There are many different types of work management software that automatically make project planning and tracking a lot easier and that are much more efficient than manual project tracking. One tool that we'll focus on in this program is Asana. Asana is a work management platform that helps teams plan and coordinate their work from daily tasks to strategic initiatives. Asana provides a living system and a source of truth where everyone's work lives. With Asana, everyone can see, discuss and manage team priorities, giving teams clarity on who is doing what by when. It's great for building project plans, assigning tasks, automating workflows, tracking progress, and communicating with stakeholders. As a project manager, you can use Asana to create a log of tasks like gathering cost estimates from external vendors and assign a task to people on the team. All tasks are visible and organized in the format of the project manager's choice, like in a list or on a calendar and designed to drive transparency and connection with all the tasks related to the overall goal. It's easy to use with external stakeholders as well, because within Asana, you can share status updates and other communications with people outside your company. Another great tool will focus on throughout this program is the spreadsheet. Spreadsheets are extremely versatile and you can use them for a wide range of tasks from creating timelines and building charts to managing budgets and tracking tasks. You can add and view project information in a variety of formats depending on what you need in the moment. For example, let's say you enter a list of tasks, due dates, completion statuses and task owners into a spreadsheet. From there, it's very simple to sort the list by due date to see what's due next. You can then filter the list of tasks by task owner so that you'll only see the things you're responsible for. You can also highlight the rows of the sheet and different colors to visually illustrate the tasks with the least progress. With spreadsheets, you can easily transform, visualize and manipulate information. Spreadsheets and more comprehensive tools like Asana are just two options for effective project management and it's a good idea to get a basic understanding of a variety of software options out there. Then if your company doesn't have a standard software tool, you can choose the right one for the project needs. Being able to recommend the right tool for the job can be a great way to add value to your team at the beginning of a project. Keep in mind, however, that software options are constantly changing from the addition of new features to the launch of new tools. There's no way for you to know every software available and no company would expect that of you. Many of these tools have similar functionality like task tracking and task assignment. So if you understand one tool deeply, you should be able to easily adapt to a new tool on the job. Now that you've learned a bit more about Asana and the power of spreadsheets, take some time to explore these tools since we'll be working with them later in the program. Coming up, you'll hear from a project manager who will tell you all about their experience using tools during their day-to-day role at Google. Stay tuned. Hi, I'm Amar. I'm a senior engineering program manager at Google Shopping. And on a day-to-day basis, I drive programs which spans across multiple products at Google. As a project manager, tools are our best friends. Tools and the tools which will help us drive the execution, those are really should be near and dear to us. And those are near and dear to me. What I look at is what tools which help me create the body of work. There are like a lot of open source tool as well as free tools like, you know, Google Spreadsheets are there, Google Docs is there. So many of these tools are out there and there are some others supporting tools also like JIRA and all. These will help you create the body of work. This will help you define that what needs to be delivered and when. This will help you create the timeline. Like there are timeline tools like Gantt chart, Gantt tools that you will find out. And then there are tools which will help you drive the visibility across the board and the drive the dependent ecosystem. We want to make sure when we are starting at the project, we look at the available tool set so that we are not defragging the system that much. We are not really kind of adding too many complexities or new tools in the ecosystems. We want to make sure that okay, what are the current tools which are out there? Have a look at those tool set. Find out are those supported? Find out what's the current adoption rate and look at what are the gaps? If there are gaps, go for new tools, propose new tools to improve productivity. But if there's existing tool set which our team is following, which your team is following, try to learn those tools because those are the tools which will get quick adoption and those will be an amazing tool set to have with you. Nice work. Getting through all this material is a huge accomplishment. Take a moment to consider how much you've learned so far about the ins and outs of successfully kicking off a project. You dunk deeper on initiation, the first phase of the project lifecycle and how important it is to determine your project scope including what's in scope and what's not. You also learned about project goals and deliverables and you learn how to measure project success by creating success criteria early on. Then you learned to define project roles and responsibilities. Choosing the right people for a project team is a big decision and one you'll always want to consider carefully. You now know how to create a stakeholder analysis that tells you how and when to communicate with different stakeholders and you learn how to create and track team accountability using a race C chart. You also study the final steps of the initiation phase. Identifying resources, creating documentation and selecting tools. You learned about the resources that project managers rely on to achieve the goals of a project from budgets to people to the materials needed to complete a deliverable. You also learned the value of documenting your work using a project charter which is a key step to getting approval to start your project. Lastly, you learned about the many types of tools that can help you be a more efficient project manager from straightforward tools like email to sophisticated tools like Asana. Completing this course is no small feat and you've put in hours of work. Give yourself a pat on the back. You've earned it. In the next course you'll jump right into the next phase of the project lifecycle. And my colleague Rowena will be your guide. Get ready to have some fun as Rowena shows you the ropes of serious project planning. Hello. Welcome to this course called Planning Putting it All Together. If you've already completed our previous courses then you have a great foundation for what it takes to initiate a project and kick off the planning phase. Before we get started let me introduce myself. My name is Rowena and I'll be your instructor for this course. I work as a senior program manager in Google Cloud on a variety of projects. I mostly focus on systems and productivity enhancements for my team which consists of around 100 full-time employees and more than 300 contractors around the world. Some of the larger scale projects that I work on impact Google Cloud's sales and global sales support teams which are made up of thousands of people. But I didn't start out building solutions for thousands of people at a global company. I left school at the age of 17 with no college degree and no real plan. Before Google I worked in retail, hospitality and even in the airline industry as a crew member. When I joined the corporate world I noticed something. The processes were just as messy as the stock rooms of the retail stores where I'd worked. There was so much room to improve. I came to realize that every business is complicated and that there's always room to create order. So I started thinking about ways to automate my day-to-day tasks. I was emailing ideas to my manager and colleagues working with teams across the company, brainstorming solutions to problems, coordinating training for my coworkers and so much more. That's when it became clear I was project managing. I transferred into a role focused entirely on program management at Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California. In my job interview I focused on examples of how I applied these transferable skills for my previous roles and how I could leverage the knowledge I gained from my experience. Four years later I'm here and I'm so excited to be partnering with you on this learning journey. From the outside big global companies can seem as though they have it all figured out but there's always room for new processes and you likely have the skills and insights from your previous experiences that can be useful. So keep going you're heading in the right direction. This course is focused on the planning phase. I'll share the tools and techniques to complete this phase. First up I'll demonstrate how to kick off the planning phase. Then we'll explore the importance of setting and reaching milestones. For every milestone there'll be a set of tasks to complete. So I'll teach you some tips for breaking down and distributing the workload. Later we'll discuss the budget and how the overall budgeting process works. We'll learn about people or companies outside of your organization that may play a role in determining the budget. And we'll discuss the importance of sufficiently documenting your budget. Then we'll discuss the various risks and the possible impact those risks can have on the project. Nothing ever goes quite as planned but risk management is a great way to make sure you know what could go wrong and how you'll address it. This includes communicating possible risks to your stakeholders, creating a mitigation plan and then keeping an eye on those risks to make sure they don't store your projects. Last but not least documentation ties it all together. Keeping all your project plans documented and organized not only helps you but it also helps those involved knowing their responsibilities. Documentation also provides stakeholders with a window into the development of the project. It has always been important to the success of my own projects at Google and I'm excited to explore this topic with you. Ready to get started? Meet you in the next video. Hi again. In the previous course you learned about the initiation phase. During the initiation phase the project manager is gathering all of the necessary preliminary information needed to get stakeholder approval and plan the project. A few key things need to happen during this time. First the project manager gets assigned. That's you. Then the goals of the project have to be approved as well as the scope of the project and its deliverables. A number of people will need to be assigned to the project and you'll have a good sense of their individual roles and responsibilities. You'll also need stakeholder sign-off on your project charter. If all of these criteria have been met then you're set to begin planning. Planning is a significant part of ensuring a project's success. So let's take some time to discuss why it's so important. Planning is important for any project large or small. While planning your project you and other members of the team will determine the processes and workflows needed to meet your goals and put together ideas about how to make the project a success. While planning you might draw from previous project experience but don't be afraid to think of new ways to get results. Every project is different so new and different approaches may be just the thing you need. Planning has many benefits. As we've discussed planning helps you map out the full project. It helps you understand the work needed to achieve your goals. Planning also helps coordinate efforts and timelines with other teams contractors and vendors. Another huge benefit of planning is that it gives you time to identify and prepare for risks that could impact your project. Those might include things like a delay in the timeline the departure of a critical team member or a change in project direction from a primary stakeholder. Planning also gives you the chance to brainstorm ways to mitigate or address those risks. There are less obvious benefits too. For example the planning phase can help you get buy-in from key members of the project team. Getting buy-in means that you've gained their support for your plans. Planning also demonstrates to stakeholders that the team is taking care to start the project with a detailed plan. But one of the most significant benefits of planning is teamwork which will help you push your project across the finish line. By working together in the planning phase individuals assigned to the project can become a strong team by the time the planning is done and the work is about to start. Planning together creates a shared understanding among all parties involved in the project. So to recap planning has many benefits from helping the team to understand the work needed to achieve their goals to providing project plans to the stakeholders. Now that you know a bit more about planning we'll learn how to launch the planning phase. Meet you in the next video. Hello again. In the last video we discussed the importance of planning. Now let's get into the details of how to launch the planning phase. As you learned earlier the planning phase is the second phase of a project's life cycle. This can be a challenging time for a project manager because there's so much to consider. But it's important to know that project plans don't have to be perfect the very first time. And even if you do a great job with your plans the first time around it's likely that the plan will change as the project evolves. The planning phase may differ from project to project but generally three big things are worked out during this stage. The schedule the budget and the risk management plan. We'll discuss each of these in greater detail later on in the course. But for now here's some general information so you can understand why these three elements are so crucial to planning. Let's start with the schedule. The schedule is basically a timeline of the project. It includes the start date the end date and the dates for things that will happen in between. You'll use time estimation techniques to determine these dates. Let's imagine scheduling in our example project at office screen. As a reminder you're the lead project manager for Project Plant Pows a new service that will provide top clients with desk friendly plants. You want to launch the service by the end of the year so the planning phase for this effort should include a number of key dates. Those dates might include when you'll request proposals from plant vendors. They might also include the date you'll kick off with the web designers and developers who are creating a new website for the service. It should also include important dates during the project execution phase like when the plants need to be ready for delivery or when the new web page design needs to be approved and you'll need to include the target date for the launch of the service. Another part of the planning phase is setting the budget. The budget will account for the total cost to complete the project. The total cost needs to be broken down to determine how much has to be spent on different elements of the project. For project plant pals, the budget will need to include items like the cost of designing and launching a web page, the cost of hiring your plant vendor and much more. The third component of the planning phase is risk management which means searching for possible problems and planning ahead to mitigate these risks. Let's face it, risk is inevitable in every project. What's not inevitable is how the risk impacts your project. Good project planning means searching for places where trouble might occur. Where might the schedule get off track? Where might the budgets exceed your estimates? You'll work with your team to consider answers to these questions and prepare a risk management plan based on whatever you discover. Let's go back to the office green example. While putting together the initial schedule, you may realize that your estimates from your developers put you way beyond your launch date. To manage that risk, you might try to reduce or adjust the project's scope to still meet your deadline or even negotiate a new launch date with your stakeholders. These are two simple examples of how you might mitigate a scheduling risk. So to recap, you'll spend the planning phase building your schedule, setting your budget, and preparing your risk management plan. But first, you need to get the whole team on board. Next, we'll discuss the project kickoff meeting which is where the project really gets going. Meet you there. Hello again. In this video, you'll learn how to schedule a kickoff meeting once you're ready to shift into planning mode. It's important to schedule a meeting that will serve as a formal start to project planning. You might be wondering what a kickoff meeting is and how it differs from other types of meetings. That's a great question. A project kickoff meeting is the first meeting in which a project team comes together to ground everyone in a shared vision, gain a shared understanding of the project's goals and scope, and to understand each person's individual roles within the team. So, who's invited to the kickoff meeting? Well, that would be the team members identified in a racy chart created during the initiation phase. As a reminder, a racy chart helps to define roles and responsibilities for individuals or teams to ensure that the work gets done efficiently. During the kickoff meeting, team members will learn more about how they'll contribute to the project and how they'll gain a deeper understanding of how the team will work together to reach the project's goals. You should also invite your stakeholders and your sponsor to the meeting so that they have a chance to understand the high-level plan for the project, can share their perspective, and you can ensure that everyone is on the same page. Now, you might be wondering why do I need a kickoff meeting? Can't my team learn everything they need to know from the project charter? We get it. Meetings can be time-consuming, and there are definitely situations when a quick email or a chat to a teammate will suffice. But when you're kicking off a project, especially larger projects with multiple people involved, it's important to get together to establish a shared vision, a line on the scope, and build team rapport. This is also an opportunity for teammates to ask questions and offer insights. And it's a great time for you to set expectations with the team about how each person will individually contribute to the project. Now, let's discuss how to plan and run a kickoff meeting. There are lots of templates for kickoff meeting agendas online, but most follow a similar structure and last about an hour. Keep in mind that this is just a suggestion, and you should feel free to schedule as much or as little time for each agenda item according to the needs of your project and the team. Most meetings start with brief introductions. You can allocate about 10 minutes for everyone in the group to introduce themselves and their roles. And if time allows, share a fun fact to help build team rapport. Then you'll spend about five minutes giving an overview of the background of the project. This covers details like how the project came to be and why the project matters. You'll also use this time to set a shared vision. Next, spend about five minutes sharing the goals and the scope, which refers to the boundaries around a project. That includes making it clear what work is considered in scope and what work is considered out of scope. This is also a good place to share the target launch date and highlight any important milestones the team need to be aware of. Once you've covered goals and scope, it's time to discuss everyone's roles. It's a good idea to spend about five minutes making sure that everyone is clear on what work they'll be responsible for throughout the duration of the project. Next, it's time to address collaboration, which is how the team will work together on the project. This is a great time to go over tools that will serve as a communal source of information for the team, like a project plan created in a spreadsheet or work management software tool like a sauna. It's also a great time to determine how the team will communicate with one another, like through daily email updates, a team chat room and weekly team check-in meetings. You should spend about 10 minutes on this topic. When that's all set, it's time to discuss what comes next.  You'll also use this time to make clear to each teammate what actions they'll need to take next. Finally, it's really important to set aside about 15 minutes for questions from the group. This is your team's chance to gain clarity on any of the topics you've discussed so far. It's also your chance to hear from the team and ensure that the project is benefiting from diversity of thoughts, experiences and ideas. For example, in addition to fielding questions out loud in the meeting, I might invite teammates to input their questions or feedback in a shared document. This practice can help create space for collaboration. I also like to poll my teammates for confidence on the topics discussed that day. I ask what their confidence level is on a scale of one to five. One being I'm not confident at all and five being I'm extremely confident. If they're not confident, I ask them what I can do to help change that. This practice can give the team a stronger sense of support because they know I'm there to help them through roadblocks. If you try this practice in your meetings, be sure to deliver on any promises you make there. Your reputation as a project manager to get things done and remove roadblocks is critical to building and maintaining relationships. So to recap, the kickoff meeting will cover introductions, project background, goals and scope, roles, collaboration and what comes next. And the meeting will leave time for questions from the group at the end. Once you've finalized the meeting agenda, document this information into a meeting agenda template and send it to attendees a day or two ahead of the meeting. As the project manager, you'll be leading the majority of this meeting. And when you're presenting, it's difficult to take notes and present at the same time. So at the start of the meeting, ask a teammate to take notes on key points you discussed throughout the session and to record each teammate's action items. In some cases, it may be beneficial to record this meeting so that attendees can revisit it later, especially if you have a large or dispersed team. Just be sure to get each attendees permission to record ahead of time. After the meeting, don't forget to send a follow-up email to the group summarizing key points and outcomes from the meeting as well as any action items to the attendees. In your follow-up email, be sure to also invite attendees to reach out if they have any additional questions. While there's a lot that goes into the kickoff meeting, remember that this is an exciting moment for the team and especially for you as the project manager. All of the careful thinking and hard work that you've done during the initiation phase comes together to form the foundation of your project. Coming up, we'll learn about milestones, tasks and how they differ. Meet you in the next video. Hi again. As we've discussed throughout this program, the project manager is responsible for assigning work to the team and keeping track of the project's progress. When we discuss assigning work, we'll use a few key terms, project milestones and project tasks. Let's break these down. A project milestone is an important point within the project schedule that indicates progress and usually signifies the completion of a deliverable or phase of the project. These are significant checkpoints in your project and keeping track of them helps ensure that your project is on schedule to meet its goals. For example, a milestone might include completing the first draft of a report and the goal may be to ultimately publish the report. Another example of a milestone is receiving sign-off or approval from your customer on a major deliverable. Let's discuss how milestones differ from project tasks. A project task is an activity that needs to be accomplished within a set period of time. The work of a project is broken down into many different tasks. In order to reach a milestone, you and your team must complete multiple tasks. For example, if a milestone is completing the first draft of a report, the tasks required to get to that milestone might include hiring a writer, conducting research and drafting different sections of the report. Let's imagine milestones and tasks in the context of project plant powers at Office Cream. One of your project deliverables is to launch a website for your new service where customers will be able to place orders and get customer support. Some of the milestones leading up to that launch will include securing approval on the website design and implementing feedback from user testing. To achieve those milestones, your team needs to complete multiple project tasks. For example, in order to reach the design milestone, your website designer will need to create initial mock-ups of the proposed website design. You'll need to review those mock-ups and the designer will need to implement your feedback. Each of these items is a project task and you won't reach your milestone until they're complete. To review, milestones are important points within the project schedule and project tasks are activities that need to be accomplished within a set period of time to help reach those milestones. Milestones and project tasks are interconnected. Tasks ladder up to milestones which are crucial for project tracking. Now that you know more about milestones, project tasks and how the two differ, we'll learn more about the importance of milestones in the next video. I'll meet you there. Great to see you again. So you've learned that a milestone is an important point within the project schedule that highlights progress and usually marks the completion of a deliverable or phase in the project. But now, let's talk about why setting milestones within your project is so important. While it might seem tempting to make a quick to-do list and get on with the project, it's really important that you take the time and effort to break your project down piece by piece. Here's why. First, setting milestones gives you a clear understanding of the amount of work your project will require. The act of setting milestones forces you to break your project down into more manageable chunks. The further you go, the better you'll be able to see how much work will be needed to meet the project goals. At first glance, it might seem simple to launch a new website, but it might be more work than you think. And if you break that deliverable down into milestones and those milestones into tasks, you'll have a better sense of the true amount of work that needs to be done. This will help you better manage the project workload. Another reason milestones are so great is that they can help keep your project on track. When you set a milestone, you assign clear deadlines for when certain project deliverables need to be completed. Then, as you work through the execution phase, you can look back at these deadlines to make sure that the project is progressing at the right pace. A third reason you'll want to set milestones is that they help you uncover areas where you might need to adjust scope, timelines, or resources to meet your goals. For example, if you realize that reaching a milestone will require more tasks than you'd anticipated, you might ask a stakeholder for permission to reduce the scope of the project and cut down on the number of tasks. And finally, there's one more reason milestones are so important. Actually, reaching milestones can seriously motivate your team and illustrate real progress to your stakeholders. With big projects that go on for months, you'll want to keep the team's motivation high. A milestone signifies the completion of an important chunk of work and provides a moment of celebration for the team, even if there's more work ahead. Milestones also serve as a great check-in point to highlight your progress to stakeholders. It gives them the opportunity to see the work that's been completed so far and lets them see everything is on track and up to their standards. It's also important to remember that milestones must be completed on time and in sequential order because usually, reaching the next milestone is dependent on completing a previous milestone. Think about this in terms of project plant powers at Office Green. As we discussed earlier, in order to launch a website for a new plant service, there are a few milestones you need to hit like securing approval of a website design, completing development of the website and implementing user feedback. These milestones must happen in this order. Here's why. The web developer can't build the website if the design hasn't been approved by stakeholders and you can't implement feedback from user testing if there's no website to test. So we know it's important to reach milestones in sequential order but it's just as important that you reach them on time. If the team misses the mark to complete a deliverable tied to a specific milestone, it could set back your project schedule meaning your team might need to work over time or add additional resources to catch up. For example, if you need to secure stakeholder approval on a website design by Friday but the web designer hasn't completed the design yet, you might have to wait until after the weekend secure stakeholder approval. This will delay the start of the development phase giving your team less time to build the website. Even worse, this delay could affect the project budget if completing this deliverable directly ties to a payment from the client. If you miss the deadline, your likely delay receipt of that payment. You might even risk losing the payment altogether. Though deadlines are sometimes flexible, it's important to be extra mindful of milestones where the deadline is non-negotiable. And that's that. Hopefully you understand why milestones are important to any project. Coming up, we'll discuss how to set milestones for your project. See you there. Hi again. Okay, so you know that milestones are pretty important. They help give you a clear picture of the amount of work required. They help your project stay on track, uncover areas where you might need additional resources, motivate your teammates and show progress to your stakeholders. So now, let's talk about identifying milestones within your project and how you can set deadlines for each one. The first step to setting a milestone is to evaluate your project as a whole. It helps to refer back to your project charter to remind yourself of the project goal. Then, make a list of what your team needs to do to achieve that goal. The big items that indicate progress are your milestones. These are the key points within the project schedule that signify the completion of a project deliverable or a phase in the project. Smaller items like any item that a stakeholder wouldn't need to review, for example, are tasks. Your plan for these, once you've separated them out from the milestones. So let's go back to our office green example. One of the project deliverables is a new website. And as we determined earlier, some milestones for our office green website scenario include securing approval of website design, completing development of the website and implementing user feedback. Mocking up initial designs or building a landing page are smaller items on your list. So those are marked as tasks. Try to keep in mind that some projects might have many milestones while others might just have two or three. There's no one right number of milestones to set. The number will vary from project to project. Once you've determined your milestones, the next step is to assign each one a deadline. Reaching each of your milestones is dependent on the completion of multiple project tasks. So to make sure you give your team a fair amount of time to complete each of those tasks, you'll need to space your milestones out accordingly. For a larger, months-long project like Project Plant Pals, you shouldn't expect to meet multiple milestones in the span of a week. Mocking up website designs and collecting insights from user testing are big tasks that take time. You need to space milestones out to give your team room to complete their work. To get a good sense of timing, you can connect with teammates to discuss the tasks required to reach each milestone and get their estimates for how long these tasks will take. With those estimates in mind, you can make an informed decision about reasonable deadlines for each milestone. When you set deadlines for milestones, you'll also want to consider the needs of your stakeholders. Ask yourself when they'll expect to see a certain project deliverable and consider the answer when choosing a deadline. Your stakeholders will want to see regular indications that the team is making progress. And milestones are a great way to show that progress. So to recap, you set milestones by looking at your project as a whole and pulling out important checkpoints that show progress. Then you assign deadlines to each milestone while keeping the needs of your stakeholders top of mind. Next up, we'll discuss a helpful tool for breaking down the tasks that ladder up to each milestone. See you there. So we've discussed how to set milestones. Now we'll learn how to account for the many tasks that ladder up to each milestone. You can do this by creating a work breakdown structure. Let's start with the definition. A work breakdown structure often abbreviated to WBS is a tool that sorts the milestones and tasks of a project in a hierarchy in the order they need to be completed. This is a helpful tool because it helps break down the sometimes intimidating challenges of a project into more manageable chunks. Big projects like publishing a report or organizing a conference seem a lot less daunting when the work required to get there is broken down step-by-step with a clear pathway from the beginning of the project to the end. Let's look at an example of a basic work breakdown structure. There are lots of different ways to design a work breakdown structure. But one common way is to create a tree diagram of project tasks. Let's say that we're creating a work breakdown structure for the project PlantPals website launch. At the top of the diagram is the name of the project. The second level of our diagram breaks the project down into three milestones. These include securing design approval developing the site and implementing user feedback. At the third level of the chart we can see each of those milestones gets further broken down into a series of project tasks. For example tasks listed beneath your design approval milestone include mocking up designs and collecting feedback. This is a very simple example of a work breakdown structure. Here we've only created a work breakdown structure for a new website which is just one of the project PlantPals deliverables. Keep in mind that in future project management roles you'll likely create a WBS that outlines the tasks for an entire project. It's also important to note that while creating a work breakdown structure is a helpful exercise for visualizing the tasks of a project you wouldn't typically include this type of diagram in your official project plan. Instead you'd input the tasks identified through this exercise into a spreadsheet or your chosen work management software where you can more easily assign owners to each task. Okay so after completing a work breakdown structure and organizing those tasks in a spreadsheet a few things should be clearer to you. First you should have a set of discrete project tasks that ladder up to each of your milestones. You and your teammates will know exactly what needs to happen to reach your first milestone and the milestones after that. Second you're now in a good position to assign those tasks to members of the project team. Each person should have a clear understanding of the tasks they own and the order in which they need to complete them. Let's break down how to assign tasks. Tasks are typically assigned according to a person's role in the project. For example in our office screen scenario the web designer is assigned to the task of mocking up the initial website design. You are assigned to the task of reviewing that design and providing feedback. And the designer is assigned to the task of implementing your feedback. A web developer will be assigned to the next task of developing the site itself. Sometimes your team will have multiple teammates working in the same type of role. To assign tasks between two or more team members with the same roles you might take into consideration each person's familiarity with the tasks at hand. For example if you have multiple web developers working on the new website you might task one developer with creating the landing page and task the other developer with creating the contact us page. When assigning tasks you should also consider each teammate's workload. Think about how much time they're meant to be spending on the project compared to work outside the project that they might also be responsible for. It's important to keep everyone's workloads balanced. You'll want to make sure that a single teammate isn't assigned more work than others. You'll also want to make sure that no one is assigned more work than they can handle. When people feel overloaded the quality of their work may suffer or they might need more time to complete the number of tasks putting the timeline and the overall project schedule at risk. As the project manager you'll ensure that your teammates are clear on their assigned tasks. You can do this by assigning tasks with help from project management tools like Asana which I use a lot in my day-to-day role at Google. When you manage a project in Asana you'll add tasks to represent actionable pieces of work needed to complete the project. As a best practice it's good to start each task with a verb. For example instead of just typing website make clear the task is to mock up the website or add images to the website. Another thing to think about when assigning tasks is timeline. Be sure to add an assignee and a due date to each task so it's clear who's doing what by when. Finally be sure to include as much detail surrounding the task as possible to avoid miscommunication. In Asana you can click into the task details to add helpful information. Here you can add a description link to corresponding files or attachments or even comment on the work related to the task. There's so many benefits to assigning tasks but the biggest one is that it frees you up to focus on managing a project. This way you can feel confident in the knowledge that your teammates are responsible for specific work. But there's also some less obvious benefits of assigning tasks. Let's explore these more now. One less obvious benefit of assigning tasks is that it creates a sense of personal responsibility for members of the team. When you assign a teammate to a task you enter into an agreement with that person that they'll own the task until it's completed. Creating a sense of ownership for members of the team is important because it makes them feel more invested in the project. It also gives them space for personal growth. Plus it supports your own skill building as a manager who's a supportive delegator. And on top of that it keeps your team motivated and invested in completing their work on time. And while each team member should have a sense of responsibility for their assigned task a complete sense of ownership might feel overwhelming for some teammates. If that's the case it's a good idea for a project manager to encourage teammates to support one another on their tasks. This is also great for building overall team rapport. Got all that? Great. So to recap you've learned about work breakdown structures and how to assign tasks to people on your team. Meet us in the next video for a recap on what we've covered over the past few videos. Hi again. Over the past few videos we've discussed how to launch the planning phase of the project lifecycle. This is where you'll build your schedule, set your budget and prepare your risk management plan. You also learned about an important part of the planning phase the project kickoff meeting. This is a key moment where you can meet with your team stakeholders to establish a shared vision, a line on scope, build rapport, ask questions and set expectations. We also discussed milestones which are important points within the project schedule that indicate progress. And we also learned about tasks which are activities that need to be accomplished within a set period of time. Then you learned about the value of milestones and how to set them. And you learned how to take those milestones break them down into tasks and record that information in a work breakdown structure. Next, we'll explore estimating time and setting a schedule. See you soon. Hi, my name is Clinita and I'm a senior engineering program manager at Google. So the planning phase of project management is essentially the time where you take step back and you reflect on what's the scope of the project. So what are the problems that we need to solve? When you look at planning for projects it's critical to understanding what you're building, who you're building for and how long you have to build it. We look at our risk to make sure that we know what potentially could derail the project and if possible create mitigation that would circumvent any risks that we may come in contact with or just be aware of things like scope. We also look at timing. Is there a time, a deadline that we need to hit? And if so, do we have enough time to hit that deadline? We assess the work that needs to be done to understand if the work that needs to be done in order to meet the requirements fits into the timeline that we have. We also look at testing what the testing plan looks like. What is success going to look like? So we know what the target is so that when we hit the target and we validate it we already know what metrics we expect to get. I'm a planner. Like, it's just in my nature. Planning, that's a tone for what we're actually doing together. It creates a sense of team. The planning also aligns everybody to understanding what it is we're all shooting for. What it is our goals are what success is going to look like. It really is the place where we come together to ensure that we're all on the same page and we're all going in the same direction. When you don't have that things get lost. You're not talking to the right people. You have miscommunications. Things get delayed and you don't really understand why people aren't comfortable communicating what you know what progress is happening. They aren't they really aren't comfortable in communicating when their problem comes up. So you want to just set a tone of like we're all in this together. We're all going to be successful together and we are going to run into roadblocks. We are going to run into problems but we're going to work it out and figure it out as a team. Hi, welcome back. In the previous section we learned more about the planning phase which is the second phase of the project lifecycle. We introduced you to kickoff meetings which is the first meeting for the project team. We also discussed milestones, tasks and how to set these within a project. Coming up we'll explain why it is necessary to create and manage a project plan. We'll discuss the definition of a project plan and we'll learn what typically goes into one. This includes the project schedule which will help guide your team to the finish line. We'll also share how to use time estimation methods to prevent project failure. We'll introduce you to a few time estimation techniques which can help you build an accurate project schedule. And finally we'll examine tools and best practices you can use to build out a project plan. Ready to get started? Meet me in the next video. A project plan can be useful for any project big or small since it helps you document the scope, tasks, milestones and overall activities of the project. At the center of the project plan is the project schedule. The project schedule can help you estimate the amount of time it'll take to complete the project and it can provide the team with a way to track the project's progress against your goals. What goes into a project plan may vary from company to company but most plans contain these five basic elements. These are tasks, milestones, people, documentation and time. Let's break those down. A project plan will include tasks and milestones. Two topics we discussed before. Tasks are activities that need to be accomplished within a set period of time. They're assigned to different members of the team according to their roles and skills. And milestones are important points within the schedule that indicate progress. They usually signify the completion of a deliverable or phase of the project. A project plan will also include the people working on your team and their roles. It's important that each team member understands their role and the tasks they're responsible for completing. Ensuring that everyone is clear on their assigned task frees you up to focus on managing the project and creates a sense of personal responsibility for members of the team. A project plan is a good place to link to relevant documentation. This includes documents like your racy chart which helps to define roles and responsibilities for individuals on your team. You can also link to your charter which clearly defines the project and outlines the details needed to reach your goals. Relevant documentation can also include documents like your budget and risk management plan. We'll discuss more about those later on in the course. Lastly, a project plan should include the estimated time that will be spent on the project. This forms the basis of the schedule which is the anchor of your project plan. The estimated time includes dates on which tasks should be started and completed and the dates when you hope to reach various milestones. It also includes the start and end dates of the project which are important in determining which resources you'll need and when you'll need them. So, how exactly do you estimate how long these things will take? Meet me in the next video to find out. As the project manager, you aren't responsible for completing every task. What you are responsible for is identifying and helping assign those tasks and then estimating how long they'll take to complete. These estimates come together to determine the overall project schedule. So, how do you estimate the amount of time a given task will take? You do this with the help of your team. Time estimation is a prediction of the total amount of time required to complete a task. Effort estimation is a prediction of the amount and difficulty of active work required to complete a task. Effort estimation differs from time estimation in that effort quantifies the amount of time it will take a person to complete work on a task. On the flip side, time refers to the overall duration of the task from start to finish. That includes inactive time. Here's an example. The effort estimation for painting a wall might be 30 minutes, but time estimation might be 24 hours. That's because in addition to the 30 minutes of active painting time, there are also 23 and a half hours of inactive drying time. It's important to understand the difference between time estimation and effort estimation because it can help you be more efficient with your available resources. If there's idle time baked into a given task, your teammate is effectively free to do other things. A painter can do other tasks while the wall is drying, like painting the mailbox or the window trim. An unrealistic effort estimate can negatively impact a project schedule. Generally, this happens when you underestimate the amount of time it will take to complete a task. Often, the culprit for underestimating effort is optimism. And listen, optimism is a wonderful trait for a project manager to possess, but too much optimism can lead you to overlook potential risks that could set your plans behind schedule. Though it might be tempting to make the optimistic assumption that tasks will be executed exactly according to plan, there is always a possibility that there will be setbacks. So, how do you try to avoid making unrealistic effort estimates? You can do this by communicating with teammates assigned to each task. Your teammates will have the most realistic understanding of the amount of work required to complete a task and should be able to provide you with the best estimate. Let's imagine this scenario in the context of our Plant Pals project at Office Green. As a reminder, you're launching a new service to provide top Office Green customers with small low maintenance plants that they can place on their desks. You might assume that creating a contact list of top customers is relatively straightforward and can be completed in a single day. But it's important to really consider certain sub-tasks required to complete work in your planning. Sub-tasks refer to smaller tasks that are required to complete a larger task. For example, this might include meeting with the global sales team to identify clients, gathering contact information, determining client language preferences, and building a spreadsheet to house this information. Asking the teammate assigned to the task for their estimate is likely to yield a more accurate estimation since they'll have a deeper understanding of the work and the nuances of what's required to complete the task. You might learn that creating the contact list may take two days to complete, which could be double the time you originally expected. Of course, you can usually ask follow-up questions or even gently push back on their estimate as needed. Later on, we'll discuss more of the techniques you can use to get more accurate estimates from your teammates. Now, even though task owners tend to have the strongest sense of how much time they'll need to complete a task, the fact is that effort estimates are just that. Estimates. Meaning that sometimes those estimates won't be accurate. For example, in our plant power scenario, your teammate estimates that it will take two days to create a contact list of top customers. But let's say that the sales team is out of the office for a team building exercise and unable to meet about the client list until after the weekend. This will create a task delay. And as a result, the original estimate is no longer accurate. Luckily, there's a helpful tool called a buffer that you can use during the planning phase to protect against inaccurate effort estimates. A buffer is extra time added to the end of a task or a project to account for unexpected slowdowns or delays in work progress. Buffers are important because they can provide some leeway, just in case your time and effort estimates turn out to fall a bit short. With a buffer, you can add extra time into your schedule and your project shouldn't fall off track when task delays inevitably arise. There are two types of buffers you can use when planning your schedule. Task buffers and project buffers. First, we have task buffers which refer to extra time tacked on to a specific task. Task buffers should be used primarily for tasks that are out of the project team's control. For example, you might ask a potential plant vendor to provide you with a cost estimate by Monday. You might assign them this deadline knowing that you won't actually need the estimate until Thursday. The time between Monday and Thursday is your buffer and it provides your team with extra time just in case the vendor sends their estimates to you a day or too late. Task buffers should be used more sparingly for tasks within the project team's control. For example, you might choose to add buffers only to tasks that are difficult to complete or that have an element of unpredictability like the length of time it will take plants to grow.  This is where project buffers come in handy. Project buffers differ from task buffers in that they provide extra time to the overall project schedule. Rather than adding a buffer to every task you can add extra time as a buffer towards the end of your project schedule. Then you can use that extra time two to three days for example as needed throughout the project. For instance if a teammate misses a deadline here and there the project buffer gives you space in the overall schedule to make up for lost time. I use buffers often in my day-to-day role at Google. For example on a recent project at Google I was working with a new hire who was great at coding but kept missing deadlines. I realized they weren't giving themselves enough buffer time to do testing. I started to ask questions about their current workload and the complexity of their tasks and based on their answers to those questions I was able to gather insights about their work and determine where I needed to add buffer to their tasks. Ultimately my goal is to ensure that I'm setting a realistic timeline for the project. After all if you hit your project goal two months later than expected your organization may not consider the project a success. Time estimation effort estimation and buffers can help you build realistic plans for reaching the project goal. Hi again. Okay so we've discussed time estimation which is a prediction of the total amount of time that will be required to complete a task and we've also discussed effort estimation which is a prediction of the amount and difficulty of active work required to complete a task. These techniques can help you estimate the length of time it'll take to complete a task. Once you have that information you'll need to determine if you have the right number of people to get the work done. To figure this out you can use a technique called capacity planning. First let's define capacity. Capacity refers to the amount of work that the people or resources assigned to the project can reasonably complete in a set period of time. A person can only do so much and it's important to keep in mind each person's capacity when assigning work. This is where capacity planning comes in. Capacity planning refers to the act of allocating people and resources to project tasks and determining whether or not you have the necessary resources required to complete the work on time. During this process you might find that you need more resources to speed up the project timeline like a second web developer or a third writer. Let's imagine capacity planning in the context of our plant powers project at office green. If you know that you'll need to deliver plants to 100 customers over a period of five days then you'll need to determine if you've hired enough delivery drivers to meet that deadline. If one driver averages for deliveries within an eight-hour workday then you know you'll need to hire at least five drivers to complete the work on time. Even if a person on your project team is spending 100% of their time at work on your project they'll have limited capacity for the amount of work they should be expected to complete each day. Between meetings unexpected urgent tasks and other elements of a typical workday there's only so much each person can complete. So how do you decide where a teammate should focus their priorities and make the most of their capacity? You can prioritize their time by plotting the critical path of your project timeline. The critical path refers to the list of project milestones that you must reach in order to meet the project goal on schedule as well as the mandatory tasks that contribute to the completion of each milestone. Anything else is considered off the critical path. For example tasks on the critical path for launching project plant powers might include hiring plant vendors developing a new website and fulfilling deliveries. A task like adding flowers to your product lineup is nice to have but might not have much impact on the overall success of your project because this task isn't crucial to your launch. These tasks aren't part of the critical path to summarize your critical path includes the bare minimum number of tasks and milestones you need to reach your project goal. If your team is unable to complete any of those tasks on time that might result in a project delay. To determine the critical path of a project you'd start by listing all the tasks required to complete the project and the milestones they feed into. This is a perfect time to think back to your work breakdown structure or WBS which is a chart that sorts all the milestones and tasks of a project into a hierarchy according to to be completed. This includes a detailed overview of every project task. Then you determine which tasks on the list absolutely can't begin until another task is complete. This is called a dependency and we'll discuss this topic in more detail later on. Next you'll work with your team to make time estimates for each task and map each task from start to finish. The longest path is your critical path.  First you need to be able to identify which tasks can happen in parallel which means they can happen at the same time as other tasks. You will also need to identify which tasks can happen sequentially meaning they must happen in a specific order. When you identify which tasks can happen in parallel it helps you create efficiencies within your project schedule by demonstrating where you can complete multiple tasks at the same time. Identifying sequential tasks help you identify the tasks that you need to prioritize early on in the project. For example a sequential task for your plant pals project may include needing budget approval before hiring a vendor and two parallel tasks might include hiring delivery drivers and the development of a website. These tasks have no relationship to one another as they focus on different portions of the project and can be completed by different members of the team. That means that one task can begin even if the other task hasn't been completed and so the work to complete these tasks can happen at the same time. You also need to determine which project tasks have a fixed start date. A fixed start date refers to a date on which you must start work on your task in order to achieve your goal. Identifying whether or not your task have a fixed start dates can help with capacity planning because it helps ensure that you'll have the right number of people available to complete tasks on time. For example, let's imagine that your contract says you'll need to deliver 100 plants on a specific date. That means that the task of picking up those plants has a fixed start date of one day prior to delivery. Alternatively, some tasks might have an earliest start date. An earliest start date refers to the earliest date in which you can begin working on a task. Identifying an earliest start date can set accurate expectations for when vendors and team members will be up and running on the project. This can help you plan your work and prioritize your work accordingly. For example, if you're working with a new vendor, you need to wait until contracts are signed and the purchase order is approved and created before the vendor can start. Let's say that at office green, this process can take about three weeks. Based on this information, you can determine that the earliest start date for your vendor will be three weeks from the kickoff meeting with your vendor. Another best practice for capacity planning and creating a critical path includes identifying if a task has float, also sometime known as slack. Float refers to the amount of time you can wait to begin a task before it impacts the project schedule and threatens the project outcome. These are high-priority tasks that have low to no wiggle room. This helps reinforce what is and what is not on your critical path. For instance, tasks on the critical path should have zero float, meaning there is no room for delays and tasks that do have float are not a part of the critical path. For example, the shipment of plants to a priority customer who's requested their delivery on a specific date is a task that has zero float. Great. You've now learned a bit more about how to define capacity, capacity planning and critical path. We also discussed the techniques used to identify critical path in a project and the various factors that can impact capacity and capacity planning. In the next video, we'll continue learning how to create viable estimates in a project plan. You will also find out how your soft skills can help the effectiveness of your team. Meet you there. Hi again. Ready to get back into it? Let's go. Time estimation, effort estimation and capacity planning are all helpful techniques for creating your project schedule. And at the center of all this planning is your team. Throughout the schedule planning process, you're working with teammates to gather estimates and you're taking into account each person's capacity when building the project schedule. It makes sense to involve your teammates at this stage. After all, the person assigned to the given task is likely to have the best sense of how long it will take to complete that task. They'll also have the best sense of their own capacity for taking on the work. But these conversations are a two-way discussion and you'll need to tap into your soft skills to get the most accurate estimate from your team. Soft skills are personal characteristics that help people work effectively with others. These include crucial communication and interpersonal skills we've discussed over the course of this program. Soft skills can be important when trying to understand what might be blocking someone's ability to do their best work. Let's go over three ways to use soft skills and gather accurate estimates from your teammates. These are asking the right questions, negotiating effectively, and practicing empathy. Let's start with asking the right questions. Think of conversations around the time estimation as a kind of interview. You're connecting with your teammates to learn more about how they work on specific tasks and you'll use this information to build your schedule. To aim to get the most relevant information from these conversations you'll want to be certain that you're asking effective, open-ended questions that lead to the answers you're seeking. An open-ended question is a question that cannot be answered with a yes or a no. The answer provides the relevant details of what you need to know. Let's imagine this in the context of your project at Office Green. You've discussed the design of a new website with your web designer and you'd like to know how long it will take them to mock up designs for your review. Now let's say you start the conversation by asking a question like, can you complete the mock-ups in one week? This is a closed-ended question and might elicit a simple yes or no answer which doesn't tell you much about the task of designing a website or about your teammate's working style. Now, imagine if you had started this conversation with an open-ended question. For example, you might ask the web designer something like, how long does it typically take you to mock up a website design like this one? This is an open-ended question and is more likely to elicit a more detailed response. From there, you can ask follow-up questions like, how complex are the steps to complete this task? What are the risks associated with this task? And, when do you think you can have this ready? By asking your teammates effective, open-ended questions about their assigned tasks, you can learn more about how they work and what they do. As you have more of these conversations, you'll develop a better sense of your teammate's roles and their tasks and you'll be able to rely less on your team to make accurate estimates. Another way to use soft skills to gather estimates from teammates is to negotiate effectively. Part of your job as the project manager is to bridge the gap between high-level goals of the project and the day-to-day perspective of your team. While your project might be your number one priority, it's possible that people on your project team have competing priorities on other teams to keep track of as well. Negotiating effectively can help you influence a team member to make your project their priority by collaborating to find an outcome that works for everyone. For example, let's imagine that the website designer estimates it will take them two weeks to mock up the website design for review, but perhaps you are hoping that their estimate might be closer to one week. To arrive at an estimate that works for both you and the designer, you might gently challenge the estimate by asking follow-up questions. Perhaps you'd ask if their estimate includes mocking up designs for multiple pages. If so, you might ask if the designer is able to share one or two pages with you sooner than their proposed deadline. By asking questions, you can determine if their estimate is flexible, or if you need to bring in an additional designer to support the schedule. By negotiating effectively with your teammates, you can create a sense of shared ownership over the project outcomes, and create a schedule that aligns with everyone's workload. Now let's discuss the value of practicing empathy. Empathy refers to a person's ability to relate to the thoughts and feelings of others. Practicing empathy at work can be a very effective way to build trust with your team. Your teammates are humans, and each person can only do so much. When you're discussing estimates with the team, you might practice empathy by asking each person about their workload, including work outside of your project and the overall work-life balance. You might also ask if they've scheduled vacation or leave during the duration of the project, or if there are crucial holidays in which they won't be working. This can help you avoid assigning tasks when teammates are unable to complete them on time. For example, the web designer might tell you that they're also designing a website for another team at office screen, and that the timeline for both projects overlap. So, to avoid overloading your designer with work, you might work with the other project manager to balance workloads across the teams. People like to feel their work is valued. So part of empathy is remembering to always be appreciative of the work, collaboration, and support that you're getting from the team. So, to recap, asking the right questions, negotiating effectively and practicing empathy can help you get viable, accurate estimates from your teammates about project tasks. Coming up, we'll discuss putting these estimates to good use in the project plan. Hi, my name is Angel, and I'm a program manager at Google. I'm a mechanical engineer by degree, and my first boss out of school said, you're an okay engineer, but your people skills are off the charts. And having a technical background and having really good people skills is hard to find. Soft skills, to me, have a lot to do with emotional intelligence. So, being able to read other people, and then, ultimately, really knowing yourself and being able to read the team, read what they need, but then, at the same time, you know, what am I doing? You know, either influencing the team in a good way in a bad way, or just a different way. Just asking, sometimes, people that don't usually kind of raise their hand to give input, goes a long way because a lot of times the folks that are maybe a little more quiet are genuinely thinking about the problem and may have a lot of insights that if you didn't kind of catch on that or ask them, you could miss out. And so, to me, soft skills just means just really understanding kind of the emotional needs of the team. And that can really help with, you know, whether it's estimations or costs, whether it be labor or dollar-wise, get kind of the full view from the team of what that might look like. When it comes to task estimation and time estimations, the other thing is just asking good questions. So not just, you know, I need you to go faster, but really saying, hey, how much faster could you go if I gave you this? What is stopping you from going faster? You know, what teams would you need to get involved? To kind of help this, right? Or, hey, we have an issue. Are there similar issues in other parts of this project? And do we need to get together in a larger group to kind of bring that together? I think as a program manager, that's really your role is to kind of see patterns in a project and see kind of where things are either slowing down or at a complete stop and having those soft skills to be able to bring the team together to, to solve that problem. And to even just see it, right? Just to acknowledge that there is a problem and instead of, you know, blaming is really just digging in and kind of, how do we learn from this? How do we fix this? How do we move on? Some of the things that also help is just relating to your team members and if you've either been in a similar situation or just trying to get to understand what their process is. Sometimes just having people walk through the estimate out loud can sometimes come up with realizations of oh, we could save more time or could improve this just by talking it out. I've been a project manager, you know, for machines that make labels, to locomotive engines, to how you make plywood. So project management skills, you know, don't necessarily need to be all about kind of the field that you're in. It's really more about kind of the method and the process and kind of how you structure a team and get people to work together. Hi again. In the previous videos, we took you through a few different time estimation methods. Now you can relate how to use time estimation methods to prevent project failure. Let's discuss how to pull all of this information into a project plan to help you and your team stay on track to meet your goals. Even the simplest projects can benefit from a clear plan and an anchor of a good project plan is a clear schedule containing all the tasks of a project, their owners and when they need to be completed. Once you have your project schedule, you can build a solid plan around that schedule using tools like spreadsheets and a sauna. We'll explain these tools in a few moments. But first, let's discuss building a project schedule. There are many helpful tools that you can use to create a project schedule. But let's focus on one that we sometimes use here at Google called a Gantt chart. A Gantt chart is a horizontal bar chart that maps out a project schedule. Fun fact, the chart gets its name from American engineer Henry Gantt who helped popularize the chart in the early 1900s. So, why did people working in project management find this chart useful? Well, it's a highly visual representation of a project's tasks with clear breakdowns of who's responsible for the work and when those tasks are due. For many people, a visual aid that builds upon written directions can be a helpful way to understand and synthesize the work they need to do, when they need to complete it and how their individual tasks connect to the other tasks in a project. Gantt charts are almost like calendars. They feature the start and end dates of each task and the bars align with how much time is devoted to each of those tasks. For example, let's say that your teammate Leon is tasked with creating a project charter and another teammate, Kylie, is tasked with reviewing and editing the charter when Leon is finished. Using a Gantt chart, you'll use colored bars to illustrate the days that they'll be working on these tasks. With this method, you and the rest of your team can determine that Leon has Friday, Monday, and Tuesday to work on the chart and Kylie has Wednesday to complete any revisions. The bars cascade down the chart to illustrate the passing of time and the blocks of time in which the tasks are completed. Gantt charts can be a helpful tool for tracking schedules. But what kinds of tools can you use to make a Gantt chart? There are a few options, but we're going to focus on the straightforward spreadsheet. Creating a Gantt chart in a spreadsheet is pretty simple. You can organize your left columns by items like task title, task owner, start date, due date, duration, and percent of task complete. This is a great place to list the tasks and milestones previously identified in a work breakdown structure. You'll include relevant information in the rows below, organized by start date. On the right side of your sheet, you'll order your columns by the weeks estimated to complete the project from start to finish. In the rows below that, you'll include bars representing the dates when certain tasks will take place. Kinda neat, right? Spreadsheets are helpful here because they can hold more information than just the Gantt chart. Though the project schedule serves as the central component of the project plan, you can use separate tabs on your spreadsheet to house or link to other documents you'll want to include in your plan, like a racy chart or a project charter. You may also opt to include your plans for risk management and communication here too. With a spreadsheet, you can simply add a tab for your documents. Keeping every document for the project in one spreadsheet saves time, helps everyone stay organized and reduces the burden of having to search through emails for information. Alternatively, you can also opt to use a digital document to link out all the relevant documents. While Gantt charts are a useful tool, they are far from the only option for your project plan and there are plenty of reasons why this form of documentation might not work for you or your project team. For a simple project, you might find that your team responds better to a digital document that features a list of tables or tasks, their owners, due dates and links to other relevant planning documents. Or perhaps your team works best with Kanban boards, which uses cards to track and visualize the progress of your tasks. Regardless of your chosen tool, if your plan includes the project's goals, its tasks, owners, start and end dates, and relevant planning documentation, then you'll be able to keep everyone on the same page. Now you know a bit more about the tools that can be used to create a project schedule. Up next, we'll discuss best practices for building a project plan. Meet you in the next video. Hi again. Earlier, you learned about creating a project plan based on a project schedule that lists all of the milestones, tasks and deadlines of a project and that clearly outlines the people responsible for each task. You also learned about Gantt charts, which are simple visual ways to create your schedule. So, how can you help make sure that your plan works for you and your team? Let's discuss five best practices for building a great project plan that will remain useful throughout the execution and closing phases of your project. Those include ensuring careful review of project deliverables, milestones and tasks, giving yourself time to plan, recognizing and planning for the inevitable, things will go wrong, staying curious and championing your plan. First, you'll want to ensure that you've carefully reviewed the projects deliverables, milestones and tasks. During the initiation phase, you'll recall that you created a project charter with important information regarding your project, like your goal, scope and deliverables. When a project enters the planning phase, your plans become more granular. Let's discuss this in the context of your project at Office Green. In your plan, you need to break this information down further. You're creating a new website for this service, so you'll need to break that deliverable down into smaller milestones, like kicking off a meeting with the web developer and gaining stakeholder approval. And those milestones will break down into smaller tasks, like mocking up a design of the new website and developing a landing page. Each of these tasks will be assigned to a teammate and given a start and end date. Now, a new website isn't the only project plan powers deliverable. You will need to break down every deliverable into milestones and tasks to ensure that you and your team have a clear picture of what needs to be done to meet your project's goals. Your plan revolves around completing each and every tiny task, so you should take your time to get this piece right. This brings me to my second tip. Give yourself time to plan. There's a reason that planning is its own phase of the project life cycle. It's a time-intensive process, especially for larger projects with multiple deliverables. Planning gives you and your team some time to think realistically about what your team can and cannot accomplish within a certain timeframe. You're not a machine and neither are your teammates. There are limits to the amount of work any one person can do in a given timeframe. Using the strategies that we've shared earlier, like effort estimation and capacity planning, can help you and your team get a realistic sense of how long the project will take and when you'll be able to hit your milestones. It's also important to allow for buffer time since projects rarely go exactly as planned. Later in the project, you'll be grateful that you initially planned for some built-in flexibility around timing. That leads nicely into my third tip. Recognize and plan for the inevitable. Things will go wrong. Even with thorough planning, your projects will still experience unexpected setbacks and bumps in the road. You can't plan for every problem, but the team can identify the risks that will most likely occur and create plans to prevent or mitigate those risks. As we mentioned before, Buff is a helpful tool for mitigating issues related to slowdowns in progress. You'll learn more about how to create a risk management plan that goes into your project plan later on in this course. Onto my fourth tip. Stay curious. Though you may be the sole expert on your project overall, it's extremely unlikely that you're an expert on every task of the project. That's why it's so important to sit down with your teammates during a planning phase and ask lots and lots of questions. As we mentioned earlier, asking your teammates questions about their work can give you deeper insights into their tasks for the project. Their input will help you build a stronger plan and the back and forth dialogue will help you build trust between you and your teammates. To keep the project running smoothly, it's also important to understand the expectations, priorities, risk assessments and communication styles of your stakeholders and vendors. For example, you might ask stakeholders how to best keep them in the loop on the project's plans and you might ask your vendors about their availability to complete work for the project. Now onto my fifth tip. Champion your plan. While deciding how to organize your plan, you'll want to ask yourself a few questions like can your teammates use the tool you used to build your plan? Is the information clear enough for your stakeholders? Will using this plan as a single source of truth save your team and stakeholders the time and energy when they need to find information on the project? If the answer to each of these questions is a strong yes, then you're on the right track. To achieve buy-in from your teammates and stakeholders on your project plan, champion it. Tell your team why it benefits them to stay on top of the plan. By doing so, you may influence your teammates to stay on track and update the plan regularly. So to recap, you can set your project plan up for success if you review your deliverables, milestones and tasks. Give yourself time to plan, prepare for things to go wrong, stay curious and champion your plan once it's finalized. Coming up, we'll recap what you've learned over the past few videos. See you there. Nice work. Let's recap what we've just covered. First, we took you through why it's necessary to create and manage a project plan. At the center of the project plan is a project schedule and we discussed methods for determining realistic time and effort estimates for each task. You also learned more about the power of soft skills to help you gather time and effort estimates from members of your team. We also introduced you to a Gantt chart which is a useful tool for visualizing a project schedule and I shared my best practices for creating a project plan that will serve as a useful source of information throughout the planning phase and execution phase. Coming up, we'll take you through managing costs and budgets. See you soon. Welcome back. Previously, we learned about creating and managing a project plan and using time estimation to prevent project failure. Coming up, we're going to shift the discussion to the inner workings of a project budget. So let's discuss money. As mentioned before, a lot of project management skills may overlap with common skills that you already use in your everyday life and you may already have some kind of budgeting experience. Budgeting in the project management world is a complex process involving many different parties and documentation. I'm going to teach you how to create and manage a real world project budget. We'll discuss the many components of a budget and how stakeholders play a role in the budgeting process. You'll learn about the importance of procurement in project management. If you don't know what that means yet, sit tight. You'll understand that concept soon enough. You'll also learn about vendor management and procurement in both the agile and the traditional methodology settings. There will be several new concepts around legal and contractual documentation introduced throughout such as NDAs, RFPs and SOWs. You'll learn that project managers are fluent in acronyms and soon you will be too. I will explain each of these acronyms coming up. We'll also teach you about the role that legal teams and ethics play in procurement. I'll give you a hint. It's a big one. Starting a new project and sourcing materials considering the ethical implications can get project managers into hot water. So you'll learn more about legal teams and ethics to help you avoid these tricky situations. The best part you'll get pretty hands on here since you'll create your own documentation using our templates. Are you ready? We'll get started in the next video. Let's get back to budgeting. You may already set a budget to help you stay on track with your monthly expenses in your personal life. Many people do because it allows them to feel prepared and in control of their finances. The same is true about project budgeting. Project budgeting is a little more complex than your personal budget. We'll help you understand and go a little deeper into what a project budget entails. A project budget is the estimated monetary resources needed to achieve the project's goals and objectives. When reviewing a project budget you need to consider all of the potential and projected costs needed to complete the project. You break the budget down by milestones which are important points within the project schedule that indicate progress and usually signifies the completion of a deliverable or phase of the project and list activities and tasks alongside their associated costs. This ensures that you calculate the correct expenses for a particular period of time. This is considered a forecast. A forecast for your project budget is a cost estimate or a prediction over a period of time. You'll frequently review your project budget and it will evolve throughout the project life cycle. These budgets usually contain items such as labor, operating costs and costs associated with obtaining necessary materials like hardware, software or equipment. The importance of a project budget focuses on more than just saving money. In project management a budget is considered a deliverable. It is a success metric. The project budget is a tool to communicate exactly what is needed and when it is needed with stakeholders. The budget will have a direct effect on the company's financial viability. So as you can probably tell by now it's an integral part of project management. Budget creation takes place in the initiation phase of your project. Keep in mind that the budget will be adjusted as needed throughout the life cycle of the project. Depending on your role in the company you won't always be the sole creator of the budget. Your ownership over things like budget and vendor relationship may vary depending on factors such as size of the company or support team or the team organizational chart. Although you may not always manage the budget from start to finish budget and milestones go hand in hand. So it's important for you to know the ins and outs of the budget throughout the project. As a project manager you may be tasked with obtaining approvals for spending. Most companies have a signing or spending policy. This usually outlines who has the authority to commit resources or incur costs or other obligations on behalf of the company. This is important because you won't be able to continue with some of your deliverables or action items if you don't know how much certain activities will cost and whether you have the necessary funds available. It wouldn't make any sense to rent a property without checking on the rental costs first, right? That's especially true if the rental price is higher than your budget. The same thinking is applicable for your project budgeting. The budgeting process usually happens in conjunction with the scheduling process because the steps of the scheduling process are highly dependent on the costs. The project manager will collaborate with people on the project to create their estimations. For the most part after the cost estimating process has been completed it's common for the project sponsor or another key stakeholder to review and approve estimation costs and if necessary adjust and reallocate funds for the project. This could mean that either the CEO or the COO are the ones giving the okay or the final signoff. For example in our office green project the director of product has signoff approval. As we mentioned before the project manager will most likely need some kind of signoff from the finance department. This may vary from company to company so just make sure you're aware of your company's processes. Project budgeting is never a one-size-fits-all operation. As the project manager you'll have to prioritize where you allocate funds within the project to ensure maximum output. Ultimately most projects are created to improve workforce productivity increase revenue or attempt to save costs within an organization. Budgeting is one of the most important aspects of project management and when you start to stay on budget is one of the trickiest tasks. It's important not to go over budget and cost the company extra money and it's equally important not to be under budget either since that might affect the company's budget for the next year. When it comes to high-profile businesses such as publicly traded companies like Google or public sector organizations such as your local education department they may have a requirement to report on their financial performance going too far over or under budget will change the way the company budgets for the next year potentially leaving you with less money to work with in the future. In other words a project manager must show the requested amount of money was used in order to secure enough budget for future projects. For smaller businesses there may be a tighter budget in which case it's especially critical to be careful about spending too much money on a project than initially allocated. It's really helpful to your overall success as a project manager to understand budgeting. So in the next video we're going to learn the specific ins and outs of what's included in a budget. See you soon. Now that you have an understanding of what a budget is let's discuss some specific components in a budget. There are so many things to factor into project budgeting. Unfortunately it's not quite as simple as a company saying we have $5,000 so that's our budget. When you go to the grocery store in the same way that you don't determine how much apples will cost businesses can't just decide that they want to spend $200 on a project if the market rate for a project of the same caliber is $2,000. Instead project managers must account for understanding stakeholder needs. Budgeting for surplus expenses, maintaining adaptability and reviewing and re-forecasting throughout the entire project. And these are only some examples of what you'll need to take into account. Let's imagine some of these factors in our office green project. In terms of understanding stakeholder needs it's important to know exactly what stakeholders expect from this project in order to deliver. As a company the ultimate goal is typically to make a profit and to save money and time. So the project sponsor the director of product in this case needs the project to come in at a certain cost in order to make profit. As the project manager you'll also need to budget for surprise expenses. Let's say several planters arrived from the vendor broken and cracked. Maybe the planters cracked during delivery process and it isn't the vendor's fault. In that case you'll have to order some additional planters to fulfill orders and that may be an added cost. As your project continues along you'll have to review your budget and sometimes re-forecast which means creating a separate revised budget based on how your project is tracking. Keeping on top of the budget will help you stay organized and re-forecasting is a way to recalibrate the budget if necessary. As the project manager office screen you might find that you need to shift costs to different resources and categories within your project budget. Maybe you initially overestimated the cost of plants from the vendor and underestimated the costs of marketing your new launch. So you can reallocate these dollars as necessary. That's a great example of how to review and re-forecast. There are several factors to consider when creating a budget including resource cost rates, reserve analysis, contingency budget and cost of quality. You'll need to determine resource cost rates. Resource cost rates are exactly what they sound like the cost of a resource. Some examples of resources are labor, tools, equipment, materials and software. So you'll want to ask yourself how much will each of these resources cost the company? Sometimes a project can be derailed because the project manager didn't adequately include funds for reserves or buffers. Performing a reserve analysis will help you account for any buffer funds you may need. A reserve analysis is a method to check for remaining project resources. In performing a reserve analysis you'll review all potential risks to your project and determine if you need to add buffer funds. These funds are necessary because new costs that you didn't originally foresee will arise. This is also known as contingency budget. Contingency budget in the context of project management is money that is included to cover potentially unforeseen events that aren't accounted for in a cost estimate. The purpose is to compensate for the uncertainty that occurs in cost and time estimates as well as unpredictable risk exposure. The cost of quality refers to all of the costs that are incurred to prevent issues with products processes or tasks. The cost of quality includes prevention costs appraisal costs internal failure costs and external failure costs. Once you've applied these factors resource cost rates reserve analysis contingency budget and the cost of quality into your budget you can estimate what your project might cost. Remember your budget will most likely change. Starting with an initial estimate is one way to ensure that you are at least on track and it's okay if your budget does change that's why we review and re-forecast. Hopefully you're starting to notice the framework for creating a budget. In the next lesson we'll begin to piece a budget together. Let's put all of your notes and newly acquired knowledge to use. See you soon. Now that we've learned about budgeting let's find out how it all works together. By now we know that project budgets help to control costs throughout the duration of the project. They help project managers establish the main objectives of their project and keep them within a reasonable framework to ensure that project makes financial sense for the company. So what's the best way to start making a project budget? You'll find that as you get further along in the process there are various resources and tactics that you can use to make sure you aren't overestimating or underestimating. You'll use techniques like researching historical data, leveraging experts, the bottom up approach, confirming accuracy and setting your baseline. For starters you can always review past projects that are similar to yours to get an idea of what your project could entail. We'll refer to that as referring to historical data. This way you can find out what past project managers did right and wrong. The more experienced you become as a project manager the more historical data you'll have to draw upon and the better your estimations will be. In a similar vein you can leverage experts in the field. To leverage something means to use it to its maximum advantage. So leveraging experts means gathering their insights to do something more effectively. Reaching out to colleagues who worked on a similar project in the past will be a great resource for you as an entry level project manager. If you're asking someone outside of your company for advice be sure to avoid sharing any confidential company information with them. Another approach to take is the bottom up approach. This means thinking about all the parts of a project from the beginning to the end. Including making a list of every material, resource, contract worker, or anything that comes with an associated cost and adding all of that together. You should also ask the vendors your thinking of working with for quotes so you can get a rough estimate of how much their work will cost. After you've created your budget with these resources you'll want to double check everything to confirm accuracy. Of course the work doesn't stop once you've created the budget. Next you'll have to set the baseline. Your baseline is the dollar amount that you'll use to measure against to find out if you're on track or not and to measure the success of your project. Once you've set your baseline you'll have to revisit that number and adjust it to match where the project is currently. Making adjustments in real time is something you have to do a lot as a project manager. The size of the project and company will determine how often you should reexamine and update the budget. Creating a thorough budget is important to the success of your project. With Project Plant Pals we suggest breaking the project down into tasks. That's the bottom up approach. From there we estimate the cost of each item add those estimates together add contingency and tax and seek overall approval on our budget from our key stakeholders. Since we're creating a new service we'll need to hire designers and developers to build out the website and develop the app for our customers. Once these tasks are laid out you'll have to negotiate employee allocations contractor rates and shop around for vendors and delivery services. This will help you assign cost estimates to each task. Now that the tasks have been broken down and assigned you'll need to account for material costs. Do your team members and stakeholders need equipment? Maybe an employee with a disability requires modifications to accommodate or enhance their workplace. Maybe some remote workers need the hardware and accessories necessary to work from home. This is where you'll include everything from computers to software related to the launch. Will you need storage space for miscellaneous plants or supplies? Miscellaneous is a term that we use to represent additional items that are not included in any of the other areas. Usually they are minor items or items where there are only one or two of them and that they are not a major budget line. Be sure to add these items to your expenses. You'll also need a few more line items. Start with the fixed cost that won't change over the course of the project. Let's say you're paying to advertise the web developer role to a job board. It may cost you about $50 to post that job description. That's an example of a fixed one-time cost. Next, you'll need a line item for things like travel expenses and meals. And finally, we'll want to account for buffers and reserves. You'll need to factor in unexpected costs that may come up later on. Be sure to leave yourself with some buffer room. We've chosen to account for 5% of the overall project budget as our buffer. This is a standard practice and depending upon how much detail you know about the project already, you can raise or lower your percentage for reserves. The client needs to be aware of this buffer in case spending starts to become excessive. In which case, you need to problem-solve with the client and agree to adjust the scope. You'll want to include a planned cost versus actual cost column 2. This way, you can keep track of your cost every step of the way. We'll provide you with concrete budget templates in the readings associated with this section. So you can fully immerse yourself in the process. Remember, every project will have an estimated cost and a final cost. Your goal is to get your estimated cost as close to the final cost as possible. You may have to recalibrate your estimations during the project. That's when the estimated cost to complete the project comes in. The final cost of your project differs from the forecasted or estimated cost if you weren't exactly on target with your budget. Remember, while your goal is to get as close to the original estimate as possible, that won't always be the case. Each time you're placed on a new project, it will be helpful to look back on the final costs of previous projects and see how close you came to your goal. Now you know the best way to create a project budget. Up next, we're going to talk about maintaining a budget. See you there. Now that you have an idea of how to create a budget, we're going to discuss how you'll manage that budget and explore some challenges that you might face like being under or over budget. As mentioned previously, you'll want to check in on your budget regularly. But, what exactly does that mean? What are you checking for? How can you tell if you're staying within your budget or not? Monitoring the budget is crucial for a project manager to enforce accountability in terms of spending. By monitoring your budget regularly, you'll be able to tell if the plans you set into action are actually being implemented on both a financial and operational level. As you may recall from previous video, a milestone is an important point within the project schedule that indicates progress and usually signifies the completion of a deliverable or phase of the project. Milestones are a metric for tracking progress in the project. Milestones are a great opportunity to re-review the budget to identify if anything needs to be reset or revisited throughout the project. That said, milestones can act as a checkpoint for budget management and payment. You may have agreed in your contract that you get paid at certain milestones rather than at the end of the project. Fixed contracts are usually paid for when certain milestones are reached, whereas time and materials contracts are usually paid for monthly based on the hours worked and other fees associated with the work like travel and meals. As you monitor your budget, you'll want to be on top of cost control. Cost control is a practice where a project manager identifies factors that might impact their budget and then creates effective actions to minimize variances. Think of it this way. It's proactive budget management. It is much better to be proactive with your budget than to be reactive with your budget. If you are reacting instead of anticipating, then you may already have some kind of problem with the budget. In order to control costs, you should establish a sign-off plan and inform the appropriate stakeholders of any changes that occur. You'll have to ask yourself which stakeholders or sponsor will be approving the contractor or vendor time sheets. What about invoices? You'll also need to make sure any changes within the project budget are agreed upon. For example, you shouldn't approve a new cost or item if it hasn't been agreed upon or if it isn't within the scope. And you shouldn't be spending money if it's not pre-approved by your stakeholder or project sponsor. It is also important to make sure there's good business case before bringing it to the stakeholder. You'll also need to manage changes as they're made. This involves updating forecasts or estimates and tracking everything. You never want to be surprised by budget changes and you don't want to have to keep asking stakeholders for more money. You can prevent that by revisiting these numbers on a regular basis. You'll also want to accept that budget misses will happen. It's your job to bring the expected cost overruns within acceptable limits. Before the project starts, collaborate with the project sponsors and key stakeholders to determine an acceptable limit. Is it 1%? 10%? You'll decide together. In a previous video, we talked briefly about what happens when a project goes over or under budget. Having a project go over budget may mean that the company will have less funds for other areas within the business. So, let's dig a little deeper into the effects on a company when a project goes under budget. Even though it seems like going under budget would be a project manager's dream, it actually isn't. If you go under budget, it's an indicator of less than satisfactory project management. Going under budget indicates that you may not have done a good job at initially estimating. Going under budget could also indicate that you could have spent more money on the project. Meaning that you could have possibly had extra resources or better quality output. And it may mean that the budget for future projects will be slashed. The company may figure that since you did this project under budget, you'll be able to do future projects under budget too. So, that's not a totally desirable situation to be in either. The best option is to adequately account for, adapt, and manage your budget with that risk in mind. Later on, we'll cover other strategies more in depth that you could use to save the company money and time. You'll also learn the ins and outs of identifying and managing risks a little later on in the course. In the next lesson, we'll learn about procurement. See you in a bit. In the past, we've compared project management to starting a new hobby. Let's say you're trying to take up painting. In order to paint, you'll need to purchase or in other words, procure paint supplies and materials. So, first, you ask yourself, what supplies will you need? What kind of paint will you start with? Do you want to try oil paint, watercolour or acrylic? Will you paint on canvas, wood or paper? You need to research these choices before you procure your materials. Once your research is done, you can start procuring materials, scheduling courses, watching tutorials and voila! You're on your way to becoming the next Freda Callot. So, as you may have guessed by now, procurement means obtaining all of the materials, services and supplies required to complete the project. You'll need to procure vendors as well. Vendors are individuals or businesses who provide essential goods and services. Therefore, think of vendor management as procurement for individuals or businesses. Vendor management covers the activities included in researching and sourcing vendors. Instead of materials, vendor management is often a matter of sourcing for a specific service or talent and then managing that relationship. Sourcing talent includes researching and obtaining estimated costs from different partner companies you may use on a project. You'll typically use vendors when they provide specialized skills that aren't available within your company. Vendor management entails sourcing vendors, getting quotes for their work, deciphering which vendors will best fulfill your needs, negotiating their contracts, setting deadlines for them, evaluating performance and ensuring payments are made. It also entails familiarizing yourself with regulations like the Americans with Disabilities Act if you're working in the US, for example. And if you're somewhere else, being aware of similar regulations in that country, keep in mind that not every project will require vendors or contractors and so every project won't require vendor management. Let's revisit the example of contract workers in the context of Project Plant Pals at Office Green. Like many companies, Office Green doesn't have a copywriting department. So for the launch of Project Plant Pals, you'll need to use external resources to supply a contracted copywriter. This person is a necessary team member on the project because Office Green doesn't have copywriters or internal employee resources required to finish this task. This contractor or team of contractors will draft copy for the website for a slated amount of time and then their work on this particular project will be complete. Awesome. Now that you know about procurement in the next video, we'll discuss the different phases of the procurement process and how procurement differs depending on your approach to project management. See you then. While not every single project will require procurement, it's important to be prepared for it if and when procurement does come up. So, how do you get started? There are typically five steps that make up the procurement process. Let's go over them. First is initiating, which is the planning process of defining what help you may need outside of your current resources to hit the project goals. In this step, you'll also make a case for getting extra resources via the procurement process. Second is selecting, which entails deciding what supplies you need and which vendors you'll go through. The third step is contract writing, which is where the contracts are developed, reviewed, and signed. The fourth step is control, which is when you make payments, set up logistics and requirements to maintain quality and ensure the service agreement is being met. The fifth and final step is completing, which is where you'll measure the success of the procurement. That's a quick overview of the procurement process. This high-level cycle of procurement will make more sense as we continue on through this course. One thing to note is the procurement process can seem a little different depending on the project management methodology. There are differences in procurement in the context of agile versus traditional. Agile procurement management is often more collaborative with both the project team and the end supplier than traditional approaches. There is a heavy emphasis on the relationship between these parties. The whole project team plays a larger role in identifying what needs to be procured. Rather than featuring contracts that are based on fixed deliverables, agile procurement management tends to have a living contract that can be adapted based on the evaluation of the project. If you think of the word agility, which means to move easily and quickly, you'll be able to remember that agile procurement can change more easily than traditional procurement methods. In this process, the team reviews the project or deliverables on a reoccurring basis and consistently addresses feedback. This way of working is important to communicate to your suppliers so they understand this style of working and agree to maintain flexibility. Again, it is so important to have a positive relationship with the procurement supplier. This is critical since the contract may need to be renegotiated at multiple points during the project. On the other hand, traditional procurement management tends to focus on standard contracts with clear terms and deliverables. When it comes to traditional approaches, the project manager may be responsible for end-to-end procurement instead of the entire team providing input. The contracts may feature lengthy and extensive documentation that include fixed requirements and comprehensive detail of the services and deliverables. While this may appear more rigid, the benefit is you've outlined clearer work streams and deadlines. This way, you're much more protected from unforeseen circumstances and may not have to pay for unpredictable changes. In traditional approaches, the negotiation process can be a little bit trickier. You won't necessarily have the room to renegotiate contracts if something changes, so you may have to start the whole process over again. That's why being as detailed as possible and spending more time in the negotiation phase is incredibly important in a more traditional project management approach. As you may have guessed, procurement can become pretty complex, but there are some official documents that can help guide you through the procurement process. In the next video, you'll learn more about those documents and processes. See you there. There are a few important documents that help a project manager navigate through each phase of procurement. For instance, in the initiating phase, a project manager will create a non-disclosure agreement, otherwise known as an NDA. In a selecting phase, a project manager creates a request for a proposal or an RFP. In the contracting phase, a statement of work or an SOW is created. Now let's learn more about these acronyms and documents. The first important document is a non-disclosure agreement, also known as an NDA. NDAs are standard within a lot of companies and it's best practice to ask external contract workers to sign an NDA. The purpose of an NDA is to keep confidential information within the organization. So for instance, if a company is using some kind of proprietary technology on a project or preparing for a sensitive product launch, they want to ensure that any conversations or information surrounding that technology doesn't leak out to competitors or to the public before the company is ready to launch. For example, in Project Plant Pals, vendors might be required to sign an NDA because the project is new to market and hasn't been made public yet. Then we have a request for a proposal or an RFP, a document that outlines the details and requirements of an organization's project to be passed on to vendors. RFPs are used to solicit bids from vendors so that you can then select which vendor might be the best for your project. A RFP is widely used within different departments in a company and across various industries. An RFP typically includes an overview of the project, the desired outcomes and goals, budget, deadlines, milestones and contact information so each vendor can get back to you with a detailed proposal of how they plan to tackle the job. When creating an RFP, make sure to add the following headers to your document. The overview. Treat this section like a general summary. What is the purpose of this project? What problems will it solve? What new doors will open for the company? Your goals. What are some measurable results you can aim to achieve throughout the process? Next is the scope of work. What are the specifics of the project? How are you going to achieve those goals and make sure the project launches successfully? Then include milestones. Make sure to highlight the key milestones your project will include. Lastly, include submission requirements like please submit the RFP as a presentation and include three prototypes as well as the questions you'd like the vendor to answer as part of the process. This helps you properly assess potential vendors. For instance, you might want to know what issues a contractor sees upfront or how the costs will break down. After the RFP is sent out, various vendors will review it and if they feel they can fulfill your project's needs, they'll provide a proposal. For example, you may create an RFP for project plant powers to source plant providers. In this case, you'll want to sent out RFPs to all possible plant providers to ensure that you're getting the best price, quality and overall value. You may hear RFP being used as a verb. As in, has this been RFP yet? That's really a way of asking if an RFP has been sent out to vendors yet. It's important to note that both the NDA and the RFP are fixed and remain the same throughout the process. This means that there's not a lot of room for customization and it won't be changed once it's submitted. Lastly, there's a third important document called a statement of work or an SOW. An SOW is sent after the vendor is selected and involves as the project goes on. We'll continue discussing these concepts and further explore the importance of a statement of work in the next video. I'll see you there. Let's continue learning about the necessary documents required for a successful project. After you've sent a request for a proposal to clients and you've selected the vendor, client or contractor you want to work with, you'll also send them an SOW or a statement of work. A statement of work is a document that clearly lays out the products and services a vendor or contractor will provide for the organization. An SOW also provides a description of the contractor's needs and requirements to properly perform the agreed upon services. Although the SOW covers the customer's needs, it's equally as important to include the organization's needs and the vendor's needs too. It's critical that all parties involved understand what is expected from each of them in order to deliver the best possible products or services. The project manager is tasked with developing the SOW but often asks for input from subject matter experts or SMEs for technical expertise that the project manager may not have. Your organization's legal advisors will review this document with you and may even be crafting it alongside you. Let's discuss how to create an SOW in the example of project plant powers. You'll want to start by including page headers with your company name, project and creation date on them. At the top of the page, make sure to include important stakeholders like yourself as the project manager and the name of the sponsor which in this case is the director of product. Next, you'll construct a table for revisions. The SOW will likely go through a few rounds of revisions because several stakeholders may review it and suggest changes. You'll detail those changes in this box here. Next, you'll create a purpose section where you'll go into detail about exactly what the desired outcomes are. Make sure to include a section regarding your target audience and make sure it's inclusive of everyone. For instance, in this case, the purpose of the project is to launch a new service that provides desk plants to offices and commercial businesses. If you have more specific goals, you can list them here too. Next is the scope section where you'll include what the service entails. You may write that the service includes providing customers with small, low-maintenance plants that they can place on their desks. Customers can order plants online or from a print catalog. Office Green will ship the plants to the customer's work address. The types of plants in scope include 6-inch leafy ferns, small cacti, and 5-inch bonsai trees. Keeping this vendor in mind, some major activities may be storing the plants in a warehouse, maintaining the health of the plants by providing them with water and light, sourcing the vases and ensuring that the vases are in near-perfect condition upon delivery. You'll also want to mention what's out of scope or, in other words, what the project doesn't include. This will eliminate any potential room for confusion and help set expectations with the vendor. For instance, you may write that the project doesn't include annual reporting or custom plant orders that are not mentioned in the scope. This helps draw clear lines and sets the right expectations with the vendor. For deliverables, you'll want a concise statement about what your project will deliver. For example, your Office Green project deliverables could include the vendor providing maintenance guides on how to take care of the plants or that the vendor will be responsible for developing a support page on Office Green's website to address any questions or concerns. Since milestones are such an integral part of tracking progress, budget and scope, they'll need to be included here too. Examples of milestones in project plant powers could be to fulfill the first quarter of plant orders delivered to all of the top customers, launch customer satisfaction surveys, collect and report on any insights from customer feedback. You'll want to make it really clear on how many hours are needed for the completion of this project here. And you will want to designate a particular date that you need their services performed by here. At the bottom, you'll typically add terms and conditions and any other disclaimers. It's good to have a disclaimer stating that revisions may take place as the project goes on. This is important to include, just in case the scope changes because of unforeseen issues. It's a good idea to add revisions into the disclaimer because as a project manager, it's best not to overpromise and underdeliver. You always want to be clear that you intend to stick to the schedule unless circumstances outside of your control intervene. Another part of your SOW is payment terms. This outlines when your suppliers need to be paid. Ensuring that suppliers are paid on time will promote strong relationships. Generally, good procurement practice would be to pay your vendors and contractors upon delivery of goods and service, not before, unless a circumstantial agreement has been made. For instance, if Office Green's plant provider requested to be paid when each milestone was completed instead of after the entire project is finished. Great job. Now you know more about SOWs. Next up, we'll discuss the importance of partnering with your legal team during the procurement process. See you there. Now that you have a better understanding about NDAs, RFPs and SOWs, let's discuss how you can get support from other departments and team members as procurement goes forward. The procurement process doesn't end after you've selected vendors and signed contracts. You'll use performance trackers and meetings like quarterly business reviews to track and evaluate overall performance to ensure that both parties are living up to their initial agreement. And when there are contracts and paperwork with terminology that you may not be familiar with, you'll enlist the help of a legal team. Depending on the company's size, the legal situation may vary. Some companies, usually well-established and larger businesses, will have a legal team. Some businesses may outsource their legal team. Some startups or smaller companies may not have a legal team, but they might reach out to legal advisors as needed. Again, this all depends on the company where you work. Laws surrounding manufacturing products and consumerism will vary from country to country, but there will nearly always be laws in place that you'll need to follow around topics like fair and ethical trade. Most companies have a mission or value statement. Sometimes, a team of people in the Ethics and Compliance departments are tasks we're ensuring that the day-to-day operations are adhering to their value statement and governmental policies. These team members will also be tasked with duties like working to prevent discrimination and making sure that the company is practicing adequate corporate social responsibility. Also, as a project manager, you'll need to ensure that the various stakeholders who are representing the business are adhering to these policies and processes too. You'll all need to be aware of any pertinent meetings regarding legal or compliance issues and you, as a project manager, will have to remind the team about when those meetings are being held. Looping in the appropriate stakeholders is especially critical if there's some kind of necessary approval since it'll have an impact on the project one way or another. Like most projects, for project plant pals, looping in legal and compliance for review and approvals is really important. For instance, let's say some of the offices where you're delivering plants are pet friendly. In your contract with the supplier, you've specified that you want to offer non-toxic plants only. Unfortunately, the supplier provided a plant with leaves that are harmful to animals. Office green could potentially be liable and in legal trouble because this critical detail was missed. Pretty crucial consideration, right? So, regardless of your future company's legal team or advisory, having contracts reviewed in some capacity make good business sense and should be a priority for you as a project manager. Now you're on your way to becoming your own lawyer. Only kidding. But, you hopefully have a better grasp of the importance of your legal team and having them review your contracts. Next up, we'll discuss the importance of checking in with your vendors and we'll find out what compliance has to do with the procurement process. I'll see you soon. Welcome back. We've learned a bit about the ins and outs of contracting with vendors. So let's learn more about the importance of ethics when partnering with vendors. Failing to be mindful when choosing vendors can lead to significant consequences. If you've seen a company in the news that's been entangled in a scandal, that usually means that the team probably should have done more research in the procurement process. So, what does that entail? There's a lot that can be done to ensure that businesses are operating in an ethical way. Project managers have a big job when deciphering whether or not every aspect of their project is sourced ethically. It helps if the project manager thoroughly oversees the project to make sure the safety, economic and environmental ethical risks are mitigated. In other words, doing a lot of research, monitoring and evaluating throughout the project is a project manager's job. There are a couple of steps to safeguard ethical procurement. The first is knowing your business's legal requirements. You'll want to have a deep understanding of what is required of you legally as a project manager for your business. You can also seek out the Code of Ethics for your profession, which in this case is for project managers. For instance, the Project Management Institute, also known as PMI, has a Code of Ethics that you can access as a member or credential holder. This will help you understand some parameters for how to assess ethical versus unethical procurement. According to the PMI's Code of Ethics, honesty, responsibility, respect and fairness are the values that drive ethical conduct for the project management profession. So, when you become a project manager, if you aren't totally sure if something is ethical, first, try to use your best judgment based on what you believe those words mean and continue to do the required research. If you still aren't sure, don't hesitate to ask a subject matter expert such as someone from the legal team. As a starting point, some unethical issues or risks you may run into may include bribery or corruption. Some regulations in other countries may not be the same as regulations in your country. So, for example, you'll want to make sure laborers involved in production are treated fairly, working in good conditions and are compensated adequately for their work. It is a good idea to consult your legal team to ensure that you don't run into these situations and to be aware of the regulations surrounding your processes. You'll also want to be aware of possible issues with sole supplier sourcing. In some scenarios, you may need to perform non-competitive procurement, which is when a company restricts the bidding process to one supplier. This may be common for companies who are more cautious about exposing trade secrets. But, regardless of your reasoning, you'll need to be able to justify exactly why you are choosing to restrict bidding to one supplier. There's also interaction with state-owned entities. You'll want to be vigilant when dealing with government agencies and officials. Government agencies may have tighter restrictions and regulations in regard to sourcing, and you don't want to do anything unethical without even knowing it. A project manager monitors the project's ethics throughout the whole process. In the initiating phase, you'll need to decide whether the project is ethical in the first place. Does it meet your business's code of ethics? Does the project meet environmental ethics laid out by governmental agencies? Is the labour going to be ethically sourced? You'll need to review government regulations and policies, assess potential risks, and put together a diverse team that you trust to be ethical. Before the contracts are signed, you'll want to figure out whether the suppliers you're thinking of hiring are ethical. You'll want to make sure that you're procuring them in an ethical way and are paying them a fair rate. And you'll also want to completely understand the supply chain if there is one. After the contracts have been signed by your contractors, make sure to carry out your assurance duties. This may include things like auditing each task and cost, executing quality control, or even approving invoices. During the production of your service or product, focus on the day-to-day relationships with vendors to make sure they're aware of and meeting your deliverables and keeping you informed of any potential roadblocks. After you've done all the research that you possibly can on whether your project is ethical, remember to trust yourself. If something feels wrong, it probably is. As you