Project Management Online Certificates

COST: approximately $2,850 (Required texts are not included in tuition)

This certificate is intended for students seeking a solid introduction to core project management fundamental methodologies using the PMI framework in the PMBOK® Guide.

Five Required Classes:

Electives (Choose One):

Upon approval by program/advising staff, students may choose an alternate focus that meets their specific training needs. The combination of required and elective courses chosen should total a minimum of 10.8 CEUs to be eligible for a Certificate of Completion.

COST: approximately $4,750 (Required texts are not included in tuition)

This certificate is intended for students wanting to develop project management expertise using the framework in the Project Management Institute’s Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide).

Eight Required Classes:

Electives (Choose Two):

This nine-week online class covers best practices in scheduling: evidence-based task names, networking, resourcing and estimating average work parametrically. Concurrently, you improve a schedule template of your choosing. Then, you schedule a specific project and link it with a service project to a resource pool. After manual and automated workload leveling and adding a project reserve, you baseline a rapid, reliable, feasible schedule. To control scope, you identify how to quickly assess issues and change impacts. Finally, to recover from likely slippages, you identify which tasks to fast-track, crash or de-scope. For this course, you need access to Microsoft Project.

Prerequisite to all other courses

The role of an effective project leader is a demanding one that requires a clear understanding of the five project process groups: initiating, planning, executing, controlling and closing. Using the Project Management Institute's guidelines, students will learn about the ten management knowledge areas: integration, scope, time, cost, human resources, communication, quality, risk, procurement and stakeholders. This course is a prerequisite for all required courses in the Project Management certificate program.

Prerequisites: Project Planning and Management Overview; Scheduling Fundamentals, OR experience with Microsoft Project and faculty permission.

This course examines various measures of project performance to keep a project on course. Students will gain insight into best practices in estimating schedules, costs and resource requirements. Using these data, a number of techniques have been developed that help measure project status and have proven highly successful in assisting project managers to better measure where their projects stand. Participants will examine various ways that managers can make changes to ongoing projects improving performance without being disruptive. We will explore how managers use a variety of techniques aimed at early problem identification, predicting its impact and how to take corrective actions to ensure the success of your project.

Compared with project work done in the past, all projects today are risky. Projects are more time constrained, they pose greater technical challenges and they rarely have adequate resources. Techniques to deal with project risk exist and when you apply them, they will help you recognize and manage potential problems. The course will focus on practical methods for completing difficult projects. Throughout the course, examples will show how to apply these ideas to your projects.

Learn about managing international teams in a global marketplace. Maintain effective collaboration and communications with team members without traditional face-to-face meetings. Teams bridging the distance gap and cultural diversity will win clear competitive advantage – less travel, greater impact, backed up with web conferencing, shared space technologies, chat, email, conference calls and other digital tools. Acquire skills needed for global sourcing. Think digital, mobile, virtual, wireless and personal to connect and collaborate. Human resources, information technology, corporate real estate – all need to think together about how teams of tomorrow can operate in the most efficient and human-sensitive way.

This course will cover in-depth the four processes of the project procurement management knowledge area - plan procurements, conduct procurements, control procurements and close procurement. Process components included in A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide), will be analyzed and explained. Real-world experiences and best practices for effective project procurement management will be explored and applied to the current challenges faced by project managers.

This course offers an overview of project quality management processes including all the activities of a project management team that determine quality policies, objectives and responsibilities so that the project will satisfy the needs of the project's customers and stakeholders. This class will cover the implementation of quality management systems through the policy, procedures and processes of quality planning, quality assurance and quality control with the study of continuous process improvement leadership and best practices. The Quality Knowledge Area of project management will be covered with the objective of preparing students for the quality portion of the PMP® certification exam.

This course addresses each of the core competencies required for effective project communication management. The project management body of knowledge identifies this project communications management as a critical process for overall project success, which employs the timely and appropriate generation, collection, distribution, storage, retrieval and ultimate disposition of project information. It is the project communications management process that provides the critical link between people and the information being generated. What's more, effective project managers are also leaders that deeply understand the process of communication and the importance of authentic communication as a tool for team support, coaching and team building.

Effective project managers must possess strong skills in organizational planning, leadership, team building, communication and performance coaching and staff management. In this course students will learn how to use human resources to achieve project goals; the process of human resources planning, facilitating team building among acquired project teams, skills for developing project teams and managing them. Students will also develop the skills needed to establish clear project roles and responsibilities, institute rules of engagement and exercise influence within the existing power structure using appropriate leadership styles and coaching. This class will explore critical tools for managing matrix teams and virtual teams.

In this highly interactive class, students learn to utilize the increasingly popular Agile framework to manage a project from start to finish. Students will learn the basics of Scrum, an Agile framework for complex projects, by role playing with the Scrum roles (ScrumMaster, Product Owner, and Team) and collaboratively developing common project artifacts like user stories, burndown charts, and information radiators. The class will explore best practices for implementing Agile methods in estimating schedules, costs and resource requirements. Students will learn to identify problems early, predict their impact and take timely corrective action. This class will provide a solid working understanding of Agile methodologies.