Welcome back. Let's start by reviewing what we've
discussed so far. Earlier, you were introduced to project management
as a career path. We discussed how this
course can help you advance your career goals with a project management
certification. We also discussed some of the basics of project management, like how to define a project and its
different components. Then, we went over some distinct project
management careers, roles, and responsibilities. Now it's time to gain a deeper understanding of
a project manager's role. By the end of this module, you'll be able to explain the unique value a project
manager brings to their team. You'll also be able to describe a project manager's roles
and responsibilities, and list their core skills. This course will
help you continue to recognize the skills that you already have that will help you become a successful
project manager. It will also help you identify new skills that you may need to learn in preparation
for your new career. Ready? Let's get started.
===================================================================

Earlier in this course, we introduced you to the
world of project management. We discussed how project
management spans industries and
companies of all kinds, from large corporations
to small businesses. Now let's define what a
project manager is and describe how they add value to their teams and organizations. Let's start with the definition. Project managers
shepherd projects from start to finish and serve
as guides for their team, using their impeccable
organizational and interpersonal skills
every step of the way. As you learned earlier, project managers usually follow a process that involves
planning and organizing, managing tasks, budgeting,
and controlling costs so that the project can be completed within the
approved timeframe. We'll dig deeper
into these topics throughout this program. What you need to know
right now is that project managers play a crucial role in
their organizations. Project managers add value to their teams and organizations in key ways that
include prioritization, delegation, and
effective communication. So let's break these down. First, we'll discuss
prioritization. Project managers add value to their teams and
organizations through effective prioritization of tasks required to complete a project. They're experts at helping
team members identify and break down large tasks
into smaller steps. There'll be times when
a project manager may not know which
task to prioritize. To determine which
ones are the most critical to the success
of the project, they'll connect with
their teams and with stakeholders to gather
information and make a plan. Stakeholders are people
who are interested in and affected by the project's
completion and success, like the leader of
an organization. You've probably
used prioritization to complete work in the past. In any kind of project, personal or professional, there are tasks with different
levels of priority. For example, let's imagine
that you've decided to rent a house and plan
to repaint the rooms. You've picked out your paint and you're eager to get started. While it may be tempting to
start painting right away, you'll need to prioritize
tasks like laying out drop cloths to protect
the floors and furniture, applying blue tape to the
rooms' edges, and much more. Those preliminary steps are critical and need to
come before painting. Other related steps, like choosing new face plates for your light
switches, can come later in the process or be switched out of the project entirely if you
run out of time or money. When you choose to take care of these preliminary steps before wedging open the paint can, you're prioritizing the tasks
or steps of your project. You're also increasing the
likelihood that you'll be satisfied with your
newly-painted rooms. This process is similar
for professional projects. When you effectively
prioritize important tasks, you set up your team and yourself for a better
project outcome. Now, let's discuss delegation. Project managers use delegation to add value to their teams and organizations by matching tasks to individuals who can
best complete the work. Let's return to our house painting example
for a second here. Painting multiple rooms can
be a time-consuming project, so it's possible that you might enlist a few friends to
help you get it done. Maybe one friend has professional
painting experience. Now, with that in mind, you might ask her to handle the more challenging
aspects of the project, like painting the ceiling
or the detailed molding. You might also
schedule her to paint the molding before another
friend paints the walls. So by delegating this task
to the person with the right skills to complete the work and ordering
the task appropriately, you're applying knowledge of your team's strengths to the
planning of your project. That makes sense, right? Finally, let's talk about effective
communication. Project managers deliver value through effective
communication, both with their team and
with key stakeholders. This refers to being transparent, which means being up
front with plans and ideas and making information
readily available. Project managers keep in regular contact with their
team about the progress of the work and help identify areas where a teammate
may need support. In our house painting example, this might involve checking in with your friends periodically to ask if they have enough paint or supplies left to
complete their tasks. Checking in regularly means
you'll know if you need to buy more paint before
the can is empty, which ensures that the
project stays on track. In addition to keeping
up with teammates, project managers keep in regular contact with people
outside of the team, like company leaders who are invested in the project outcomes. For example, you might reach
out to your landlord to get permission to paint and to share the days you'll be
working on this project. Though your landlord isn't directly involved in
the project's execution, the outcomes will
affect her property and so it's important
to keep her informed. Without your project
management skills, you might run out of paint
halfway through the project, your walls might
get painted without drop cloths to
protect the floors, and your landlord could be caught off guard
about your plans. So it's a good thing you're
here to keep the project running smoothly and efficiently. Great. Now you should
be able to define what a project manager is and explain how they
use prioritization, delegation, and
effective communication to deliver value to
their organizations. Coming up, you'll hear
about the career path of a real life project
manager at Google. Their journey to me is fascinating and we can't
wait to share it with you.
==============================================================================

My name is JuAnne. I'm a Senior Program
Manager at Google. I'm a first-generation
Chinese American. My family and I came to the United States
when I was young. My parents worked really
hard when I was growing up and I spent a lot
of time by myself, basically just having
to take care of myself; planning my meals,
doing my homework, taking care of chores. I feel like I got a little bit of my program management skills from just being really organized, having to be really
organized all the time. My path to being a
project manager really started as a business
systems analyst. I was writing requirements or gathering requirements
for our customers and translating them
into documentation for our engineers so that
they could implement it. Through that process, I
became a project manager. I started to manage
the timelines, manage the tasks,
understand all the pieces, and who needed to be involved. There you go, you have
a project manager. I think the funnest
part about being a project manager is really
working with people. You get to meet all
different kinds of people, different
personalities. Sometimes you get
to travel to places to meet them but
even when you don't, just meeting new people and understanding
how we interact, how people interact and
behave is fascinating. I think if you build
a relationship, focus on the relationship, and really understand
what their style, where they're coming from, what their concerns are, it will help your working
relationship much better. You can communicate with them in the style
that's necessary. You can work with them in the style that's
more receptive to them and that would just make the project
better all around.
====================================================================

Welcome back. I hope you enjoyed that last
story because for me, it's always helpful to hear about someone else's career path. Maybe you even noticed a few parallels between their
career path and your own, or you felt inspired to pursue a specific area of
project management. So far we've discussed
the types of project management roles
you'll be qualified for, and how to search for them. Earlier, we discussed
the value that project managers bring to their teams and
their organizations. Now let's learn more
about the roles and responsibilities of
a project manager. Earlier you learned that project management is the
application of knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to meet the project requirements and achieve the desired outcome. How does that actually happen?
That's where you come in. Project managers usually
follow a process that involves planning and
organizing, managing tasks, budgeting, and controlling
costs, and other factors, so that the project can
be completed within the approved budget
and timeframe. Let's break these
down into examples of responsibilities that you might find in a job listing for a project
management role. We'll start with
planning and organizing. One responsibility
that falls under the umbrella of
planning and organizing is making use of
productivity tools and creating processes. During the planning and
execution of a project, you might need to
use certain tools and develop processes to improve information
sharing across the team; you may also need to create
plans, timelines, schedules, and other forms of documentation to track project completion, and you'll usually
need to maintain those documents throughout
the entirety of the project. The next task is budgeting and controlling
costs, and other factors. As the project is underway, changes to the plan and budget are bound to come up. Believe me. This will require you to
monitor and manage the budget, track issues and
risks as they arise, and manage quality by mitigating
those issues and risks. One way to do this is by removing unforeseen
barriers that come up. Now, by barriers, we mean things that can get in the way
of project progress. For example, if your teammates lack the resources needed
to complete a task, you might identify that
issue, or barrier upfront, escalate the issue
to a stakeholder, and work to secure the resource so your team can move forward. Another huge piece of the project manager's
role is managing tasks. A project task is an
activity that needs to be accomplished within a set
period of time by you, your team, or your stakeholders. Keeping track of tasks
is a great way to help manage the team's workload and ensure that things
are getting done. Keeping track of tasks is also a great tool
for demonstrating progress to people outside the immediate team,
like your stakeholders. Back when I was a program manager in Student Development
here at Google, one of our goals was to create pathways for students
who identify with communities that are underrepresented in the
technology industry. A large part of my day-to-day responsibilities
involved working with two separate engineering teams to create our
technical curriculum. To manage the tasks
associated with this project, I created separate
project trackers for each team that outline the
vision for the curriculum. These trackers kept both teams in the loop about the
timeline for delivery, the categories and
subcategories for work, and the team members
assigned to each task, I also made sure to update our stakeholders every
step of the way. By actively managing tasks through out the
project lifecycle, I was able to keep tabs
on everyone's work and efficiently
inform stakeholders, which allowed us to achieve our project goal
with minimal issues. Nice job. Now you should
be able to describe the roles and responsibilities
of a project manager. Coming up, we'll discuss a project manager's role
within the extended team, including how to work
alongside the people tasked with executing the
project. Catch you in a bit.
==============================================================

Hey and welcome back. Earlier you learned more about
the responsibilities of a project manager. And while it might seem like a lot to keep
track of, it's important to know that you, as the project manager won't need
to do everything on your own. Let's discuss the role of
the project manager and how that role relates to other
roles within the project team. It's easier to hear the term manager and
immediately think of your boss. But a project manager is not
often the direct manager of the people working on a project team. Here, we're discussing the project
manager as someone who manages the tasks of a project. But what does that really mean, right? Well, although you might have a few
teammates working with you on a project, you're probably not their day-to-day boss. With the help of your team,
you can get a lot more done together. Everyone on your team will have their
own set of roles and responsibilities. And you'll come together to ensure that
everyone is able to do their part to advance the project. Each person will be an expert on their
portion of the project, but no one will be an expert on every aspect of the project,
and honestly, neither will you. For instance, the graphic designer
will focus on graphic design, but probably won't be an expert
on copywriting. Similarly, you'll be an expert on project management,
but may not be an expert on marketing. Here's another way to think about it.
Imagine that you're organizing a camping trip. You might be the person in
charge of planning the trip, but that doesn't mean you have to be a camping
expert. Maybe you've never been camping before, but your partner grew up
spending every summer by the campfire. In that case, you might assign them the task
of picking out the right number and style of tents for your group. So, in this example, you are planning
the trip by giving your partner the job of finding the right
number of tents and the right size tents to make
sure everyone is covered. You aren't doing the research or
the task yourself, but you're making sure that
things are getting done. It's similar in the workplace.
As the project manager, you won't be an expert in every
project role, and that's okay. As we said, your job isn't to
be the expert on everything. Instead you're responsible for
guiding your team and making sure that they have the support that they need
in order to complete the project. So how does a project manager go about
doing that? Let's discuss using a few more examples of the required responsibilities
you might find in a job listing. First, you'll need to hold all
team members accountable for their assigned tasks. Managing tasks
will help you hold your team members accountable by giving them ownership
over specific pieces of the project. Second, you'll need to ensure that
issues and risks are tracked and visible, and
be able to establish escalation paths. Now by escalation paths, I mean that you
should know how you will communicate risks to the right people at the right time. Third, you'll need to understand and help teammates adopt the right workflows
and project management styles. As the project manager, you'll likely have
the best idea of which style is best for the work. It's your job to ensure that
the team adheres to that style and the other systems in place. And fourth, you'll need to collaborate
with other teams at the organization to meet the requirements based on project,
scope, schedule, and budget. In other words, a project may
affect not only your team, but other teams at an organization,
as well as, say, the marketing or the finance team. So you'll need to work
with those teams to ensure that everyone is happy with the project outcomes.
You'll learn more about working with other stakeholders in a later course.
Catch all that? Let's recap. You learned that a project manager isn't
always the direct manager of each member of the project team. Rather, they're
responsible for guiding those people and ensuring they have the support
they need to complete the project. Now that you have a good sense of
the way that a project manager fits into the project team,
let's move a little bit ahead, where we'll discuss the types of skills
that a project manager needs to succeed. Meet you there.
=====================================================================================

A great project manager is
some funky combination of EMT, ninja, and jazz musician. An EMT who can show up on a
scene that's full of chaos, figure out what
needs to happen now, triage all of the things on site, and then develop a
plan of action while also participating
in that action. A ninja, because you have to be stealth about how you go about
influencing other people. Overt action or pushing people too hard isn't necessarily
received well. A jazz musician,
particularly a jazz drummer, who keeps a steady beat as a lot of things are
happening around you. On a team, you're
going to be surrounded by a bunch of talented people. A trombone player, a bass player, a trumpet player, a pianist, and you, keeping the beat and making sure that
everybody is working in time. I spend most of my days
with my product and engineering counterparts
talking a lot about strategy, updating status to
key stakeholders, and trying to figure out what
comes next for our product. Some things about
my job never change from this day to
my very first day. The fact that I communicate with a lot of people in a day, a lot of different
types of people, from engineers to product
managers to partnerships, to sales and marketing, all of that's the same. The biggest difference is the number of people
that I communicate with, and the complexity of
the topics I cover. The most important thing
for you to keep in mind is staying organized. The more organized you
are in your actions, the more organized your team is in their thinking
and their actions. What I do to stay organized
is lists, all day long. I have post-it notes, I have electronic lists, I have lists in e-mails, and those lists
help me stay on top of what actions
need to happen now, what actions need to happen next, and which I can put off
for a few more days. I do use lists to
help manage my time. I think one of the
things my lists are most important for is making sure I know what
needs to be done today. Then, once my list is made and I'm sure of what needs
to be done today, I budget time for those things. A stand-up is a quick meeting, usually at the start of the day, but you can have
them at any time. My stand-ups usually happened in the morning around
9:30 or 10:00 o'clock, depending on when the
engineering team got in. They lasted for about 15 minutes so that we were clear on what had gotten done the day
before and what was on the docket
to get done today. Then we usually checked in again quickly around lunch to
make sure that people were still on track or ran into any technical issues that might require a longer time
to finish the task. I think the thing that makes
me a great project manager is a bias to action
and resilience. One of my favorite phrases, is pick it and stick it. In part because I think
it's important to make a decision to
get yourself unstuck, to follow through on that action, learn some things
and decide to take a new action once you've
learned something. The latter half of
that is resilience. I'm resilient and my
teams are resilient. If we've taken a bad action, we've learned that we can learn and change our mind
with new information. I'm Elita, a Senior Engineering Program
Manager at Google.
===========================================================

Hey, and welcome back. Now that you've learned
about the roles and responsibilities of
a project manager, let's discuss the core skill sets that a project manager
should bring to the role. While there are lots
of different skills a project manager can
bring to their role, there are four specific
skill sets that we think can help a project
manager be successful. Those are enabling
decision-making, communicating and
escalating, flexibility, and strong organizational skills. First, let's talk about
enabling decision-making. The ability to enable
decision-making on the team, or gathering decisions from
the appropriate leader, is crucial to keep projects on task and achieve their goals. Lots of the day-to-day
decisions within a project will likely fall to you and your teammates to
discuss and agree on. You'll ensure that
projects stay on schedule by gathering
information from teammates and using
those insights to help the team make
informed decisions. You'll also make sure
that those decisions are communicated to the
necessary coworkers, whether that's the immediate
team or company leaders. For example, you might provide relevant data or feedback to help your teammates make an informed decision between
choice A and choice B. The second skill is
communicating and escalating. As a project manager, you'll use your
communication skills in just about everything you do. This might look like
documenting plans, sending emails about the
status of the project, or holding a meeting to escalate risks or
issues to stakeholders. The third skill is flexibility. As a project manager, knowing how to be flexible when changes are needed is key. Plans definitively will change, even with careful
upfront planning. For example, maybe the goals
of your company change, or maybe a member of your team unexpectedly takes a new
position at another company. A good project manager knows
that unpredictable moments like these are almost
always guaranteed. A quote we love
here at Google is, "The only constant is
change," and that's true. By staying cool under pressure, you'll be able to adjust while helping your team stay calm, too. Finally, a successful
project manager needs strong
organizational skills. As you learned earlier, the role of a project
manager requires using a lot of different processes to
keep the project on track. Having strong
organizational skills means having the
ability to organize these processes and
the core elements of a project to ensure nothing
gets lost or overlooked, which trust me, can
and does happen. To prevent this, you might
decide to track daily tasks in a spreadsheet or send frequent status
updates or reminders. There are many ways to stay organized and hone your
organizational skills, and we'll talk more about
them throughout the program. To recap, decision-making, communicating and
escalating, flexibility, and strong organizational
skills are four core skill sets that are essential to successful
project management. You can continue to build on these skills by
becoming familiar with industry knowledge that applies to most project management roles. Knowledge of helpful
tools and templates and familiarity with popular
project management styles like Waterfall and
Agile, can help you organize and document the project throughout
its lifecycle. We'll learn about these
throughout this program. Hopefully, you feel better
equipped to explain the core skills a project manager should bring to the role. These skills really help enforce team morale and accountability for the tasks of a project. We'll discuss this
coming up. See you soon.
==============================================================================

My name is Rachel, I'm a Senior Program Manager
in Google, New York. Google hired me out of a bar in the East Village
about 12 years ago. For about three years, a group of NY Ops and SRE,
drank at my bar. Like everyone at the bar, they asked the
bartender for advice. I gave them advice and helped them through
a lot of problems, and I also became
friends with them. I really admired them, they
were incredibly smart and charming and really good
drinkers, and tippers. Eventually, I wanted something
different for my life. I've been standing behind
a bar all night long, and there was an opportunity to apply for an admin
role in their team. So, I joined Google in 2008. They hired me first
as an Administrator for Site Reliability and Engineering Ops in New York City. After about two years, I transferred into
Program Management. Google's hiring is a little
more conventional now, but the skills that I
polished while being a bartender informed
my everyday work. A wise old bartender that I knew in the lower East side
once told me that, "A bar was a room full of tables and chairs and some beer, and a meeting room was the same, a room full of tables and chairs. People come into a bar
like they come into a meeting room wanting to
leave feeling something else." As a program manager, my job was to help people
through that experience, the aesthetic experience of
meeting with each other, making decisions, and coming
to conclusions together. Very similar to bartending and helping people
have a better night. My role as a program manager started by someone
taking a risk on me. My engineering partner
picked me out of the admin pool
because he knew that I could build a community
with these engineers. When you work in a bar, you have to talk to anyone
who comes into the bar. Anyone who walks through
that door is your customer. You have to understand
what they want, what they want to drink, whether they can
continue drinking, whether they might
be done drinking, all of these things. When you are working with a subject matter
expert, an engineer, a product designer, a UX person, the same things apply. You have to be able to talk
to any engineer on your team, any product manager
you need to work with, and you have to understand
their unique needs. Program Management
isn't just about the process and the
artifacts that you create, it's about how you
relate to people. Understanding what you've learned in other parts of your life, whether it was in a
bar or art school, these are the
experiences that you bring into the job that
make your work unique. Your skills, talking to people or de-escalating conflict or
understanding what people need. This is what makes you a
great program manager.
=======================================================================

Earlier, you learned about the role of the project manager and the core skills you'll need to be successful in that role. You've also learned more about your role within
the project team. Now let's discuss
a few key skills that you'll use to build relationships with your
teammates and stakeholders. Using your interpersonal
skills is key to building relationships
with the people involved in your project. By developing these
relationships, you'll learn about the needs
and concerns of the team. This will help you determine the priorities of the project and motivate your team
throughout the process. Possessing strong
interpersonal skills is a huge part of
good leadership. Even if you've never held a
formal leadership position, having these skills will help you when you
need to guide a team. This is called influencing
without authority, which refers to a project
manager's ability to guide teammates to complete their assigned work without acting as
their direct managers. There's a few key interpersonal skills that you can use to accomplish this and guide
the project outcomes, even without the authority of
being your teammates' boss. These skills include
communication, negotiation, conflict mediation, and
understanding motivations. Let's break these down. First step is a key
skill we've mentioned a few times now, communication. In the context of leading a team, communication can
include checking in with teammates to
understand how they're progressing on a
task and providing clear feedback on the
quality of a teammate's work. Next is negotiation. Negotiation might include working with a teammate to compromise on a new deadline when
they tell you that they won't be able to complete
their work on time. Now, trust me, I know
this can be frustrating, but you'll need to use your negotiation skills often
with your teammates and stakeholders to
balance their needs and what is best for the project. Another important skill
is conflict mediation. As we mentioned, project plans can change and issues will arise. This can sometimes lead to tension and conflict
within the team. Conflict mediation
is a great skill to practice and develop to ensure the project does
not suffer as a result. This might involve setting up a meeting with two
teammates who are struggling to agree upon the best way to
handle a shared task. Finally, there's
understanding motivations. This means getting to
know your teammates and figuring out what pushes
them to do their best work. Understanding motivations
might also include learning how your teammates
prefer to receive feedback, and how they like to receive recognition for
doing a great job. You would use that
individualized information to motivate and encourage
each person on your team. To recap, communication,
negotiation, conflict mediation and
understanding motivations are all interpersonal
skills that will help you influence
without authority. During job interviews for
project management positions, you might be asked to discuss a time when you influenced
without authority, and it's possible that you've already noticed ways that you've used these skills in your personal life without
even realizing it. For example, let's say
you have a coworker who's constantly late to every meeting and I mean, every meeting, while you can't force
them to arrive on time, it's likely that you've
thought about ways to motivate them to
want to be on time. In doing so, you might
have also wondered how to change the way you
communicate with your coworker, to influence them to be on time. Maybe you've tried asking them to arrive 15 minutes
earlier than the rest of the group or maybe
you've told them how this behavior impacts
the rest of the team. Both of these strategies are examples of influencing
without authority, and they serve to encourage
specific behavior. Influencing without authority
is one of the most critical and one of the most
challenging aspects of project management. As you've just learned, you'll need to leverage
your interpersonal skills in order to do it effectively. In later courses, we'll review
and learn more about using your interpersonal
skills to manage various projects. We'll
see you in the next video.
====================================================================

I'm Ellen and I'm a director of technical program management. That means I lead a team of
program managers at Google. I love project management because I really like this
idea that you can do more together as a team with a group of people than
you could do alone. By bringing in a bunch of people together and getting organized, getting aligned
around a common goal, We can do some pretty
amazing things. I think a successful project
manager is somebody who really knows how to pull
together a group of people. To me, there's really two
parts of project management. One is this laser-like focus
on executing on this goal, but then the other
part is the people. So a successful project
manager can do both. When I first started
managing project managers, it was really about everyone
works on their own project. How do I just guide them, give them guidance and help
them with their projects. Over the years, I've shifted to mentoring on
project management, to mentoring project managers. What I mean by that
is, it's different. I'm no longer saying, "Here's what you should
do on your project." I'm really trying to
help them think about how to think about
their projects. One of the things that I think about a lot as I'm building a project management
team is having a really diverse set
of folks with different backgrounds,
different experiences. We're a global company, so we're really trying
to make sure we are a global team as well. When I talk about diversity
of background and experience, it really is about working
in different types of environments with
different types of teams. When I chat with new project
managers and they say like, "How do I continue to grow
as a project manager?" My answer is, work on
different projects, work on as many
projects as you can, but don't be afraid to
try different areas, different domains, work
with different people. With every project you work on, you're going to really
learn something.
=========================================================================

Nice work. So far, you've started
learning all about project managers and the value they bring to their teams. We also introduced you to a few
program managers here at Google, who spoke about their own
experiences working in the field. You also learned more about the day-to-day
responsibilities of a project manager and how they guide their teammates
to do their best work. And you learned about the types of skills
you'll need to succeed in a program management role. As we move forward, you'll develop and
hone lots of the skills needed for the daily tasks of a project manager. And hopefully, you've also identified
the skills you already have that can help you become a great project
manager and an asset to employers. Next up,
we'll discuss the project life cycle. You'll learn more about the different
phases of a project and the tasks associated with each phase.
You'll also learn more about some of the most popular project management
methodologies used across industries today, and how to choose the best one for
your project. See you soon.