Modern Project Management - Working with Clients and Project Teams

Modern Project Management - Working with Clients and Project Teams is the second in a series of free online courses designed for anyone who wants to learn about best practices in contemporary project management. As projects become more complex and clients' expectations increase Project Managers need to shift emphasis from managing the tasks to taking a leadership role. This involves getting a good understanding of what the client really expects – not just the technical scope – but also how decisions are reached, how information is communicated, and how and why changes are made to the project plans. The Project Manager also needs to motivate and engage the members of the project team and keep all the other stakeholders on board. This course is broken down into three key areas: understanding and meeting the client’s expectations, working with the project team members and using the relevant communications and software to keep track of the project information. Using the Project Management Institute's Book of Knowledge along with other core theory this course shows how to engage the client appropriately from the start of the project, to resolving issues that may arise through to celebrating key achievements. It also looks at the role of personality types both in terms of the Project Manager's own leadership style, and how to define the roles of project team members and to identify team members who are suitable for those roles. It explains the different types of project teams and how to manage effective team meetings. Learners will also be introduced to the technical communications involved in sharing knowledge within the project team and they will get an overview of the types of software used for project management at differing levels of complexity. This free course will be of great interest to all professionals working in the area of project management or those who have become involved in a work project or learners who just want to be able to manage personal projects more effectively.

To qualify for your official ALISON Diploma, Certificate or PDF you must study and complete all modules and score 80% or more in each of the course assessments. A link to your Diploma certificate will then appear under the My Certificates heading of your My Account page.

Having completed this course the learner will be able to: - Identify advantages and disadvantages of including the client on project teams; - Identify methods for determining client expectations, clarifying values and determining differences; - Describe standards and procedures for dealing with problems and the importance of dealing fairly with the client; - Describe the advantages of using project milestones. - Describe emotional intelligence, personality types and how this relates to leadership style; - Describe how work is delegated; - Describe the value of trust, how to build it and how it relates to contracts and complex projects; - Describe the different types of teams and team meetings; - Identify characteristics and examples of both asynchronous and synchronous communication; - Identify questions to answer when considering new communications technologies; - Identify the types of software that are appropriate for projects with various levels of complexity; - Describe strategies for sharing documents that can be viewed or edited by a team.