery store, in the same way that you don't determine how much apples will cost, businesses can't just decide that they want to spend $200 on a project if the market rate for a project of the same caliber is $2,000. Instead, project managers must account for understanding stakeholder needs, budgeting for surplus expenses, maintaining adaptability, and reviewing and re-forecasting throughout the entire project. And these are only some examples of what you'll need to take into account. Let's imagine some of these factors in our office screen project. In terms of understanding stakeholder needs, it's important to know exactly what stakeholders expect from this project in order to deliver. As a company, the ultimate goal is typically to make a profit and to save money and time. So the project sponsor, the director of product in this case, needs the project to come in at a certain cost in order to make profit. As the project manager, you will also need to budget for surprise expenses. Let's say several planters arrive from the vendor broken and cracked. Maybe the planters cracked during delivery process and it isn't the vendor's fault. In that case, you'll have to order some additional planters to fulfill orders and that may be an added cost. As your project continues along, you'll have to review your budget and sometimes re-forecast, which means creating a separate revised budget based on how your project is tracking. Keeping on top of the budget will help you stay organized and re-forecasting is a way to recalibrate the budget if necessary. As the project manager offers screen, you might find that you need to shift costs to different resources and categories within your project budget. Maybe you initially overestimated the cost of plants from the vendor and underestimated the costs of marketing your new launch. So you can reallocate these dollars as necessary. That's a great example of how to review and re-forecast. There are several factors to consider when creating a budget, including resource cost rates, reserve analysis, contingency budget, and cost of quality. You'll need to determine resource cost rates. Resource cost rates are exactly what they sound like, the cost of a resource. Some examples of resources are labor, tools, equipment, materials, and software. So you'll want to ask yourself, how much will each of these resources cost the company? Sometimes a project can be derailed because the project manager didn't adequately include funds for reserves or buffers. Performing a reserve analysis will help you account for any buffer funds you may need. A reserve analysis is a method to check for remaining project resources. In performing a reserve analysis, you'll review all potential risks to your project and determine if you need to add buffer funds. These funds are necessary because new costs that you didn't originally foresee will arise. This is also known as contingency budget. Contingency budget in the context of project management is money that is included to cover potentially unforeseen events that aren't accounted for in a cost estimate. The purpose is to compensate for the uncertainty that occurs in cost and time estimates as well as unpredictable risk exposure. The cost of quality refers to all of the costs that are incurred to prevent issues with products, processes, or tasks. The cost of quality includes prevention costs, appraisal costs, internal failure costs, and external failure costs. Once you've applied these factors, resource cost rates, reserve analysis, contingency budget, and the cost of quality into your budget, you can estimate what your project might cost. Remember, your budget will most likely change. Starting with an initial estimate is one way to ensure that you are at least on track. And it's okay if your budget does change. That's why we review and re-forecast. Hopefully you're starting to notice the framework for creating a budget. In the next lesson, we'll begin to piece a budget together. Let's put all of your notes and newly acquired knowledge to use. See you soon. Now that we've learned about budgeting, let's find out how it all works together. By now, we know that project budgets help to control costs throughout the duration of the project. They help project managers establish the main objectives of their project and keep them within a reasonable framework to ensure that project makes financial sense for the company. So what's the best way to start making a project budget? You'll find that as you get further along in the process, there are various resources and tactics that you can use to make sure you aren't overestimating or underestimating. You'll use techniques like researching historical data, leveraging experts, the bottom-up approach, confirming accuracy, and setting your baseline. For starters, you can always review past projects that are similar to yours to get an idea of what your project could entail. We'll refer to that as referring to historical data. This way, you can find out what past project managers did right and wrong. The more experienced you become as a project manager, the more historical data you'll have to draw upon and the better your estimations will be. In a similar vein, you can leverage experts in the field. To leverage something means to use it to its maximum advantage. So leveraging experts means gathering their insights to do something more effectively. Reaching out to colleagues who worked on a similar project in the past will be a great resource for you as an entry-level project manager. If you're asking someone outside of your company for advice, be sure to avoid sharing any confidential company information with them. Another approach to take is the bottom-up approach. This means thinking about all the parts of a project from the beginning to the end, including making a list of every material, resource, contract worker, or anything that comes with an associated cost and adding all of that together. You should also ask the vendors you're thinking of working with for quotes so you can get a rough estimate of how much their work will cost. After you've created your budget with these resources, you'll want to double-check everything to confirm accuracy. Of course, the work doesn't stop once you've created the budget. Next, you'll have to set the baseline. Your baseline is the dollar amount that you'll use to measure against to find out if you're on track or not, and to measure the success of your project. Once you've set your baseline, you'll have to revisit that number and adjust it to match where the project is currently. Making adjustments in real-time is something you have to do a lot as a project manager. The size of the project and company will determine how often you should reexamine and update the budget. Creating a thorough budget is important to the success of your project. With Project Plant Pals, we suggest breaking the project down into tasks. That's the bottom-up approach. From there, we estimate the cost of each item, add those estimates together, add contingency and tax, and seek overall approval on our budget from our key stakeholders. Since we're creating a new service, we'll need to hire designers and developers to build out the website and develop the app for our customers. Once these tasks are laid out, you'll have to negotiate employee allocations, contract to rates, and shop around for vendors and delivery services. This will help you assign cost estimates to each task. Now that the tasks have been broken down and assigned, you'll need to account for material costs. Do your team members and stakeholders need equipment? Maybe an employee with a disability requires modifications to accommodate or enhance their workplace. Maybe some remote workers need the hardware and accessories necessary to work from home. This is where you'll include everything from computers to software related to the launch. Will you need storage space for miscellaneous plants or supplies? Miscellaneous is a term that we use to represent additional items that are not included in any of the other areas. Usually they are minor items or items where there are only one or two of them and that they are not a major budget line. Be sure to add these items to your expenses. You'll also need a few more line items. Start with the fixed cost that won't change over the course of the project. Let's say you're paying to advertise the web developer role to a job board. It may cost you about $50 to post that job description. That's an example of a fixed one-time cost. Next, you'll need a line item for things like travel expenses and meals. And finally, we'll want to account for buffers and reserves. You'll need to factor in unexpected costs that may come up later on. Be sure to leave yourself with some buffer room. We've chosen to account for 5% of the overall project budget as our buffer. This is a standard practice and depending upon how much detail you know about the project already, you can raise or lower your percentage for reserves. The client needs to be aware of this buffer in case spending starts to become excessive, in which case you need to problem solve with the client and agree to adjust the scope. You'll want to include a planned cost versus actual cost column two. This way, you can keep track of your cost every step of the way. We'll provide you with concrete budget templates in the readings associated with this section so you can fully immerse yourself in the process. Remember, every project will have an estimated cost and a final cost. Your goal is to get your estimated cost as close to the final cost as possible. You may have to recalibrate your estimations during a project. That's when the estimated cost to complete the project comes in. The final cost of your project differs from the forecasted or estimated cost if you weren't exactly on target with your budget. Remember, while your goal is to get as close to the original estimate as possible, that won't always be the case. Each time you're placed on a new project, it will be helpful to look back on the final costs of previous projects and see how close you came to your goal. Now you know the best way to create a project budget. Up next, we're gonna talk about maintaining a budget. See you there. Now that you have an idea of how to create a budget, we're going to discuss how you'll manage that budget and explore some challenges that you might face, like being under or over budget. As mentioned previously, you'll want to check in on your budget regularly. But what exactly does that mean? What are you checking for? How can you tell if you're staying within your budget or not? Monitoring the budget is crucial for a project manager to enforce accountability in terms of spending. By monitoring your budget regularly, you'll be able to tell if the plans you set into action are actually being implemented on both a financial and operational level. As you may recall from previous video, a milestone is an important point within the project schedule that indicates progress and usually signifies the completion of a deliverable or phase of the project. Milestones are a metric for tracking progress in the project. Milestones are a great opportunity to re-review the budget to identify if anything needs to be reset or revisited throughout the project. That said, milestones can act as a checkpoint for budget management and payment. You may have agreed in your contract that you get paid at certain milestones rather than at the end of the project. Fixed contracts are usually paid for when certain milestones are reached, whereas time and materials contracts are usually paid for monthly based on the hours worked and other fees associated with the work, like travel and meals. As you monitor your budget, you'll want to be on top of cost control. Cost control is a practice where a project manager identifies factors that might impact their budget and then creates effective actions to minimize variances. Think of it this way. It's proactive budget management. It is much better to be proactive with your budget than to be reactive with your budget. If you are reacting instead of anticipating, then you may already have some kind of problem with the budget. In order to control costs, you should establish a sign-off plan and inform the appropriate stakeholders of any changes that occur. You'll have to ask yourself, which stakeholders or sponsor will be approving the contractor or vendor time sheets? What about invoices? You'll also need to make sure any changes within the project budget are agreed upon. For example, you shouldn't approve a new cost or item if it hasn't been agreed upon or if it isn't within the scope. And you shouldn't be spending money if it's not pre-approved by your stakeholder or project sponsor. It is also important to make sure there's good business case before bringing it to the stakeholder. You'll also need to manage changes as they're made. This involves updating forecasts or estimates and tracking everything. You never want to be surprised by budget changes and you don't want to have to keep asking stakeholders for more money. You can prevent that by revisiting these numbers on a regular basis. You'll also want to accept that budget misses will happen. It's your job to bring the expected cost overruns within acceptable limits. Before the project starts, collaborate with the project sponsors and key stakeholders to determine an acceptable limit. Is it 1%? 10%? You'll decide together. In a previous video, we talked briefly about what happens when a project goes over or under budget. Having a project go over budget may mean that the company will have less funds for other areas within the business. So let's dig a little deeper into the effects on a company when a project goes under budget. Even though it seems like going under budget would be a project manager's dream, it actually isn't. If you go under budget, it's an indicator of less than satisfactory project management. Going under budget indicates that you may not have done a good job at initially estimating. Going under budget could also indicate that you could have spent more money on the project, meaning that you could have possibly had extra resources or better quality output. And it may mean that the budget for future projects will be slashed. The company may figure that since you did this project under budget, you'll be able to do future projects under budget too. So that's not a totally desirable situation to be in either. The best option is to adequately account for, adapt and manage your budget with that risk in mind. Later on, we'll cover other strategies more in depth that you could use to save the company money and time. You'll also learn the ins and outs of identifying and managing risks a little later on in the course. In the next lesson, we'll learn about procurement. See you in a bit. In the past, we've compared project management to starting a new hobby. Let's say you're trying to take up painting. In order to paint, you'll need to purchase or in other words, procure paint supplies and materials. So first, you ask yourself, what supplies will you need? What kind of paint will you start with? Do you want to try oil paint, watercolour or acrylic? Will you paint on canvas, wood or paper? You need to research these choices before you procure your materials. Once your research is done, you can start procuring materials, scheduling courses, watching tutorials and voila. You're on your way to becoming the next Frida Kahlo. So as you may have guessed by now, procurement means obtaining all of the materials, services and supplies required to complete the project. You'll need to procure vendors as well. Vendors are individuals or businesses who provide essential goods and services. Therefore, think of vendor management as procurement for individuals or businesses. Vendor management covers the activities included in researching and sourcing vendors. Instead of materials, vendor management is often a matter of sourcing for a specific service or talent and then managing that relationship. Sourcing talent includes researching and obtaining estimated costs from different partner companies you may use on a project. You'll typically use vendors when they provide specialized skills that aren't available within your company. Vendor management entails sourcing vendors, getting quotes for their work, deciphering which vendors will best fulfill your needs, negotiating their contracts, setting deadlines for them, evaluating performance and ensuring payments are made. It also entails familiarizing yourself with regulations like the Americans with Disabilities Act, if you're working in the US, for example. And if you're somewhere else, being aware of similar regulations in that country. Keep in mind that not every project will require vendors or contractors and so every project won't require vendor management. Let's revisit the example of contract workers in the context of Project Plant Pals at Office Green. Like many companies, Office Green doesn't have a copywriting department. So for the launch of Project Plant Pals, you'll need to use external resources to supply a contracted copywriter. This person is a necessary team member on the project because Office Green doesn't have copywriters or internal employee resources required to finish this task. This contractor, or team of contractors, will draft copy for the website for a slated amount of time and then their work on this particular project will be complete. Awesome. Now that you know about procurement, in the next video, we'll discuss the different phases of the procurement process and how procurement differs depending on your approach to project management. See you then. While not every single project will require procurement, it's important to be prepared for it if and when procurement does come up. So, how do you get started? There are typically five steps that make up the procurement process. Let's go over them. First is initiating, which is the planning process of defining what help you may need outside of your current resources to hit the project goals. In this step, you'll also make a case for getting extra resources via the procurement process. Second is selecting, which entails deciding what supplies you need and which vendors you'll go through. The third step is contract writing, which is where the contracts are developed, reviewed, and signed. The fourth step is control, which is when you make payments, set up logistics and requirements to maintain quality and ensure the service agreement is being met. The fifth and final step is completing, which is where you'll measure the success of the procurement. That's a quick overview of the procurement process. This high-level cycle of procurement will make more sense as we continue on through this course. One thing to note is the procurement process can seem a little different depending on the project management methodology. There are differences in procurement in the context of agile versus traditional. Agile procurement management is often more collaborative with both the project team and the end supplier than traditional approaches. There is a heavy emphasis on the relationship between these parties. The whole project team plays a larger role in identifying what needs to be procured. Rather than featuring contracts that are based on fixed deliverables, agile procurement management tends to have a living contract that can be adapted based on the evaluation of the project. If you think of the word agility, which means to move easily and quickly, you'll be able to remember that agile procurement can change more easily than traditional procurement methods. In this process, the team reviews the project or deliverables on a reoccurring basis and consistently addresses feedback. This way of working is important to communicate to your suppliers so they understand this style of working and agree to maintain flexibility. Again, it is so important to have a positive relationship with the procurement supplier. This is critical since the contract may need to be renegotiated at multiple points during the project. On the other hand, traditional procurement management tends to focus on standard contracts with clear terms and deliverables. When it comes to traditional approaches, the project manager may be responsible for end-to-end procurement instead of the entire team providing input. The contracts may feature lengthy and extensive documentation that include fixed requirements and comprehensive detail of the services and deliverables. While this may appear more rigid, the benefit is you've outlined clearer work streams and deadlines. This way, you're much more protected from unforeseen circumstances and may not have to pay for unpredictable changes. In traditional approaches, the negotiation process can be a little bit trickier. You won't necessarily have the room to renegotiate contracts if something changes, so you may have to start the whole process over again. That's why being as detailed as possible and spending more time in the negotiation phase is incredibly important in a more traditional project management approach. As you may have guessed, procurement can become pretty complex, but there are some official documents that can help guide you through the procurement process. In the next video, you'll learn more about those documents and processes. See you there. There are a few important documents that help a project manager navigate through each phase of procurement. For instance, in the initiating phase, a project manager will create a non-disclosure agreement, otherwise known as an NDA. In the selecting phase, a project manager creates a request for a proposal or an RFP. In the contracting phase, a statement of work or an SOW is created. Now let's learn more about these acronyms and documents. The first important document is a non-disclosure agreement, also known as an NDA. NDAs are standard within a lot of companies, and it's best practice to ask external contract workers to sign an NDA. The purpose of an NDA is to keep confidential information within the organisation. So, for instance, if a company is using some kind of proprietary technology on a project or preparing for a sensitive product launch, they want to ensure that any conversations or information surrounding that technology doesn't leak out to competitors or to the public before the company is ready to launch. For example, in project plant pals, vendors might be required to sign an NDA because the project is new to market and hasn't been made public yet. Then we have a request for a proposal or an RFP, a document that outlines the details and requirements of an organisation's project to be passed on to vendors. RFPs are used to solicit bids from vendors so that you can then select which vendor might be the best for your project. A RFP is widely used within different departments in a company and across various industries. An RFP typically includes an overview of the project, the desired outcomes and goals, budget, deadlines, milestones and contact information so each vendor can get back to you with a detailed proposal of how they plan to tackle the job. When creating an RFP, make sure to add the following headers to your document. The overview. Treat this section like a general summary. What is the purpose of this project? What problems will it solve? What new doors will it open for the company? Your goals. What are some measurable results you can aim to achieve throughout the process? Next is the scope of work. What are the specifics of the project? How are you going to achieve those goals and make sure the project launches successfully? Then include milestones. Make sure to highlight the key milestones your project will include. Lastly, include submission requirements. Like, please submit the RFP as a presentation and include three prototypes, as well as the questions you'd like the vendor to answer as part of the process. This helps you properly assess potential vendors. For instance, you might want to know what issues a contractor sees upfront or how the costs will break down. After the RFP is sent out, various vendors will review it and if they feel they can fulfill your project's needs, they'll provide a proposal. For example, you may create an RFP for project plant powers to source plant providers. In this case, you'll want to send out RFPs to all possible plant providers to ensure that you're getting the best price, quality and overall value. You may hear RFP being used as a verb. As in, has this been RFP yet? That's really a way of asking if an RFP has been sent out to vendors yet. It's important to note that both the NDA and the RFP are fixed and remain the same throughout the process. This means that there's not a lot of room for customization and it won't be changed once it's submitted. Lastly, there's a third important document called a statement of work or an SOW. An SOW is sent after the vendor is selected and involves as the project goes on. We'll continue discussing these concepts and further explore the importance of a statement of work in the next video. I'll see you there. Let's continue learning about the necessary documents required for a successful project. After you've sent a request for a proposal to clients and you've selected the vendor, client or contractor you want to work with, you'll also send them an SOW or a statement of work. A statement of work is a document that clearly lays out the products and services a vendor or contractor will provide for the organization. An SOW also provides a description of the contractor's needs and requirements to properly perform the agreed upon services. Although the SOW covers the customer's needs, it's equally as important to include the organization's needs and the vendor's needs too. It's critical that all parties involved understand what is expected from each of them in order to deliver the best possible products or services. The project manager is tasked with developing the SOW but often asks for input from subject matter experts or SMEs for technical expertise that the project manager may not have. Your organization's legal advisors will review this document with you and may even be crafting it alongside you. Let's discuss how to create an SOW in the example of project plant powers. You'll want to start by including page headers with your company name, project and creation date on them. At the top of the page, make sure to include important stakeholders like yourself as the project manager and the name of the sponsor which in this case is the director of product. Next, you'll construct a table for revisions. The SOW will likely go through a few rounds of revisions because several stakeholders may review it and suggest changes. You'll detail those changes in this box here. Next, you'll create a purpose section where you'll go into detail about exactly what the desired outcomes are. Make sure to include a section regarding your target audience and make sure it's inclusive of everyone. For instance, in this case, the purpose of the project is to launch a new service that provides desk plants to offices and commercial businesses. If you have more specific goals, you can list them here too. Next is the scope section where you'll include what the service entails. You may write that the service includes providing customers with small, low maintenance plants that they can place on their desks. Customers can order plants online or from a print catalog. Office Green will ship the plants to the customer's work address. The types of plants in scope include six-inch leafy ferns, small cacti, and five-inch bonsai trees. Keeping this vendor in mind, some major activities may be storing the plants in a warehouse, maintaining the health of the plants by providing them with water and light, sourcing the vases and ensuring that the vases are in near-perfect condition upon delivery. You'll also want to mention what's out of scope or, in other words, what the project doesn't include. This will eliminate any potential room for confusion and help set expectations with the vendor. For instance, you may write that the project doesn't include annual reporting or custom plant orders that are not mentioned in the scope. This helps draw clear lines and sets the right expectations with the vendor. For deliverables, you'll want a concise statement about what your project will deliver. For example, your Office Green project deliverables could include the vendor providing maintenance guides on how to take care of the plants, or that the vendor will be responsible for developing a support page on Office Green's website to address any questions or concerns. Since milestones are such an integral part of tracking progress, budget, and scope, they'll need to be included here too. Examples of milestones in project plant powers could be to fulfill the first quarter of plant orders, deliver to all of the top customers, launch customer satisfaction surveys, collect and report on any insights from customer feedback. You'll want to make it really clear on how many hours are needed for the completion of this project here, and you will want to designate a particular date that you need their services performed by here. At the bottom, you'll typically add terms and conditions and any other disclaimers. It's good to have a disclaimer stating that revisions may take place as the project goes on. This is important to include, just in case the scope changes because of unforeseen issues. It's a good idea to add revisions into the disclaimer because as a project manager, it's best not to overpromise and underdeliver. You always want to be clear that you intend to stick to the schedule unless circumstances outside of your control intervene. Another part of your SOW is payment terms. This outlines when your suppliers need to be paid. Ensuring that suppliers are paid on time will promote strong relationships. Generally, good procurement practice would be to pay your vendors and contractors upon delivery of goods and service, not before, unless a circumstantial agreement has been made. For instance, if Office Green's plant provider requested to be paid when each milestone was completed instead of after the entire project is finished. Great job. Now you know more about SOWs. Next up, we'll discuss the importance of partnering with your legal team during the procurement process. See you there. Now that you have a better understanding about NDAs, RFPs and SOWs, let's discuss how you can get support from other departments and team members as procurement goes forward. The procurement process doesn't end after you've selected vendors and signed contracts. You'll use performance trackers and meetings like quarterly business reviews to track and evaluate overall performance to ensure that both parties are living up to their initial agreement. And when there are contracts and paperwork with terminology that you may not be familiar with, you'll enlist the help of a legal team. Depending on the company's size, the legal situation may vary. Some companies, usually well-established and larger businesses, will have a legal team. Some businesses may outsource their legal team. Some startups or smaller companies may not have a legal team, but they might reach out to legal advisors as needed. Again, this all depends on the company where you work. Laws surrounding manufacturing products and consumerism will vary from country to country. But there will nearly always be laws in place that you'll need to follow around topics like fair and ethical trade. Most companies have a mission or value statement. Sometimes, a team of people in the ethics and compliance departments are tasks we're ensuring that the day-to-day operations are adhering to their value statement and governmental policies. These team members will also be tasked with duties like working to prevent discrimination and making sure that the company is practicing adequate corporate social responsibility. Also, as a project manager, you'll need to ensure that the various stakeholders who are representing the business are adhering to these policies and processes too. You'll all need to be aware of any pertinent meetings regarding legal or compliance issues, and you, as a project manager, will have to remind the team about when those meetings are being held. Looping in the appropriate stakeholders is especially critical if there's some kind of necessary approval since it'll have an impact on the project one way or another. Like most projects, for project plant pals, looping in legal and compliance for review and approvals is really important. For instance, let's say some of the offices where you're delivering plants are pet-friendly. In your contract with the supplier, you've specified that you want to offer non-toxic plants only. Unfortunately, the supplier provided a plant with leaves that are harmful to animals. Office green could potentially be liable and in legal trouble because this critical detail was missed. Pretty crucial consideration, right? So, regardless of your future company's legal team or advisory, having contracts reviewed in some capacity make good business sense and should be a priority for you as a project manager. Now you're on your way to becoming your own lawyer. Only kidding. But you hopefully have a better grasp of the importance of your legal team and having them review your contracts. Next up, we'll discuss the importance of checking in with your vendors and we'll find out what compliance has to do with the procurement process. I'll see you soon. Welcome back. We've learned a bit about the ins and outs of contracting with vendors. So let's learn more about the importance of ethics when partnering with vendors. Failing to be mindful when choosing vendors can lead to significant consequences. If you've seen a company in the news that's been entangled in a scandal, that usually means that the team probably should have done more research in the procurement process. So, what does that entail? There's a lot that can be done to ensure that businesses are operating in an ethical way. Project managers have a big job when deciphering whether or not every aspect of their project is sourced ethically. It helps if the project manager thoroughly oversees the project to make sure the safety, economic, and environmental ethical risks are mitigated. In other words, doing a lot of research, monitoring, and evaluating throughout the project is a project manager's job. There are a couple of steps to safeguard ethical procurement. The first is knowing your business's legal requirements. You'll want to have a deep understanding of what is required of you legally as a project manager for your business. You can also seek out the code of ethics for your profession, which in this case is for project managers. For instance, the Project Management Institute, also known as PMI, has a code of ethics that you can access as a member or credential holder. This will help you understand some parameters for how to assess ethical versus unethical procurement. According to the PMI's code of ethics, honesty, responsibility, respect, and fairness are the values that drive ethical conduct for the project management profession. So, when you become a project manager, if you aren't totally sure if something is ethical, first, try to use your best judgment based on what you believe those words mean and continue to do the required research. If you still aren't sure, don't hesitate to ask a subject matter expert, such as someone from the legal team. As a starting point, some unethical issues or risks you may run into may include bribery or corruption. Some regulations in other countries may not be the same as regulations in your country. So, for example, you'll want to make sure laborers involved in production are treated fairly, working in good conditions, and are compensated adequately for their work. It is a good idea to consult your legal team to ensure that you don't run into these situations and to be aware of the regulations surrounding your processes. You'll also want to be aware of possible issues with sole supplier sourcing. In some scenarios, you may need to perform non-competitive procurement, which is when a company restricts the bidding process to one supplier. This may be common for companies who are more cautious about exposing trade secrets. But regardless of your reasoning, you'll need to be able to justify exactly why you are choosing to restrict bidding to one supplier. There's also interaction with state-owned entities. You'll want to be vigilant when dealing with government agencies and officials. Government agencies may have tighter restrictions and regulations in regard to sourcing, and you don't want to do anything unethical without even knowing it. A project manager monitors the project's ethics throughout the whole process. In the initiating phase, you'll need to decide whether the project is ethical in the first place. Does it meet your business's code of ethics? Does the project meet environmental ethics laid out by governmental agencies? Is the labour going to be ethically sourced? You'll need to review government regulations and policies, assess potential risks, and put together a diverse team that you trust to be ethical. Before the contracts are signed, you'll want to figure out whether the suppliers you're thinking of hiring are ethical. You'll want to make sure that you're procuring them in an ethical way and are paying them a fair rate. And you'll also want to completely understand the supply chain if there is one. After the contracts have been signed by your contractors, make sure to carry out your assurance duties. This may include things like auditing each task and cost, executing quality control, or even approving invoices. During the production of your service or product, focus on the day-to-day relationships with vendors to make sure they're aware of and meeting your deliverables and keeping you informed of any potential roadblocks. After you've done all the research that you possibly can on whether your project is ethical, remember to trust yourself. If something feels wrong, it probably is. As you know, there's a lot to keep track of as a project manager. By keeping these ethical principles in mind as you begin your project, you'll save yourself and the company from a lot of headaches later on. Of course, you can usually go to your legal team or key stakeholders if you ever have a question or need a second opinion. In the next video, we're going to review and wrap up everything we've just covered. I'll see you there. Wow, we really covered a lot here. We learned all about managing costs and budget. We learned that a project budget is the estimated monetary resources needed to achieve outline goals and objectives. We learned that a project budget is much more nuanced than just aiming to save money. It's a success metric that's used to track project performance. And remember, it's not desirable to be over budget or under budget. We also learned that cost control involves several stakeholders, sign off from key stakeholders and actively managing changes. And we definitely went in-depth on procurement and vendor management, which involves obtaining the necessary supplies, materials, and external resources for your project's success. We learned the important steps initiating, selecting, contract writing, control, and completing. We now know that procurement will be different depending on which methodology you're using. An agile procurement approach differs from a traditional procurement approach. It's more relationship-based because the negotiation stays open the whole time. An agile procurement requires more frequent communication with vendors because the contracts may be reviewed and adjusted regularly. The traditional approach is typically done during the procurement stage and ends there. We learned about NDAs, RFPs, and SOWs, and we created an SOW together. Finally, you learned a bit about how to think critically when it comes to ethics in procurement. You learned how to adhere to a code of ethics, when to use your own judgment, and the importance of researching the ethics of procurement. Nice job. Next up, you're going to learn about different types of risks, how to identify risk, and how to mitigate risk. See you there. Welcome back. Earlier, we covered managing costs and a project budget. We discussed what the components of a project budget are, how the budget process works, and how to track and estimate a budget. You also learned about the procurement process. Coming up, we will discuss risk management and why it's important to help prevent project failure. Knowing how to anticipate and alleviate, commonly known as mitigate, the potential problems is your best bet for keeping a project on track. You will learn how to define and relate risk management concepts and explain how risk management can help protect your project from failing. You'll also identify risk types and how to measure their impact on a project and communicate and resolve identified risks using a mitigation plan. Ready to get started? Great. Meet me in the next video. Think about a time in your life when you managed a project. Maybe it was a professional project like creating an employee schedule or a personal project like planning a family celebration. Now ask yourself this, did everything go according to plan? If I had to guess, I would bet there was at least one hurdle you had to deal with. That's because no project goes 100% according to plan, even when they are run by the most experienced project managers. Maybe you planned that employee schedule perfectly and then someone caught a cold forcing you to rearrange the schedule at the last minute. Or maybe just as family members started arriving for that celebration, you realized you forgot to buy ice to keep the drinks cold. And hey, these things happen. As we told you earlier, flexibility is an important skill for managing projects. Due to the nature of the project and really life in general, it's also important that you identify and plan for risks that could impact your project. Let's discuss what a risk actually is. A risk is a potential event which can occur and can impact your project. When you think about risk in the context of project management, you'll think about them as hypothetical. In other words, these aren't events that will definitely happen, but because there's a possibility that they could happen, it's your responsibility as the project manager to identify and plan for those risks. Next, let's discuss issues. An issue is a known or real problem that can affect the ability to complete a task. So what's the difference between a risk and an issue? Think of it like this. A risk is an event that could potentially happen if the event actually happens, then the risk becomes an issue. In other words, risks are the big what ifs and issues are things that currently impact a project. It is clear that risks and issues can pose a threat to your project. How you manage those risks is known as risk management. Risk management is the process of identifying and evaluating potential risks and issues that could impact a project. It's not a one-time exercise. It's something that you'll need to do regularly to address potential risks. Risk management is a crucial part of the planning process by giving you an understanding of what could go wrong with your project. It also tells you who you need to consult about the risk. It helps you determine how the potential risk could be mitigated. This way, if or when something goes wrong, you'll have a plan prepared and ready to go. Part of being proactive and planning ahead is identifying potential risks and how to solve for them. This way, you'll set up your project with better chances for success. Failing to engage in meaningful risk management can have a few big consequences for your project. First, if you don't plan ahead, you may put your project at risk of not meeting its project goal, its timelines, or its success criteria. For example, if your goal is to publish a research report and your research analyst quits halfway through the project, you'll likely miss the deadline if you don't have a backup plan ready to go. Additionally, by failing to plan for risks, you also fail to think through the many different ways that your project could pivot and still meet its goals, even if an issue does arise. There often isn't just one way to meet your project goals and success can come in many forms. Risk management helps you determine how flexible or rigid your plan is and then make necessary adjustments. For example, if your project requires a large product shipment, having a backup supplier ready means you could quickly pivot if our main supplier is unable to fulfill your order. Finally, risks can affect projects in a variety of ways that are difficult to foresee. For example, a supplier you've hired may not have adequate stock to cover your purchasing needs or the budget for your project could be cut unexpectedly. The risk management process helps reduce the impact of unexpected events, freeing up resources to focus on activities that benefit the project. Let's imagine risk management in the context of plant powers at Office Green, which is a new service that will provide customers with small, low-maintenance desk plants. One potential project risk is the possibility that the webpage for the new service won't be live in time for the launch. Another potential risk could be a fulfillment shortage. What would you do if the plant supplier runs low on the cacti and ferns that you need? To prepare for these potential risks, you will need to think about ways to mitigate these issues before they happen or how you will address these issues if they actually occur. Hopefully, these things won't be a problem, but if they are, you'll be prepared. I also want to stress the issues will come up throughout the project you did not or could not have planned for, and that's okay. When these moments arise, it is important to keep calm, figure out the root cause of the problem and come up with a solution. Risk management is a really important topic for project managers to understand. Identifying risks and issues that prepares you for the unknown. It also positively impacts you as the project manager because you'll feel more prepared, less stressed, and more confident in your approach if an issue does occur. Up next, we will discuss ways that you can identify risks. I'll meet you there. Hi, I'm Stanton and I'm a program manager at YouTube. Thinking back to one of the first projects I ever worked on, we're actually in charge of building this sports highlight app, but it wasn't just an app, it was an iOS app, it was an Android app, it was a website. And I remember the very first meeting I went to, I was just fiercely taking down notes and trying to understand what the heck was going on. And immediately after I thought, okay, this is my first project, I have to get all the details right. I have to make sure we know every little thing that was gonna happen. The launch date needed to be perfect, we had to get all the bugs down to zero. I was just totally consumed with getting everything right the first time. I think what I've realized since then is you're probably not gonna get your first project plan correct because there's just so many things that can change. You might find a bug last minute before launch. Your client might come in and say they want a different requirement, like the screen needs to be blue instead of red. And then you find out that it's not really that easy to change from blue to red. If I could go back and tell myself what to do at that point or what I could have done differently, I would have just told myself, don't worry so much, changes happen. It's how you react and respond to those changes that's more important. I think one of the best compliments I've gotten is even throughout all this mess, you're cool, you're calm, and you're collected. You think through what are the issues that have happened, how do we resolve them? And you do your program management thing. You're not always gonna have the right answer the very first time. Things can change at the last minute. If you're able to stay cool and calm, make sure you understand everything else that's going on on the project. All these years have taught me that you can always reuse some things, you're always gonna have to react to some things, but no matter what, try to think proactively, try to figure out what those issues are gonna be, and you'll be the better for it. Hello, and welcome back. Hopefully you're beginning to notice how important it is to plan for risks. Even the simplest projects can carry some kind of risks. Remember, those risks shouldn't deter you from pursuing the project's goals. The key is to be prepared. Let's discuss tools and techniques you can use to identify risks, including brainstorming and risk assessment. Brainstorming is one of the most effective techniques for identifying risks with a team, because it allows groups to spontaneously share ideas without judgment. As a project manager, you will be responsible for bringing a group of people together to imagine potential risks. Have your racy chart at the ready to refer to when you decide who to invite to this meeting. Speaking from experience, the best team for this task is a diverse one, which includes individuals from various roles, backgrounds, and experiences. Diverse teams bring different perspectives, experiences, and skill sets, and this may help you to identify risks that you may not have thought of on your own. For example, one member of your team might have experienced working on multiple projects, while another newer team member might bring a fresh perspective from their previous experience on other teams. A great tool that you can use during brainstorming is called a cause and effect diagram, also sometimes known as a fishbone diagram. Cause and effect diagrams show the possible causes of an event or risk, and are very useful at risk management. For example, in the diagram seen here, the effect listed is a supplier missing its deadlines. This is a risk to your project. On the left, your brainstorm potential causes that would lead to the effect, like poor delegation or a lack of tracking tools. In other words, cause and effect diagrams can help identify all the ways that things could go wrong by identifying a potential risk known as the effect and working backwards to consider the potential causes of that risk. By categorizing and breaking them down into further causes, you are able to identify areas that could lead to a potential problem, like exceeding your budget or allowing scope creep to impact your timeline. As a reminder, scope creep refers to changes, growth and uncontrolled factors that affect a project's scope at any point after the project begins. During these brainstorming sessions, you might find that your list of potential risks is quite long, and that's okay. It is a reality. You and your team cannot account for every single problem that can occur during your project. So how do you decide which risks to focus on? List the outcomes from the brainstorm in a risk register. A risk register is a table or chart that contains your list of risks. Next, you'll adopt a risk assessment technique. Risk assessment is the stage of risk management where qualities of a risk are estimated or measured. By qualities, we're mainly referring to how likely the risk is to occur and its potential impact on a project. We'll come back to this point in a moment. There are a few ways to assess risks, but one we'll focus on is creating a probability and impact matrix. A probability and impact matrix is a tool used to prioritize project risks. I personally love this technique and use it all the time in my role at Google. Earlier I mentioned that you'll need to assess the likelihood that a risk will happen and its potential impact. This matrix will help you do just that. To create a probability and impact matrix, you'll need to think about the level of impact. Impact refers to the damage a risk could cause if it occurs. Impact is also determined on a scale of high, medium, and low. High means that if the risk occurs, it will substantially alter the project. Low means if the risk occurs, it will have a slight impact, but it's not likely to derail the project. You'll also need to think about probability. Probability is the likelihood that a risk will occur. We also determine probability on a scale of high, medium, and low. In this case, high probability means there's a high likelihood of this happening. Low probability means you've identified a risk that could happen, but it isn't likely that the risk will occur. These two considerations come together to determine the inherent risk rating. Inherent risk is the measure of a risk calculated by its probability and impact. Measuring the inherent risk gives us a method for understanding a risk. Inherent risk is also determined on a high, medium, and low scale. So, basically, if a risk has a low impact and a low probability, it has a low inherent risk rating. These are the types of risks you don't need to worry too much about. But if a risk has a high impact and a high probability, then it carries a high inherent risk rating. Medium to high risks are the risks you should focus on and create detailed mitigation plans for. When you're creating a probability and impact matrix, it's important to ensure you create a matrix that meets accessibility guidelines and has information and formatting that everyone can easily and quickly understand. One way to do this is to use both color and distinct shapes or text to communicate levels of risk. You can learn more about accessibility communication by visiting course resources. The way you view and manage each risk will be determined based on your organization's risk appetite, which refers to the willingness of an organization to accept the possible outcomes of a risk. You, your team, and your stakeholders may have different appetites for each risk. We'll discuss how risk appetite plays into risk mitigation in just a bit. Certain low level risks that could result in minor setbacks are much more tolerable than high level risks that have the potential to completely derail your project. Once you've completed your risk assessment, you'll update the risk register to include high, medium, and low ratings for some examples of risks that you've identified for this project. Great. Now that we've covered how to identify and assess risks, we'll go on to the next video where we'll discuss some of the types of risks you'll run into during your role as a project manager. Meet you there. Hi again. Let's discuss some common types of risks that you might plan for while managing a project. Though there are many different types of risks that could impact your project, the big ones that you want to be aware of are time risks, budget risks, and scope risks. Let's break those down. First, we have time risks. Time risk refers to the possibility that project tasks will take longer than anticipated to complete. You'll need to be aware of time risks because time is money. Poor time management may deplete your budget and upset your stakeholders by causing delays. Next, we have budget risk. Budget risk refers to the possibility that the cost of a project will increase due to poor planning or expanding the project's scope. You need to be aware of budget risk since budgeting provides the basis for project costs control. For example, if you overspend, you might not be able to pay your suppliers. This could also result in some reputational damage for the company. Then we have scope risk. Scope risk refers to the possibility that a project won't produce the results outlined in the project goals. You need to be aware of scope risks because the deliverables of your project might not be acceptable to your stakeholders or customers and that may defeat the purpose of the entire project. While time, budget, and scope risks are very common, there are other types of external risks that you should be aware of. By external risks, we're referring to risks that result from factors outside of the company that you have little to no control over. For example, your project could be impacted by an environmental risk, like a major storm, or a legal risk, like a change in regulatory requirements. And it's also important to know that there are endless types of risks. There will never be a prescription for how to identify and manage every single possible risk. But if you have a plan, you'll be better set up to deal with whatever comes your way. Okay, now let's discuss a certain type of risk known as a single point of failure. A single point of failure is a risk that has the potential to be catastrophic and halt work across a project. These are risks that have the power to stop an entire team in its tracks, meaning that no one can make progress on their tasks until the issue is resolved. For example, in our office green scenario, a single point of failure might be a power outage that takes down the internal database where every piece of information about the project is stored. Until the database is back up and running, your team won't have access to any of the information they need to do their jobs. As a result, your team won't be able to complete any of their assigned tasks. To mitigate this risk, you might budget for a separate cloud service to service your backup for all of your project documentation and information. As the project manager, you will need to identify and monitor potential single points of failure in your project since they can be detrimental to the project timeline, budget and scope. Another source of risk to be aware of are dependencies. A dependency is a relationship between two project tasks where the start or completion of one depends on the start or completion of the other. In other words, dependencies are like links that connect one project task to another. A dependency must be addressed before the task can be completed or before another task can begin because dependencies are the links that connect one project task to another. They are often a huge source of risk to a project. For example, imagine that you've tasked a teammate with hiring a local plant supplier. Until they've signed a contract with the supplier, your team can't place any orders. That's a dependency. Now, here's where the risk comes in. If your teammate doesn't meet the hiring deadline and then goes on vacation for a week, this could delay your project timeline. Not great, right? If you don't plan for dependencies, you might risk an impact to your budget, schedule or project outcome. To prevent something like this from happening, you might ask a teammate to share their out-of-office plans with you at the start of the project. This helps you to stay aware of everyone's schedules, ensuring that there are backup plans in place to maintain your project schedule. There are two types of dependencies, internal and external. Internal dependencies refer to dependencies within the project that you and your team have control over. For example, you'll need to secure approval on a website design before development can begin. On the other hand, external dependencies are dependencies that you have no control over. For example, the farm that your plant vendor works at might have experienced a lighter rain season this year, meaning that they'll have fewer plants to sell. There are many different risks that can impact your project, from time risks to budget risks to scope risks. But remember, no project is risk-free. And with careful upfront planning, you can do your best to prevent risks from occurring. In the next video, we'll discuss how to mitigate risks. I'll meet you there. Hi, and welcome back. Okay, so you've learned how to identify your project's risks and assess them using a probability and impact matrix. Now that you know which risks require your attention, how do you determine what to do about them? This is where risk mitigation planning comes in. Risk mitigation planning is about finding ways to eliminate or reduce the impact of potential risks to your project. There are four common ways to mitigate risk. You can avoid it, accept it, reduce or control it, or transfer it. Let's discuss each option using the office screen example. Sometimes you can avoid the risk altogether. For example, if you learn that a certain contractor you've considered working with on your office screen project has a poor reputation for meeting deadlines, then you might choose to avoid that risk by hiring a different contractor. You can also accept the risk, especially ones that you deem low in probability and impact. In this case, you're accepting the possibility that this risk can happen. You've agreed to monitor it throughout the project, and you'll ultimately be okay with the risk if it does happen. For instance, maybe your plant supplier tells you that one of the planter styles you've requested is back ordered. The supplier is confident that they'll have time to restock the planters without delaying your project schedule. But if there is an issue with their restock shipment, this could delay deliveries to your clients by up to two days. Rather than starting over with a new supplier, you decide that it makes more sense to accept the risk. It wouldn't be ideal for this delay to occur, but you're flexible and you know that accepting this risk will save you and your team the headache of onboarding a new supplier, which could take two weeks. Another way to mitigate a risk is to reduce or control it. Personally, I like to use a decision tree when building mitigation plans. A decision tree is a flowchart that helps visualize the wider impact of a decision on the rest of your project. For example, you decide to hire the contractor with a reputation for missing deadlines, because you know they do great work. In this case, you might create a quick flowchart that visualizes the risks and potential options for addressing it, like checking in with the contractor daily, either by email or through meetings. Ultimately, you might then choose to have daily check-in meetings with the team to ensure that they're staying on top of their tasks. Finally, you can choose to transfer the risk. For example, you've determined that it's too risky to attempt to grow plants on site at office green due to the possibility that bad weather or pests could negatively impact your product. Instead, you've made a decision to transfer the risk to another party or parties. By outsourcing plant production to local suppliers, you have the power to change supplies if there's an issue with quality. When you transfer the risk, you don't risk losing out on time, resources and money. So to recap, four common ways to mitigate a risk are to avoid it, accept it, reduce or control it, or transfer it. Using one of these four strategies can help you effectively take control of the risks to your project. Coming up, we'll discuss how to document these risks in a risk management plan. Now that you know your options for mitigating potential risks, let's discuss how to document your risk planning decisions. As you've been learning throughout this program, documentation is a crucial part of your role as a project manager. This is especially true when identifying risks and creating a plan to mitigate them. A risk management plan is a living document that contains information regarding high-level risks and the mitigation plan for each of those risks. This plan helps ensure that teammates and stakeholders have a clear understanding of potential problems and a plan to address them should they occur. Risk management is an ongoing practice that you'll take part in throughout the planning and execution of a project. Since risk management evolves throughout the project, the plan should be updated regularly to add newly identified risks, remove risks that are no longer relevant and include any changes in the mitigation plans. Let's review an example of a risk management plan similar to the one we sometimes use here at Google. At the top of the document, we include the name of the company and below it, the name of the project. We also include the document author so that anyone reviewing the plan knows exactly who to reach out to if they have any questions. This template also designates a spot for the document status. As you're building your plan, you can list the status as in progress. Once the plan is complete, you can change the status to final. We've also included helpful details like when the document was created and when it was last updated. Details like these might seem small, but it's best practice to include them. That's because being transparent about dates provides stakeholders with a sense of how up to date the document is. Below these details, we have the document objective. Here, we've written that our objective is to outline mitigation plans for project plant POWs. Below that, we've added an executive summary of our project. Executive summaries should include a brief introduction to the normal conditions of a project and an outline of the potential risks that could impact the project. Now onto the really important stuff, the risks and how we'll mitigate them. This document also includes the risk register you learned about earlier, which is a table or a chart that contains your list of possible risks. Here, we've outlined one of the potential risks to project plant POWs, which is the potential for the vendor to fall behind on a deadline. We've given this risk a medium inherent risk rating. Remember that inherent risk is the measure of a risk calculated by its probability and impact. A mitigation plan has also been included for this risk, which is to hold daily meetings with the vendor to help them stay on task. Down in the appendix of the document, you'll find the probability and impact charts, as well as the probability and impact matrix that we use to assess our risks. Once you've filled out the risk management plan, you'll share it with your team and stakeholders to get their input and to ensure that they are aligned with your plans. Coming up, we'll dig deeper into the topic of communicating risks to stakeholders. See you there. Hello. As you've learned in the past few videos, identifying and assessing risks is a crucial part of the project planning process. These exercises help clarify the most important risks for you and your team and ensure that everyone agrees on which risks to plan for. But it's not enough for you and your teammates to simply be aware of the biggest risks to a project. You also need to communicate these risks to your project stakeholders, whether through documentation, email, meetings or other forms of communication you've deemed appropriate. Your stakeholders need to be aware of the risks facing a project, because if you don't tell your stakeholders about important risks, they may be less equipped to help you if an issue does arise. For example, they might not be able to provide you with more budget should you need it or with more resources should you require them. Even worse, your stakeholder might be caught off guard by an issue. Unpleasant surprises like these can erode their trust in you as a leader of the project. They'll likely want to know if you were aware of the possibility that this risk could occur. And they might wonder why you didn't share this information with them sooner. That's why it's important to communicate early and often with stakeholders about medium and high level risks. It sets expectations with stakeholders about what to potentially expect during the project execution phase and demonstrates that you've taken steps to mitigate and plan for those risks should they come up. It also gives you the opportunity to suggest ways they might be able to help you if a risk does arise. So how do you communicate risks to stakeholders during the planning phase? Well, that depends on the severity of the identified risk. For low level risks, something as simple as an email might suffice. For example, when sending out weekly planning updates to a project stakeholder, you might list a few low level risks that are relevant to their interests and briefly explain how you address these risks if they arise. For medium level risks, you might increase your level of communication to a direct email between yourself and the stakeholder in which you outline the risk with more specifics and provide a detailed explanation of your plan to mitigate the risk. You might also link to your risk management plan to provide them with more information. And you might write urgent in the subject line to stress the email's importance. The serious nature of high level risks requires a thorough and direct level of communication. When you're meeting with stakeholders to go over the project plan, you might add an agenda item to present serious risks and your plans to mitigate these risks. You can also use this time to collect feedback on your risk management plan and ask for insights from stakeholders on how they suggest handling these high level risks. Your stakeholders might have prior experience planning for similar risks and strategies that you hadn't considered before. Risk communication is a big part of my role here at Google. As a program manager, I am constantly writing emails and delivering presentations on the status of my projects, often with the goal of sharing known risks and my risk mitigation plans. And in discussing these plans with my stakeholders, we often uncover other risks that I hadn't even considered. For example, in a recent meeting, I was presenting a potential new product to a stakeholder on a different team. In the meeting, the stakeholder flagged their concerns that my solution might create time and resource risks that could have a negative impact on their team. This discussion gave me deeper insights of my colleague's potential risks and of the product's users' needs, which made me realize that I needed to ask my project sponsors for additional budget and resources. So it's always a good idea to discuss your plans with your stakeholders. They may have a different perspective. So to recap, it's important to communicate risks to stakeholders so that they're better able to help you should want to rise. And you should tailor your communication style according to the severity of the risk. Up next, we'll review and wrap up all that we've covered. Meet me there. My name is Ajee and I'm a senior program manager at Google. Program management spans a lot of different industries, a lot of different applications. At its core, it means that we bring order to chaos. So at Google, for me, I work on product launches. I also develop new processes and procedures for teams. So I work across different functional areas so that could be engineering, it could be UX, it could even be people ops, to help launch products. To me, risk management means looking ahead and trying to anticipate issues. So I liken it to the analogy of being on a ship and being the person looking ahead to make sure there's no rocks, right? A lot of our projects, I would say for the most part, at least in my experience, are never just done in a silo. Like, there are other dependencies, right? And other teams that are depending on you to execute. So it's very important to de-risk, to look ahead, to manage those risks, to communicate those risks, to the appropriate stakeholders, to make sure that you're delivering on your commitments. I think that that's the first step, is identifying the problems, bringing in the right people so that you know that you have a good kind of comprehensive list. And then from there, trying to figure out how to manage those issues. And again, that can be, and that should be a very collaborative thing, right? Because everybody on your team needs to be equally vested in making sure that the project executes successfully. So I have a project right now that I'm working on. And with this project, after we determined what our strategy was gonna be and what our end state was gonna be from a product strategy perspective, the next step was creating what we call UX mocks or UX designs. And so basically that's just image pictures of what we want our end state to be. Like, what's our ideal state, right? In a visual format. As a program manager, my job is to kind of take a step back and make sure, okay, what are the potential landlines? Like, what could go wrong? As I started going through the designs and looking at them, I realized that in my mind, it was hard for me to kind of reconcile and say, okay, this is what we're doing today, this is what's going to change. It wasn't very clear to me. And I'm less of a visual person and more of like, you know, I like spreadsheets and all of that and have, you know, things in detail. And so in my mind, I was like, okay, if I'm having this issue, trying to reconcile between, okay, you know, visually, we say we're going to design this, but this is where we are. Like, what's the difference? If I'm having this issue, then maybe other people are having this issue as well. And okay, if other people are having this issue, maybe our engineers are having this issue as well. And so, you know, when I set up the meeting, within five minutes, we started to realize that there were differences in how they were interpreting what we were supposed to do. We had gone down this road where these two teams were executing on things in different way. We wouldn't have realized it into the end and then it would have been too late. I love program management. I love coming into a problem, being given a problem that's very ambiguous and not well thought through, right? And it's a huge pain point. And then coming up with a solution to that problem. Nice work. Let's recap what we've discussed so far. You learned about risks, which are potential events that could impact your project. You also learned how risks differ from issues, which are known and real problems that may affect the ability to complete a certain task. And I introduced you to risk management, which is the process of identifying potential risks and issues that could impact a project and evaluating and applying steps to address their effects. We've discussed brainstorming as a technique for identifying risks. And I introduced you to tools you can use to identify, assess, and document risks, like a probability and impact matrix, a risk register, and a risk management plan. And finally, we discussed the importance of communicating risks to your stakeholders. In order to set expectations and demonstrate your work to plan for and mitigate potential problems with the project. Coming up, we'll discuss documentation and communication. See you soon. Welcome back. We're in the last section of this course on planning. And it's finally time to tie together everything you've been working on. So far, we've covered the key components of the planning stage, how to set a schedule, create and manage a budget, and how to identify and manage risks. Up next, I'll discuss the importance of project communication plans. There are many ways to effectively communicate during the planning phase and beyond. Here, I'll teach you some great communication strategies and I'll show you how to create a successful communication plan for any project. Let's get started. Okay, let's start with an example. Imagine you've planned a surprise party for your best friend's birthday. You've been working on it for a month and finally it's the big day. You show up at the restaurant where the party is happening, but there's an issue. The host says the reservation was canceled because no one confirmed. A friend shows up with the birthday cake but you'd ask them to bring cupcakes. Another friend texts you saying they're looking forward to seeing everyone tomorrow night. Tomorrow? And then in the middle of all the confusion, you look over to see that your best friend has already been seated on the other side of the restaurant. Not exactly the surprise party you had in mind. What happened? Poor communication happened. The friend who made the reservation forgot to tell you to confirm 24 hours in advance. The friend who ordered the cake never saw your email asking them to get cupcakes. And you assumed everyone in the group text message got the update that the party was on Friday, not Saturday. Fortunately, your best friend appreciated the effort and was surprised anyway. But whilst you and your best friend can have a good laugh about the party planning breakdown, if something like this happens at work, your boss and coworkers might not think the same. Communication is very important to every project. I'd even argue that it's the most important tool in making sure your project runs smoothly. Many times, what contributes to the success or failure of a project team comes down to whether or not everyone understands what's happening and how their tasks contribute to the project's goals. As project manager, you play a big part in making sure everyone knows what their roles and tasks are. You're also the person that team members come to when they're just in need of a quick answer. So being able to communicate clearly and effectively is key. It's important to remember that without effective communication, the project is at risk of missing important opportunities or even failing altogether. During a project I recently worked on, my stakeholders allocated a few design specialists to work with me. In the first week of the project, I noticed that one specialist wasn't attending any of the project meetings. I decided to approach the individual about their absence. When asked, they stated that they were well overcapacity with the current workload and were unable to commit to the short deadlines I had been assigning. There were a couple of breakdowns in communication here. First, between a specialist and their manager. And second, between a specialist and me, the project manager. Ideally, the specialist and their manager would have communicated better with each other about the specialist's ability to take on the workload. If I had not communicated with the specialist, their continued absence at meetings could have resulted in lots of lost time. The project being delayed or not being able to deliver the project in a satisfactory way. As it turned out, we only ended up losing a week of work due to the lack of communication. However, since I followed up quickly, we were able to pivot and assign another specialist to the project. So we know communication is very important. But what is communication exactly? To put it simply, communication is the flow of information. It includes everything that's shared, how it's shared, and with whom. Good, effective communication is always clear, honest, relevant, and frequent. But not too frequent. There is such a thing as information overload. Effective communication makes it possible for your project to run on time and up to the expectations outlined in the project plan. So take full advantage of tools like meetings, emails, phone calls, written documents, and formal presentations, and make sure they are accessible by everyone. It's also important to remember that communication is not a one-time event or a one-way route. It needs to happen throughout the entire life cycle of the project, from the project team and stakeholders as well as from you. So be sure to clarify goals and client expectations, follow up on action items, and communicate delays as the project progresses. This will help you avoid issues and setbacks. As the project manager, you're responsible for creating a consistent flow of communication throughout the project. Setting the tone for team communication and working to make sure everyone's on the same page, every step of the way, gives your project the best chance to succeed. Okay, hopefully it's clear that communication is incredibly important to manage a project. Coming up, I'll show you how to make a communication plan that will help you manage all important communication. See you in a bit. So far, you've learned some common ways of communicating during a project. Let's take that a step further by learning how to create a communication plan that will help you manage all the different kinds of communication that will happen during a project. Trust me, there's gonna be a lot of communication, so you'll need a plan to help you stay aware of it all and to use as a tool for communicating effectively. A communication plan organizes and documents the process, types, and expectations of communication for the project. The size and complexity of your communication plan will be different for every project, but it is always good to have one, especially when multiple stakeholders, different phrases, and change management are involved. It will really help you, your project and the stakeholders. Just like other plans related to the project, your communication plan needs to address these questions. What needs to be communicated? Who needs to communicate? When communication needs to happen? Why and how to communicate? And where the information communicated is stored? Let's break down each question with a sample communication plan that I've created for a PlantPals project. First off, your communication plan should include what you're communicating on, or in other words, the type of communication. This could include things like status updates, issues, feedback from users, daily check-ins, and other types of project meetings. Then, you need to identify who you'll communicate with. These are the recipients of the information, like key stakeholders and the core project team. For each type of communication, record when to communicate. This includes the frequency, which is how often you'll communicate, and key dates, like deadlines or major meetings. One thing to keep in mind is that not everyone needs to receive the same amount of information at the same time. Generally speaking, your key stakeholders will get their information less often, like in a monthly high-level summary email or project review meeting. But your core project team could receive more detailed info through daily email updates or quick virtual check-ins. Next, include how you'll communicate or what delivery method you'll use. This could be email, in-person, or virtual meetings or a formal presentation. Your plan also needs to include the goal of communicating. This is your why. So ask yourself, why are you communicating? Is it to give a progress update, identify a risk, and address barriers? Or perhaps you need to figure out next steps, detail preparation plans, and reflect on lessons learned. The goal of communication could be a combination of any of these or some other reason altogether. In either case, there must be a purpose for communicating, otherwise you risk wasting valuable time. Finally, include where communication resources are located, along with any other notes. I'll talk more about best practices for storing information in the next video, but for now, try to remember that relevant information should be easily accessible so that you, your stakeholders, and your team can quickly find the resources they need to make decisions, work on tasks, get caught up, or provide updates. One more benefit to an effective communication plan is that it allows for continuity of the project's operations. If a new project manager comes onto the project and sees the plan, they should be able to quickly access past meeting notes and documentation, as well as current and upcoming communications. The communication plan also helps with effective change management, the process of delivering your final project and getting it successfully implemented. When others have access to the communication plan after you leave the project, they'll be able to fix any problems that might come up, make decisions, or apply similar processes to a new project. Hopefully by now, you're feeling more familiar with the ways a communication plan can lead your project to success. Keep in mind, this is just a basic plan, and there are lots of other ways to structure one. It all depends on what kind of project you're working on. Up next, I'll take you through the details of a communication plan and show you how to use it to manage project communications effectively and efficiently. Now that you know what a communication plan is and the basic categories that go in it, the next step is filling in your plan. In this video, you'll learn how to set up a communication plan that works best for all the different people involved with your project and what kind of information to include in your plan. Things like who needs to be involved in the project communication, what's the best way to communicate, why are you communicating, and how often should you communicate? There are a few key benefits to planning your communications upfront. Creating a communication plan helps improve the overall effectiveness of communication, keeps people engaged and motivated throughout the project, and gets stakeholders involved in effective conversations. Let's try building a sample communication plan so you can see how it helps with managing the different aspects of project communication. We'll continue with the Office Green Plant Pals project. Here's an example of a basic communication plan using a spreadsheet. Before anything else, think about what types of communication you'll be using throughout your project. Feel free to refer back to your racy chart and stakeholder map, which are tools that will help you figure out what type of communication might work best for each person, group, or role. In this example, let's say the stakeholders are busy senior executives who may not need day-to-day details. So instead of daily meetings, it's better to send a newsletter that summarizes key milestones and project progress to date. Let's type that in. The core team, on the other hand, may benefit from a daily stand-up, which is a daily meeting designed to bring everyone up to date on key information. Here, each team member briefly describes any completed work and any barriers that stand in their way. This is common in agile project management as it helps the team stay coordinated and move quickly throughout the project. So we will go ahead and enter daily stand-ups in this row. But sometimes daily meetings aren't possible for given time zone restrictions or other obligations. Don't worry, there are other ways to keep communication flowing. For example, the project team that created this program had daily email status updates for the whole team to report which action items were being worked on for the day. They also used a project tracker for tasks and milestones to make sure everyone's on the same page. Next up, think about who needs to receive information about your project. These are the communication recipients. It helps to look back to the stakeholder map and racy chart again. Ask yourself, who needs to be heavily involved in the details? Who has high interest in the project? Who needs only to be informed of major milestones? I already mentioned that key stakeholders would be receiving a monthly newsletter. So I'll type that in now. Also, we know that the core team will be participating in daily stand-ups, so I'll add that in as well. Excellent. We're moving right along. Next up in recipients are the project subgroups for marketing, procurement, and product development. Let's add separate meetings in for each of those groups in addition to the core team meetings. Since those subgroups are not part of the core team, you might only want to meet with them weekly instead of every day. Let's add weekly check-in to each of these. Great. Another best practice is to list contact information and time zones in your communication plan. That way, you know when people are available for communicating. Let's add that in. Feel free to hide this column since it contains sensitive information about people involved in your project. There are other ways to list contact information privately and link it for easy reference. I'll teach you how to do that in another video. If you're having trouble deciding which type of communication to use, one way to help you choose is by thinking about the frequency. As I mentioned earlier, a senior stakeholder probably won't be able to attend daily meetings and they don't need every piece of information. Instead, you can communicate with a senior stakeholder on a weekly or monthly basis and you can focus on high-level status updates like overall progress, recent wins, or milestones reached, and current metrics. In this case, let's send out the project newsletter once a month. If you're unsure, it's always great to ask senior stakeholders which method of communication works best for them. When you work with your core team on a project, you need to get into more of the day-to-day details. Check in regularly and ask how everything is going, how they're doing on tasks, and do they need your help with anything? Adding a daily meeting for your core team and a weekly meeting for the subgroups. Let's make that happen. Great. Meeting more frequently can help unblock issues and keep the project on the right track. This leads us to key dates. Listing key dates and times are important for coordination. For example, if you're launching a product or new process or giving a presentation, you should list the key dates. Keep in mind not every type of communication needs a specific key date listed. For example, with daily or weekly communications, you might not need to specify the actual date every week. You could just list every Monday or something like that. Let's add in key dates to our plan. For the monthly newsletter, let's send that on the first Monday of every month. Let's schedule the daily stand-ups at noon. And the weekly check-ins are on Wednesdays at two, three, and four o'clock. Wonderful. Now let's talk about delivery methods like email, in-person, and virtual meetings. A shared document that gets updated regularly or a progress report that gets presented. Deciding the best way to communicate is a skill. One thing I continuously need to adapt and work to improve in my role as project manager is communicating among different teams and levels of authority. A director or executive may only have five minutes, so I need to be concise and know exactly what I need from them. Likewise, I might be used to communicating via instant message and video chat with my core team. However, one of the subgroups on the project might respond better to emails and in-document comments. Let me add in these methods for our communication plan, starting with email. Emails are a very common way to get people in sync, but write too much and you may lose your audience. After all, no one really wants to read a two-page email. One way to get around this is by adding a note at the top of your email. This will alert readers that some details of a long email may not be relevant to them. With this kind of email, lead with key points and action items, limited to two to three sentences. Then include a longer section at the bottom for those who want or need additional details. The goal of communicating is getting your point across effectively. So think carefully about what you need to accomplish with each type of communication. For high-level stakeholders, in particular, I'm constantly trying to answer, so what? Why should they care about my project? The same goes for my core team. What information is going to help make sure they complete tasks on time and stay motivated? Thinking about these questions helps me focus on the most important bits of information to share. So let's fill this in in the communication plan. The goal of the monthly newsletter for stakeholders is to give a status update overview. Great. And goals for the daily stand-ups with the core team would be to report progress updates, blockers, and determining next steps. So let's add those in as well. All set. Next, you need to make sure you're able to reach everyone you need to communicate with. So it helps if communication is a team effort. Especially on more complex projects, you shouldn't be the only one communicating. You want to enable other team members to be involved in communications based on their expertise in the project. I'll add a column for sender and owner to indicate who is responsible for each communication. Then I'll add the sender or owner for each of these communication types, starting with the project manager as the sender for the newsletter. Great. And we are all done. Keep in mind it's always a good idea to check in with everyone to make sure communications meet their needs. Everyone absorbs information differently. What works best for you doesn't always work best for others. Some people are more visual and want to see charts and graphs. Some people might prefer to listen to information through a presentation or a meeting. Some people may want to review and analyze information on their own first and then speak with someone about what they read. So if you're only presenting information in just one or two ways, you risk engaging some people, but not others. Your goal as project manager is to optimize and streamline communications. A great way to optimize your communications for everyone on the team is by sending a brief email or survey that asks three questions. What is working in how we communicate with you about the project? What is not working or is not effective in our communications? Where can we improve our communications with you? This will give you plenty of useful information on how you can adapt the communication style to cater to each team member. Communication plans contain a lot of important information and there are so many different ways to set one up. Depending on the size of your team and the needs of your project. Whichever system you choose to use, the most important thing is to make sure your communication plan clearly identifies who needs to be involved in project communication. What methods are being used to communicate? Why are you communicating and how often you are communicating? So that wraps up our discussion on how to effectively fill in a communication plan. In the next video, I'll share with you some best practices for documenting all the information you and your team will be communicating throughout the project. See you in a bit. Great to see you again. Now that you're here, let's talk about the importance of documentation and how it serves as a form of communication for others to reference and contribute to. I'll share an example with you. Once I worked on a project that involved several teams from quality insurance, testing, design, partner engineering, and program managers. Each team was responsible for their own set of deliverables. To keep all teams on the same page, it was important for everyone to store their plans and reports in one centralized place. This allowed any team member to quickly find the documents they needed. Documentation storage and sharing is very important. Having plans in one place makes communication quicker, easier, and more streamlined because everyone knows where to find any information they need. And just as important is making sure your files are stored with clear labels or organized into folders. For example, on my team, we have certain reports stored in one central place. This makes it easier for teams in different countries to find and share their research with each other, which optimizes workflow and reduces duplicate work. Documenting and organizing plans also provides visibility and accountability. Your project plan is a great example of this. Each task has an owner and a due date. This creates visibility for the members of the project team and accountability for the task owner. It's common for members of the team and senior stakeholders to reference your project plan and associated documents when they need a refresher on timelines or milestones. So having up-to-date plans will help ensure there's no room for misinterpretation or miscommunication. Once you've created a centralized location for your documents, it's time to think about managing permissions of your files and folders. If someone isn't a core part of the project team, you might not want them to have full access to all of the meeting notes. Instead, summarize the relevant information into a status report for those who need to stay informed of final outcomes, but don't need all background information. There's another big benefit to setting up your project plans and centralizing them in one place, continuity. As the project manager, there could be times when you need to suddenly leave the project, say you got sick, transfer to another project, or needed to take a leave of absence. Another project manager may need to step in, and if all the project information is scattered across unorganized personal notes, it's not very helpful. But if you documented all the plans in one place, the new project manager can find everything they need and pick up right where you left off. So it's always useful to store guides, manuals, meeting notes, plans, and processes all in a centralized place and clearly labeled. You'll also want to make sure the people in relevant roles are granted access to those documents. So even if you're not present, the project can carry on. As project manager, it's your job to ensure that project data can be accessed in the future by others. Documenting your plans and making them available is part of a project management best practice called knowledge management. If someone needs to review this project for making decisions or planning similar projects, they should be able to easily access the information they need. It also helps set the tone for future projects and future project managers, which can be incredibly helpful if you happen to be the one jumping onto a new project. For example, if an architect is working on a kitchen remodel, and they want to make a decision about the design, they can look at the old project plans to understand why the decision was made to put the sink in a certain location. Or if a new architect comes in halfway through the remodel, they might want to know why the other architect designed the plumbing a certain way. By looking at the old plans, they can go back and get the information and context they need to move forward with more informed decisions. It's also important to determine what kind of information to share with whom and when. Focus on the key information related to what specific individuals need to know. Think about this scenario, a project manager who's working with all the VPs at their company decides to send out daily updates. From a communication standpoint, what could be the potential impact of the project manager's decision? Well, since VPs get lots of emails, they're not likely to read the updates. That ends up being a waste of time for you. Also, when you send a lot of unnecessary information, then it's hard to tell what's really important. Figuring out the right information to share is even more important when you're working on projects that have sensitive data. In those cases, you need to be very careful of how you share information about your project with stakeholders who do not have permissions to view sensitive data. For example, financial data or user survey results are often highly sensitive and should never be made available to unauthorized viewers. Here's another scenario. Let's say your team is working on a high-profile launch of a brand new product, say an electric car. Most people don't need to know all of the thinking behind the project or see all the draft versions, but they do need to know what the final design will look like. The project is legally sensitive and you want to avoid leaks and oversharing classified data. If you share the entire project folder with everyone who needs to know only the end result, you risk doing just that, revealing highly sensitive and classified data. If this information gets leaked to the wrong people, project plans and company data could be made public, ruining the big launch of the electric car. You also risk violating company policy and damaging your reputation as a trustworthy and responsible project manager. Only share information on a need-to-know basis. It's your job to present the right information at the right time to the right people. Let me show you an example. In this sample communication plan, one of the resources is user feedback surveys. This resource contains raw data collected from surveys submitted by PlantPow's test users, which means it has personally identifiable information, or PII. PII is anything that possibly reveals someone's identity, like a screen name, password, phone number, email address, first or last name, anything like that. For that reason, only share that resource with the members of the project team who are approved to access this level of information. Then, if anyone else tries to open the document, they will be alerted that they need to request permission to access it. If you need to share results of these surveys, those can be presented in a graph, chart, or summarized in a report without any PII included. Then you can share that information with the broader team. Now you have a better understanding of how important documentation is to project management. Coming up next, we'll learn the best way to put your plan together and stay organized. See you later. Hi again. So far in this course, you've filled in or created some different project planning resources, like the project plan, budget, racy chart, risk management plan, and now a communications plan. We also discussed the importance of organizing your communications and having easy and appropriate access to project plans. Now, I'll show you one way you can organize all your project information in one centralized place. You'll be able to apply these same general techniques to almost any type of project management style or system. Organizing your project plans makes everyone's job easier and eliminates opportunity for confusion. As a project manager, your goal is to have all of your project resources documented and linked in a way to where you or anyone on the project can access what they need quickly. A couple of handy ways to get organized are using a shared file drive, like Google Drive, and creating one resource, like a document or spreadsheet, that links all of the files and resources that your project uses. Here's an example of how to organize your files in Google Drive. But it doesn't matter which shared system your project team uses. You can use the same process for pretty much all of them. First, create a new folder and label it with the name of your project. Use this folder to store all your project files. You can even create subfolders and store them in the main project folder. You can also stay organized by creating a centralized planning document that links everything together. This can serve as a quick reference guide that you can use to find all your frequently accessed files in one place. Here's an office green example that's already been started. One at a time, select a resource name, then link it. Now you can access the file directly from the centralized document. If your project uses multiple spreadsheets and you want to avoid having to open lots of separate files, you can group them within one sheet, like this. This sheet has tabs for all the other sheets that contain project information. You can add a new sheet at any time. It's helpful to include an overview sheet and link any non-spread sheet files. This is also a good place to provide a brief description of the project, instructions for how to use the sheet or communication expectations. In this example, the overview sheet is called the dashboard, which is the same thing. You can decide how to label yours. There you have it. Now you're organized and ready to show everyone what an awesome project manager you are. Hi, I'm Chris. I'm a diversity program manager here at Google. So I lead diversity programming and strategy for one of our business units here at Google. I focus in on diversity programming for our most underrepresented Googlers, like our Black Plus, our Latinx and our native populations here at Google. We're a manager world where every single day I'm thinking about who needs to be involved in the projects that I work on. Who will care to invest in the programs that I want to roll out, right? Because I need to get buy-in for certain programs to get greenlit, right? So I'm always thinking about how I'm organizing my materials. I'm always thinking about packaging and telling a story behind all of it so I can continue to do the great work that I do. An artifact is anything that you physically put together that describes or showcases the work that you're doing. So that could be a document that is say an executive brief or just an overview of the work that you're doing or it could be something as tactical as a roles and responsibilities sheet, right? So breaking down who on your team is handling what and to whom you need to present. It's really important to keep that organized because it's not just for my own use but it's also for anyone who I engage, right? So a stakeholder or someone who needs to sign off on a project or it might be my teammates on something. I often bring in either volunteers or full-time help to help build the programs that I run. Lastly, say we have an outside vendor. They need to understand where they fit into the larger picture but also what they tactically need to do to make the program successful. So keeping artifacts allows you to have the best possible outcome in all program management elements. And regardless of that piece, you also wanna be able to showcase your work at the end so that when it comes time to possibly get more budget for a program or to take the programs to the next level you have a good baseline to really understand from where you started and how far you've come. When you have all those artifacts it's really important to be able to speak to how those artifacts allowed you to be successful. The artifacts are really what tangibly show someone during a job interview that you were the one that did the work to make the program or the project successful, right? So if you just talk about a project or a program at a high level in a job interview the interviewer might want to know more detail. And the artifacts allow you to show that detail allow you to show not only what happened with the project and how far it came but also your contributions to it. And it physically shows your ability to conduct the entire process from start to finish. You're the quarterback, right? And the quarterback also holds the playbook. And if you don't have the playbook who on the team is gonna know what to do other than you, you run the show. And so effectively you wanna make sure that you're able to showcase in any setting whether it be why you're currently working on the project or later in during an interview all that you did to make the program or project successful. Job searching, whether it's your first time or your 10th is a common but unique experience. And whether you're looking for an entry level position considering a career switch or re-entering the workforce after a hiatus you need a resume. Your resume will be a key document throughout your job search. It's how recruiters can get an initial sense of who you are as a potential employee. And so it's really important to pay attention to the information on it. Most resumes share many of the same core elements. These are your contact information, previous work and educational experience and skills. Documenting your experience in a resume gives you the opportunity to stand out to a potential employer. Not only do you get to list your past and current experiences but you get to highlight your accomplishments as well. Let's break down the elements of a strong resume. Most resumes start with contact information. At the top of your document you'll include your name, email address and other relevant contact information you wish to include like a phone number or address. Many resumes also include a brief one to three sentence summary of your experience. This summary is referred to as an objective or sometimes as a profile summary. For example, an objective might sound something like a passionate and customer-centered focused individual with three years of experience launching new products and managing processes. It's generally considered optional to add an objective or profile summary to your resume. Some recruiters like them while others don't think they're necessary. An objective or profile summary can be helpful however if you're looking to change careers and want to highlight transferable experience to a recruiter. Next step is the central element of most resumes, your current and previous experience whether work or education related. When listing your work experience you'll include your current or previous employers and job titles. And for each job you'll also include start and end dates and two to three bullet points explaining your job responsibilities and accomplishments. Your educational experience isn't just high school or college but can include online degrees, certificates, and other professional development you've completed. And finally, you may choose to include skills especially those that are relevant to the project management roles you're applying to. As we've discussed earlier, some core skills that project managers possess include enabling decision making, communicating, flexibility, and strong organizational skills. I'd add that it also includes skills like ability to manage tasks effectively, work well with others, follow through on tasks, and hold teammates accountable. It could also include industry knowledge like experience with digital tools or work management software. You can highlight these skills and more on your resume either listed out in a dedicated skills section or incorporated into your section on current and previous experience. Another great skill that some people forget to add are additional languages spoken. If you have a high level of fluency in another language, it's definitely worth mentioning. Another way to show off skills is to mention hobbies on your resume like volunteer work or experience working in your community. Sometimes listing hobbies that speak to your interests and background can say a lot about you and that can be helpful to a hiring manager. In addition to highlighting what you're passionate about, many hobbies also require skills that a project manager can use on the job. For instance, some hobbies I see on a resume, coaching a youth sports team, or teaching an art class, may tell me you're able to solve problems and connect with people. Things like that really stand out to me because they show that you're someone who has interests beyond their career, including a broad variety of items on your resume can help show that you're excited about learning new things outside of work. Personally, I think this makes for incredibly interesting candidates and these are the kinds of qualities we look for when hiring program managers at Google. We are always looking for people who can bring new perspectives and life experiences to our teams. Google's culture is diverse and inclusive and we look for people who are open to learn new things and are great collaborators. This is especially true in project and program management. We look for candidates who are open to trying new things because sometimes your first attempt at something may not go as planned and you'll need to try a different tactic. And we look for people who can effectively collaborate with other teams outside their own project teams to help everyone reach their goals. As you can see, a strong resume can really help you tell a powerful story about yourself, providing a full picture of who you are, what your strengths are, and what you're passionate about. Before I wrap up, it's important to note that a resume isn't the only way to document your abilities. You can also use online communities like LinkedIn as an additional tool to increase your opportunities. The same details on your resume should be stressed in your LinkedIn profile. Additionally, recruiters and hiring managers use LinkedIn to scout for talent, view a candidate's professional journey and gain insights to skills, networks, professional associates, things that may not have been included in the typical resume. A recent survey showed that 90% of recruiters use LinkedIn to search for qualified job applicants. Once you document your experience, you can begin to search for and apply to jobs at companies. You want to get it right on paper before you have the next conversation. You'll have the opportunity to continue building this skill in the associated readings and activities. So take advantage of these resources and polish or create that new resume. I'll see you soon. I'm Dan, and I'm a program manager at Google Research. As a program manager in research, I work to make sure that all of the teams I work with are on the same page, whether that's product teams who are implementing the research or research teams who need to understand kind of how to define their research agenda for future projects. So a lot of what I do is effective communication and trying to create kind of detailed documentation so that everyone can kind of connect the dots. One thing that I've observed as a program manager is a kind of a proliferation of documents or what I like to call death by a thousand documents. So it becomes really important to have one kind of master document where you centralize all the kind of sub documents or smaller docs that you might need to execute a project. And then you can just go to the master document and find what you need, even if that lives somewhere else. So I can go into my like kind of master tracker and I can find the program charter. I can find the budget. I can find the agreed upon scope, any document that has like approval matrices, which is like a list of all the approvals I need, things like that. If I can link out to everything from just one place, I know that I'll always be able to start there and find what I need. There's not a one size fits all approach to project or program management. So you might need a risk management plan for one project but not another and there might be some other type of documentation you need. So really keeping everything organized and starting from one place is the most helpful tip I can give. The broader trend in program management or project management documentation is that you don't just take one pass at a document. You don't finish your project plan or your project charter in one go. You have to constantly return to it, revise it and continue to, it's a living and breathing document. And the more detailed you can be in your documentation, the fewer iterations you're gonna need to go through later on because they're more likely to get things right the first time. You've done a lot of work so far. Let's take a moment to review all you learned in this course. First, you learned the key components of the planning phase and explored how proper planning ensures that milestones and tasks are completed. Next, you learned why it is necessary to create and manage a project plan, how to utilize time estimation methods to prevent project failure, how to get viable estimates using soft skills and which tools you can use to build a project plan. Then you learned what the components of a project budget are, how the budget process works and the concepts behind estimating and tracking a project budget. And we discussed how the procurement process flows to manage paperwork, bids, proposals and performance. You also learned about risk management and how it helps prevent project failure. You learned how to identify risks and measure their impact on a project and how to communicate and monitor potential risks once they're identified. Finally, you learned how important it is to document plans. You learned how to organize plans to provide visibility and accountability and what elements of a simple communication plan are vital to project success. In the next course, you'll continue on to executing and closing a project where my colleague, Elita, will be your guide. She's going to teach you all about tracking and measuring project progress, risk management, using data to make decisions and effective project communication. I had a wonderful time sharing my project management experience with you. Best of luck.