Hi there. Welcome to Applying Project Management in the Real World. If you've joined us for this program's previous courses, then you've developed a solid foundation of project management knowledge and skills. Those courses covered how a project progresses through the initiation, planning, execution, and closing stages. They also taught how to manage projects using different methodologies and approaches, like Agile and Scrum. If you haven't completed the previous courses, we recommend checking them out before starting this course to ensure that you're ready to work through all of the upcoming activities. As you progress through this course, you'll create project documents based on an imagined scenario. You'll learn details through conversations, emails, and other materials, just as you would in a real-world scenario. By the end of this course, you'll have developed a portfolio of project management documents that will demonstrate your ability to manage stakeholders and teams, organize plans, and communicate project details. All of this can be valuable when applying for jobs or working on projects in your current line of work. Before we go any further, I want to take a few minutes to introduce myself. My name is Dan, and I'm a Program Manager here at Google, and I'll be your instructor for this course. At Google, I work on a team that promotes responsible practices in designing, building, and applying artificial intelligence—also known as AI—and machine learning. I support teams in adopting tools and techniques they can use to evaluate their machine learning models and determine whether they are performing equitably. I love this role because I get to support teams in building products that work for our users. Before my current role, I worked on the Google AI Residency Program team. This is a rotational program for people who are interested in doing AI research but who come from nontraditional backgrounds. This work was compelling to me because I personally didn't have any experience with AI or machine learning before coming to Google. This just goes to show that if you have strong project management skills, you often don't need to be a subject matter expert in a given domain to work in that field. Prior to my time at Google, I worked outside of tech—first as a math teacher, and then as a sponsorship coordinator for a professional soccer team. Throughout my career, I've always been passionate about education, whether that's teaching students in the classroom or teaching developers how to ethically implement AI systems, so I'm pretty excited about leading you through this course. It should be a lot of fun. Now let's get right into the scenario that will apply to all of the activities in this course. In this imagined scenario, a small restaurant chain called Sauce and Spoon wants to meet their annual growth and expansion goals. As one way to meet these goals, they have decided to launch a pilot project to test out the impact of installing new tabletop menu tablets. The new menu tablets will allow the restaurant to serve more guests in less time and will provide valuable data that will help Sauce and Spoon meet its business goals. The company just hired Peta as their first in-house project manager to oversee the tablet rollout at two of the restaurant chain's five locations. Throughout the course, you'll observe Peta as she guides her team through planning and executing the project deliverables. Although she has five years of project management experience, Peta hasn't managed a restaurant project before. You'll get to follow the project through its life cycle as Peta learns about the restaurant industry, determines the goals of the project, negotiates with stakeholders, and much more. Along the way, you'll record details of the project to use in course activities. You'll also evaluate Peta's project management skills as she works to complete this project in scope, on time, and within budget. You'll learn what works and what doesn't, and how to problem solve your way through a project. As you progress through the course, we'll review and practice key project management concepts, which include analyzing materials to identify project requirements, solve problems, and manage stakeholders, applying important negotiation techniques and influencing skills, listening with empathy when working with a team, and practicing your stakeholder communication skills. We'll explore these concepts in more depth, and I'll explain how each concept applies to the Sauce & Spoon project. Each activity will contain guiding questions to help you create common project documents that you can speak to in a job interview and utilize throughout your career. As you work through these activities, you may want to take notes on some of the information you learn. Feel free to use whichever tool you prefer, whether that's the Coursera note-taking system or another method. In the upcoming videos, I'll explain the project in more detail and share project management best practices so that you can complete the associated course activities. Are you ready? Let's go.
