You may be the project manager, but no project is an island. It requires teamwork, and project management means taking the proper actions to ensure the team works effectively to address the project characteristics and needs. In this course, you'll explore best practices for building a project team, including assessing the functional organization structure, resources management, and staffing plans. You'll also learn about tools like Responsibility Asset Matrices, RACI charts, multi-criteria decision analysis, and stakeholder analysis and how they are used to see the product vision to fruition. Finally, you'll look at how using political awareness, a project charter, and team ground rules will enable your team, including virtual team members, to work efficiently together.

As a project manager, once your project scope has been clearly defined, it's time to estimate and plan. Drawing on information from the initiation phase, you must now determine how much time and money will be required to meet objectives and complete the project. In this course you will learn how to develop the project schedule and cost baselines for your project budget, and use them to monitor and measure performance throughout the project.

Of all the different types of skills and competencies a project manager uses when managing projects, "soft" skills are the most important. The ability to communicate effectively with team members and negotiate between different demands enables the project manager to manage project conflict. Effectively resolving conflict helps stakeholders remain positive and can mean the difference between project success and failure. In this course, you'll learn about change management and dealing with conflict. You'll explore how to handle it when someone requests project changes, how to create a plan for communicating with stakeholders, and approaches for dealing with conflicts that arise.

For the new project manager, the essentials - what you need to know to undertake your new responsibilities - are not always obvious. Project management involves a lot of moving parts. In this course, you'll learn some of the foundational concepts, such as what a project and its project environment and scope are. You'll learn what you'll be responsible for, and things you'll need to understand before planning begins. You'll also learn where to go to access useful information and how to identify the different types of people who will have an interest in the project - its stakeholders.