What is Project Management?
In the modern professional landscape, virtually no tasks are undertaken by just one person. This means that successful product launches, releases, advertising blitzes or awareness campaigns are far more than the sum of their parts, relying heavily on interpersonal engagement and collaboration between various teams and team members. If you want to learn how to ensure that your team members can work together and handle all of the logistics of the collaborative effort, you may want to consider a course in project management.
Project management is a broad category of skills and tasks that are all focused on managing the three major elements of any large-scale project: capital, human resources and time. Knowing how to manage these three concerns (which can often be in opposition to one another) is essential to ensuring that any given project is completed without significant hurdles. Good project management skills can also help elevate a project's scope and successes, allowing you to complete the work faster and under budget, making future projects all the easier for you. Project management training also includes many soft skills, including conflict management and resolution, public speaking and organizational skills.
Why Learn Project Management?
Project managers are indispensable parts of any large institution or organization, especially one in which disparate teams of employees (such as a graphic design team and a web development team) must work together in order to complete major projects. Learning the skills involved in project management will be very helpful for anyone in an oversight role or who is regularly tasked with leading teams or being responsible for the day-to-day progress of a smaller aspect of a project
Learning project management is also about learning how to collaborate with other managers and invested stakeholders. It is as much about handling social interactions and human resources as it is about handling the finances and organizational concerns behind your project. This means that lessons may also include things like public speaking, data visualization, PowerPoint and conflict resolution, all of which are useful skills to have even if you aren’t working as a dedicated project manager.
What Does Project Management Entail?
While every project will be different, there are a few consistencies that you can identify across almost all projects that managers will need to account for and address. These are a few of the most common concerns you can assume you’ll deal with when working as a project manager.
Human Resources
The most complex and important issue when taking on a significant project is managing the people collaborating on it. This can be a group as small as yourself and two other people, or it can involve multiple departments working in tandem, but regardless of the group size, it is important to consider that your team members are more than just tools to be used in the process of completing the project. Learning how to handle the human side of a project focuses primarily on communication and oversight, skills that will help you keep up with the work of your team members without causing problems by being overly controlling or too distant. It also involves learning how to quickly and effectively communicate information, suggestions or other important updates to team members and invested stakeholders.
Budget
If you are in charge of a project, you are likely also in charge of handling the budget for that project. This is why many project management classes provide students with the training they need to read financial records and how to organize and update the current state of their project’s finances using programs like Excel. In many projects, budget is the one thing that is completely non-negotiable and will require the most specialized training to fully grasp as a part of the project management process. You are likely to need to keep accurate records of your spending (and income, if you have any for this project) and you’ll need to be able to report that information back to invested stakeholders.
Time
No one is going to undertake a project without at least a theoretical soft deadline, so a good project manager needs to understand that time is almost as much of a resource as the budget. Learning how to manage your team’s time and how to ensure that everything is keeping up the pace they need to complete the project. You’ll also need to learn strategies for handling sudden changes in the schedule or structure of your project since delays are inevitable when working with something as complex as a large-scale project. This training will also help you ensure that you are able to set up an initial schedule that doesn’t over-promise how quickly you can get a project done.
Risk and Change
It is often said that no plan survives first contact with the enemy, and that is as true for project management as it is for military maneuvers. No matter how well you plan out the tasks, timeframe and budget of a project, it is inevitable that you will need to work on the fly to make changes when the rubber hits the road. Learning how to manage issues of risk-taking and change during a project involves two major skills. The first is learning how to plan to offer yourself extra room for things going wrong, and the second is learning how to respond once things go wrong.
Monitoring and Closing
The final major aspect of learning project management is learning how to properly let team members or whomever you are overseeing go about their work while you monitor their progress and positively contribute to their part of the project. It is quite possible to monitor a project too closely, and it is just as easy to be too aloof in your oversight. These skills will also help you identify potential issues beforehand, ensuring you aren’t caught off guard and have plenty of time to adjust. Finally, you’ll learn that important strategies are at play for handing off a completed project (or your team’s contribution) that will require you to understand a different set of communication and interpersonal working skills.
Five Stages of Project Management
In general, every project is going to consist of five phases that you’ll need to account for (though some project managers won’t be involved in all five of them), and a good project management class will focus on the different aspects of each of these five stages.
Initiation
The initiation stage is where an idea becomes a tangible project that can be initiated by the relevant parties. This stage primarily focuses on communicating your element of the project to both invested stakeholders and to the team members who will be working on it. This stage is best thought of as a kind of pre-planning, designed to help get the project green-lit.
Planning
The planning phase, as the name implies, focuses on planning out the project on a practical level. This is also where you start to account for issues such cost, time and the human element of the project since you are looking to create a plan that can be easily executed in a timeframe that is reasonable for an acceptable price. This is also one of the more collaborative phases as you will be working with other stakeholders to outline the overall goals of the project.
Execution
Next up is the execution phase, during which the project is undertaken, and your team members start working on their individual responsibilities. This is the phase where you are going to be able to determine whether or not your proposed plan was viable and whether or not you’ll need to immediate revise your course of action based on how your team members are handling the initial work.
Monitoring
The monitoring phase happens when the execution phase is well underway, and you can be more hands-off in your oversight. This phase is primarily about ensuring that everything continues to move smoothly and that any issues that arise are caught early enough in the process and with enough foresight to be addressed effectively.
Closing
The closing phase involves either wrapping the project up and getting it ready for launch (or shutting it down in the event that it is something like an ad campaign) or handing off your team’s components of the project to the next relevant party (such as handing off a completed design document to a team of developers). This is an essential part of the process that is more complicated than it might initially seem, given that it is important that nothing gets lost in the hand-off and that the next person to handle the project understands everything about it.
Other Skills You’ll Learn in a Project Management Course
Excel
Excel is one of the most versatile computer applications publicly available and serves a wide range of different functions in a project management context. For example, the application can be used to track schedules and tasks, helping you keep records of who is working on what and when they are expected to complete their part of the task. It can also be used to track finances since you can write functions to create complex, dynamic budgets and records that will help you keep track of the internal workings of your project’s finances. Even if you are just recording important contact information and relevant document links, Excel is one of the best possible tools to learn.
Communication Skills
When working with two or more people, communication skills are vital, since information needs to be shared, and collaborative tasks can’t be accomplished without some measure of communication between the relevant parties. Learning how to communicate involves both written and verbal communication since you’ll need to learn how to talk directly to team members and relevant stakeholders, and you’ll need to learn how to compose emails and memos that will serve as a substitute for in-person communication. This training will focus on being direct and clear in your information and instructions since confusion among team members is a common cause of issues.
Data Visualization, Public Speaking and PowerPoint
It is likely that at some point during the project process (likely during the initiation, planning or closing phases) you’ll need to present your progress or explain the underlying logics that are going into a project. This will require you to be somewhat adept at the most common public speaking techniques (and how to be comfortable as a public speaker) and how to use programs like PowerPoint, Excel, or even Tableau to create visual representations of your progress, your goals or your plans for the current project.
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Tools
Artificial intelligence has become the new technology that has everyone clamoring to find a way to leverage it as part of their workflow. AI can be a powerful workplace productivity tool, especially for handling the rote and boring parts of any given project that cause it to drag on, like writing simple emails, building schedules to publish or writing internal use copy. It can also be a useful brainstorming tool for projects that necessitate some amount of creativity. While AI won’t be able to do the work of a project manager, it can make some of the more formulaic aspects of the job easier, giving you more time to focus on the unique issues that come up in regard to your project.
What Kind of Projects Might You Manage
Unsurprisingly, project management is a rather diverse field, covering various industries and end goals. While every project is unique, there are a few common kinds of projects you may want to be aware of if you want to work in a specific industry.
Product Launches
One of the most common job titles for someone trained in project management is Product Manager, a professional who oversees the design, development and launch of a product, web application or software application. They will be involved in the earliest stages of the design process through to the eventual public release of the product. They will be expected to understand the ins and outs of their industry (so if you want to be a product manager on a computer application, you’ll need to understand software engineering), and they will need to be able to work with diverse teams of employees handling a wide range of different aspects of the development process (including tangential groups, like graphic designers or advertising teams).
Design Projects
Visual design projects, whether they are user interfaces, ad campaigns, brand identity designs or even something as simple as creating a new logo, will need a project manager in order to ensure that all of the different teams and stakeholders are on the same page in regards to what they want the final product to look like. In this context, knowledge of the design process is less important for the project manager, since they won’t be as involved in the technical processes. Design projects are also less likely to involve a significant product release (though they may involve launching a website, for example). Design project managers may also oversee some aspects of a product launch, working alongside other project managers.
Awareness Campaigns
Sometimes, the goal of a project isn’t to create something as much as it is to draw awareness to something, be that a product (like an advertising campaign), a cause (an activist campaign) or just the presence of an institution (be it a club, public service or event). These campaigns will usually be overseen by a project manager who ensures everyone is on the same page and working towards the same general goal. This coordination will vary from task to task since each campaign is going to have different stakeholders, but it is essential nonetheless.
Project Management Classes
If you are looking for a project management course, there are a wide range of different options available to you, depending on the specific skills you are hoping to learn and the depth to which you want to learn them. Noble Dekstop offers comprehensive live, in-person and online project management, business and presentation courses that are perfect for anyone looking to get a career-focused education in the practical and theoretical skills associated with project management.
For the most comprehensive training possible, you can consider enrolling in the “MBA” business certificate program, which covers everything from project management to data analytics for business professionals and digital marketing strategies for various businesses. This course is ideal if you plan on either starting your own business (and want to know how to oversee your first group of employees) or looking for a well-rounded education that will allow you to oversee a wide range of different projects. This course will provide you with a certificate of completion, and because it is career-focused, you’ll leave the immersive seminar with all of the training you need to start working right away.
If you only want to learn more general project management skills, you may want to instead enroll in the considerably more abridged Project Management Bootcamp. This course covers all five stages of the project management process in great detail and provides all-purpose training for prospective managers looking to learn practical leadership and oversight skills. This course is useful for anyone looking to become a more efficient and organized leader in their existing role at a company or institution, while additional training will likely be required for anyone looking to make project management their central career duty.
You may also find that you are looking to learn specific skills that assist in project management tasks but are neither required nor comprehensive. For example, Microsoft Office offers a collection of useful tools for project managers, including Project, Excel and PowerPoint. These classes are ideal for professionals who want to learn their skills quickly and effectively, as each course can be completed in only a few evenings. If you want to learn all of these skills at once, you can enroll in the Microsoft Office Bootcamp, which covers these applications as well as programs like Word and Access.