Google Project Management Professional Certificate — My Thoughts!

As Google introduced the Career Certificates, I was intrigued about the courses and wanted to give them a try. The first course that I took from the Career Certificates program was “Google Data Analytics Professional”. Unlike most of the other courses which focused more on the technologies and techniques, the Google Data Analytics Professional course focused more on best practices and processes of managing analytics projects. Even though I have experience with analytics for 3+ years, there were a lot of best practices to learn and I loved the course.

Having Positive experience with the Google Data Analytics Professional Certification, I thought of taking up the Google Project Management Professional certification next. I am fairly new to project management concepts and indeed I felt that course was extremely resourceful. The course started with the foundation which was very useful by itself and slowly the course started building up and ended with a project which was kind of a real-world example. One thing that I loved about the Project Management Professional Certification was “Peer Graded Assessments”.

For most of the weekly assignments, peers will review your answers and you have to review for at least 2 peers. This helped me compare my answers with peers and best understand how other folks like me are approaching the project management scenarios and assessments.

In case if you can’t read the whole story, here are 5 things to know about the course.

• It covers both Waterfall and Agile Methodologies.
• Through assignments, You get to practice most project management steps from writing a project charter, preparing budget, timeline, Launch Project, Conduct Retrospective.
• There are 5 courses and 1 project module.
• You get a credly badge when you complete all the 6 courses.
• If you want to grow your project management skills and want to take up Scrum Certification, you get a 40% discount for PSM 1 exam if you have completed Google Project Management Certification.

Structure of the Course:

The course is divided into 6 modules out of which 5 are courses and 1 is a guided project.

1. Foundations of Project Management.
2. Project Initiation: Starting a Successful Project
3. Project Planning: Putting it All Together
4. Project Execution: Running the Project
5. Agile Project Management
6. Capstone Project

Some notes that I took from the course:

• Understand the Goals and determine the primary and secondary stakeholders. Use the SMART goals method for writing goals. Also, Determine OKR’s for each goal to get more insights about the Goals.
• Prepare the Project Charter and get sign-off from Project Sponsors, Stakeholders before Project Planning.
• Connect with Stakeholders to validate the Summary, Goal, Mission, Deliverables and Acceptance Criteria. (SME and Leadership) can be your best stakeholders. Use Stakeholders Matrix or RACI chart to establish the Stakeholders.
• Keep the Project Vision clear.
• Perform Cost-Benefit Analysis and ensure that the Benefit>Cost.
• Use appendix in project charter for additional info/misalignments that team or the stakeholders should know. As the course progress, this document can be revisited to understand if the conflict has been resolved.
• Determine the project model Agile/Waterfall or mix of both.
• Ensure that all the stakeholders agree to the project plan/charter before moving forward. Stakeholder buy-in is essential. Equip your stakeholders with user-friendly resources at all times. This could mean creating a one-pager (a one-page document that provides an overview of your project) or a weekly status report with the latest information and links to the main project artifacts. It may also mean ensuring everyone has access to necessary documentation.
• Make Coalition with stakeholders who can support you in taking decisions for the project.
• Once Project Charter is done, we move to the project planning phase where you will define tasks, milestones and schedules. The milestone indicates deliverables or Progress.
• Always improve domain knowledge before starting to manage the project, Do your research. Online research can help a lot.
• Define tasks by the amount of time it will take to complete. Use Three-Point Estimating. Optimistic (No issues will arise for the task)/Pessimistic (Issues would Occur for sure)/Most likely (assumes some issues might occur). Use Pert Distribution to calculate optimal time. The Beta (PERT) distribution is a weighted average. The most likely estimate receives a multiplier of four, while the overall divisor is increased to six. This method takes into account that the most likely cause is more likely to occur, so it’s given more weight. The added weight is reflected in the multiplier of four. e=(o+4m+p)/6. Add confidence rating once the time estimate is completed.
• Time Negotiation is important to manage a team. Get help from Subject Matter Experts when you want to estimate time.
• Establish Quality Standards when implementing or running a project.
• Prepare Evaluation Presentation when the outcomes needs to be presented to the management.
• A retrospective is important when the project is completed or after each milestone.
• Escalate to stakeholder when problems cannot be mitigated from the project manager’s end.
• When sending email to stakeholders, remember to share, a brief outline of the problem, Explanation of how this impacts the project, The decision or buy in you are looking for from the stakeholders.
• Prepare a close-out report once the project is delivered. It should contain Project Summary, Methodology, Performance Baseline, Outcomes, Lessons Learned, Next Steps.
• Prepare and share executive summary to present the project outcome to the Leadership.
• Executive Summary: A few sentences to para that describe the project’s purpose and outcome. Provides an overview of the main points of the larger report. Include Project Vision and Key accomplishments.

Some Keywords from the Course:

Waterfall | Agile | Scrum | Kanban | Lean | Six Sigma | Communication | Collaboration | Initiate | SMART Goals | Objectives and Key Results | Stakeholders | Plan | Resources | Cost | Benefits | Deliverables | Milestones | Tasks | Project Charter | Triple Constraint Model | Success Criteria | Power Grid | RACI Matrix | Scope Creep | Assign Project Roles | Work Break Down Structure | Capacity Planning | Risk Management Plan | Critical Path | Network Diagram | Gannt Chart | Capital Expenses | Operation Expenses | Contingency Reserves | Management Reserves | Contract Writing | Request for Proposal | Non Disclosure Agreement | Probability and Impact Matrix | Brainstorm | Risk Register | Risk Appetite | Fishbone Diagram | Roadmap | Burn Down Chart | Project Status Reports | Dependencies | Escalation Management | Quality Standard | Quality Planning | Quality Assurance | Negotiation | UAT | Continuous Improvement | Process Improvement | DMAIC | PDCA | High Functional Teams | Bruce TuckMan’s Stages for Team Development | Influence | Credibility | ROAM Analysis | VUCA | Scrum | Scrum Master | Product Owner | XP | Kanban | Empiricism | Product Backlog | Epic | Asana | JIRA | User Stories | Planning Poker | Dot Voting | Bucket System | Sprint | Retrospective | Velocity Charts | Burn Down Chart | Product Roadmap

Thanks for Reading,

Priyason P