This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.
A project can finish on time, on budget and to specification, and change nothing about how the organisation works.
Six months later people are doing what they did before, with the new system open in a tab nobody clicks.
Why delivery is not the same as change
The methodology argument gets most of the attention — predictive against adaptive, Gantt against sprint — and it is the least interesting part of the problem. A plan can be correct and still fail, because the process underneath was never described, so the new way has nothing to replace. Or because the people affected were informed rather than involved, and informed people comply until you stop watching. Or because you had responsibility for the outcome and authority over nobody, and nobody told you that is the normal condition of the job.
How the course is built
Thirty-six lessons in four parts. Delivery first, ten lessons on PMBOK 7 — which is deliberately methodology-agnostic, so the choice between predictive, adaptive and hybrid becomes a decision you make per project rather than a religion you belong to. Business case, charter, stakeholder analysis, scope, work breakdown, network diagram, Gantt, the three stages of a budget, uncertainty, the matrix environment, control and a real closure.
Then the process layer. Six lessons on describing how work actually happens: methodology, flowcharts, BPMN, tools, and running a description project from concept through defending it to management and closing it. This is the part that decides whether your change has anything to attach to.
Change, intervention and getting agreement
Then six lessons on change itself: the eight mistakes, Kotter’s model, generating urgency that is not manufactured, the rider-and-elephant model for the emotional half, quick wins, and fixing a change into the culture so it survives your departure.
Then eight lessons on organisational development, which is change management with a full method underneath it — entry, diagnosis, intervention at four levels, and evaluation including ROI, Kirkpatrick and a balanced scorecard.
And finally six lessons on the thing nobody teaches project managers: operating with responsibility and no authority. Managing a senior person’s attention, writing a brief that ends in a decision rather than a request for more analysis, working the informal power structure, and holding things together in a crisis.
Who is teaching this
Mike, the number one HR instructor on Udemy. More than 1.6 million course enrolments, over 150,000 professionals trained, PHRi and SHRM-CP certified, HRCI representative in more than 10 countries. I built the people function of the unicorn Preply and worked at Wargaming, Alfa-Bank and iDeals. Most of what I know about the authority problem I learned delivering projects across functions that had no obligation to cooperate with me.
What is included
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Lifetime access to all course materials
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Active instructor support in the Q&A section
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Udemy Certificate of Completion
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Practical assignments and real business cases
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A section with additional courses, tools and resources
Before lesson one
Think of a project that was delivered and then quietly undone. Write one sentence on why. Whatever you wrote, this course will probably give you a second reason you did not consider, and the second one is usually the real one. Enrol now and start the first lesson today.
