Project Management 360Cornell

Certificate Program

Even experienced project leaders will ask themselves “Why won't people listen to me?” or “What went wrong with my plan?” Of all the skills critical to project leadership, emotional intelligence may be the most important—and least understood. 

In this course, you will learn to identify, analyze, and manage emotions, both yours and your team members'.

It is a common mistake among project leaders to focus too heavily on the mechanics of project management while neglecting the critical people skills that keep everyone engaged and working harmoniously. In this course, from Robert Newman of Cornell's College of Civil and Environmental Engineering, project leaders will explore concepts of emotional intelligence and practice skills relevant to managing emotions so that they can enjoy better project outcomes. You will focus on five critical aptitudes: communication, relationship management, decision making, conflict management, and motivation.

Even experienced project leaders often find that regular meetings and status updates don't lead to meaningful communication. When the team doesn't fully understand project goals or how the work is going to get done, that lack of clarity will have a direct impact on whether the project is on time, within budget, and will lead to quality output. At the same time, team members may mislead you about their progress. Stakeholders may not always explain their expectations. Customers may be unclear about what they want and need. What's going wrong? And how can a project leader do better?

In this course, authored by Cornell Instructor Robert Newman, you will examine typical project-related communication problems and explore practical strategies for overcoming them. You'll learn to host kick-offs and lead meetings that actually guide the team toward successful outcomes. You will practice communicating with a fresh, even sometimes unfamiliar, perspective in order to bring about productive and high-functioning working relationships.

You are required to have completed the following course or have equivalent experience before taking this course:

• Leverage Emotional Intelligence for Project Results

Getting skilled people to behave and perform as high-functioning teams can be a challenge. In this course, you'll take a look at how teams tend to progress, what might impact motivation and engagement, and how culture can influence behaviors and results.

This course, authored by Cornell Instructor Robert Newman, will show you how the fundamentals as taught by top researchers like Frederick Herzberg, Bruce Tuckman, and Meredith Belbin can help turn a group of workers into a high-performing team.

You are required to have completed the following course or have equivalent experience before taking this course:

• Leverage Emotional Intelligence for Project Results

Seasoned project leaders sometimes apply the same leadership approach to every situation. In this course, authored by Cornell Instructor Robert Newman, you'll explore a number of leadership styles to assess their relative strengths and weaknesses. You'll learn how to manage safety concerns, when to be directly coercive, and see how creative collaboration and a shot of inspiration can turn things around for a team.

After taking this course, you'll be ready to employ a particular style or model of leadership just as a carpenter would a tool. Does the occasion call for a hammer or a saw? Every style of leadership has its merits and its place. Find out what style works best for the situation. 

You are required to have completed the following course or have equivalent experience before taking this course:

• Leverage Emotional Intelligence for Project Results

As a project leader you need to be able to distinguish between when conflict is healthy and when it's damaging to relationships and productivity. In this course, authored by Cornell Instructor Robert Newman, you'll learn to identify various causes and sources of conflict and learn to foster healthy disagreement within a project team.

You are required to have completed the following course or have equivalent experience before taking this course:

• Leverage Emotional Intelligence for Project Results

When errors, misses, over-runs and problems occur during projects, a balanced, measured response from the project leader is critical. If you underreact, stakeholders will begin to doubt your effectiveness. If you overreact, your teams will be in fear, crushing any creative effort and stifling information sharing. In this course, authored by Cornell Instructor Robert Newman, you will examine the human elements of project monitoring and control and review common errors that occur on projects. You'll learn how to ask the right questions and improve team connectedness.

You are required to have completed the following course or have equivalent experience before taking this course:

• Leverage Emotional Intelligence for Project Results

On the surface, project management seems straightforward. However, at best, only 80% of projects end up being economically successful. The remaining 20% of projects usually cost more than estimated, run late, or fail to satisfy goals or meet objectives.

In this course, Linda Nozick, Professor and Director of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Cornell, shares clear, understandable, and practical methods for achieving better results. You will practice breaking down a project into pieces that can be scheduled, tracked, and controlled.

While this is not a prep course for a project management certification, it will be quite valuable for anyone who is interested in pursuing one. This program will equip you with the concepts, tools, and language of project management that can be applied to any size and type of project.

The course is not specific to any formal project management software (e.g. Microsoft Project), but will require that learners have Microsoft Excel with its free Solver add-on installed.

Research shows that a high percentage of projects take significantly longer than expected and cost more than anticipated. Moreover, if you ask people for an estimate of how long a task will take them to complete, their estimate will usually be overly optimistic.

Sometimes, if you bring in extra people to help with a task, that actually slows down progress instead of accelerating it. Why is this so? And what can you do about it? In this course, from Linda K. Nozick, Director and Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Cornell, you will examine these questions. Students will identify strategies to integrate resource availability constraints into project planning, scheduling, and control.

This course is designed for project managers who seek better practical results for aligning available resources with tasks and bringing activities to completion on time. Students will examine compression strategies for bringing a project that's running late back on track and will explore how to handle common types of project creep, such as handling customer requests that require extra time, and working with team members who decide independently to invest extra effort in a task.

This course combines a focus on formal project management mechanisms with an emphasis on the human element: what can project managers do to resolve issues brought about in the normal course of working with customers, team members, and stakeholders?

You are required to have completed the following course or have equivalent experience before taking this course:

• Organizing the Project and Its Components

Risk management is a key function in project management. Project managers should be able to apply a variety of risk-management tools in their work, including performing risk identification, quantification, response, monitoring, and control.

In this course from Professor and Director of Civil and Environmental Engineering Linda K. Nozick, you will examine the nature and types of project risk and learn to apply specific mitigation strategies.

You'll have an opportunity to analyze a past project you've worked on and assess what the risks might have been and why. Then you'll analyze the outcomes: Did the known risks come to fruition? What were the leading indicators? What could they have done for contingency planning at the beginning? By asking these questions, you'll then be able to perform several calculations to compute the probability that a project will finish on time.

You are required to have completed the following courses or have equivalent experience before taking this course:

• Organizing the Project and Its Components
• Planning and Managing Resources

Project managers need to keep things on track by keeping a close eye on the scope of and resources invested in a project. Forecasting, adjusting, and applying corrective measures during the project lifecycle are also key functions of a project manager. This set of processes and protocols that help ensure project success is called earned value management (EVM). Every project manager should have at least a working knowledge of EVM and its theoretical underpinnings.

This course is designed for project managers who seek an introduction to EVM to achieve better practical results for implementing project controls, including financial controls and schedule controls. The calculations presented here are meant for any experienced project manager, including those who are not engineers, to apply to any size project. Students in this course will be most successful if they have a foundational understanding of standard project management tools and processes including project networks, project budgets and schedules, and work breakdown structures.

You are required to have completed the following courses or have equivalent experience before taking this course:

• Organizing the Project and Its Components
• Planning and Managing Resources
• Assessing, Managing, and Mitigating Project Risk

In traditional project management, we tend to make assumptions: the customer knows precisely what they want, or the team's workflow and tasks will go according to plan and in sequence.

Practically speaking, this is rarely the case. Sometimes the customer doesn't know what they need until they see an early iteration of your team's work and can provide feedback. Because of this, work is usually done incrementally. We must build flexibility, even agility, into the model in order to succeed.

This course is designed for project managers who want to get better practical results with adaptive approaches to projects. Students in this course will be most successful if they have a foundational understanding of traditional project management tools and processes including project networks, budgets and schedules.

You are required to have completed the following courses or have equivalent experience before taking this course:

• Organizing the Project and Its Components
• Planning and Managing Resources
• Assessing, Managing, and Mitigating Project Risk
• Using Earned Value Management for Project Managers