Learner Outcomes
This course is designed to give you practical tips, insights and shortcuts for being a successful project manager.
It saves the course participant countless hours of research and years of experience otherwise needed to gain the essential ingredients to be an effective and confident project manager.
Upon successful completion of this course, you will be able to:
- Understand predictive (waterfall), adaptive (agile) or hybrid approaches to managing projects;
- Apply a project process that works best for your objectives, your team, and your organization;
- Have tools and techniques to more effectively manage project information;
- Get desired project outcomes, without losing flexibility and innovation;
- Forecast impacts from project budget and schedule variances;
- Monitor and control project quality and risk;
- Lead project teams and communications more effectively;
- Select a project management software tool from several options;
- Engage stakeholders more effectively;
- Understand the PMP certification process and better prepare for the PMP exam.
Topics will include discussing and applying the traditional project lifecycle phases of initiating, planning, executing, monitoring and controlling, and closing that are common to all projects, both predictive or adaptive. Other topics include the project knowledge areas of project integration, scope, schedule, cost, quality, resource, risk, procurement and stakeholder management.
This Project Management course focuses on the organization and leadership skills for successfully completing projects. These skills include planning and designing a project, creating project schedules and budgets, monitoring and controlling project progress, communicating with stakeholders, and tracking results to meet outcome and timeline expectations. Project Management is utilized by all industries, from IT, to construction, marketing, and human resources. Whether your project is developing new software, creating new packaging, or developing a new employee training program, this project management course gives you the necessary skills, tools, processes and mindset to guide your team to successful completion of project objectives.
Course Format
Weekly lectures, assignments, reading assignments, quizzes and open book final exam.
Required Course Materials
Available from Amazon
- A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide) – Seventh Edition by the Project Management Institute. ISBN: 978-1-62825-664-2.
Course Benefits
Completing this course will equip participants with enhanced understanding to lead projects and teams with more confidence, plus add more skills to identify, assess and resolve potential problems during the project process.
Additionally, course participants will have more understanding about:
- Creating an optimized project delivery process tailored to specific needs;
- Problem solving as a collaborative team;
- Conducting more effective meetings;
- Building better internal processes using project management principles and tools;
- Time management;
- Setting up a PMO;
- The established vocabulary of the project management profession
Evaluation Tools
This is a pass/fail course, based on points earned as a percent of points available. Twelve weekly quizzes will count as half of the course total and the final exam will count as the other half. A total of 70% is required to pass the course.
Ethics
Honesty, as defined in the Project Management Institute Code of Ethics, is expected at all times. Any indication of cheating, as defined by the University and perceived by the instructor, will result in course failure.
Disabilities
Students who may require special accommodations must register with Disability Services for Students (DSS) before any such accommodations can be made.
University Policy
There are important University policies that students should be aware of, such as the add/drop policy; cheating and plagiarism policy; grade appeal procedures; accommodations for students with disabilities; and diversity at SSU. These and other university policies may be found at http://www.sonoma.edu/policies
Instructor
The course will be taught by Craig Whan, PMP. Please refer to Craig’s Bio for information about the instructor.
Communications
Please contact Craig by email at: craig.whan@sonoma.edu.