The Project Management Professional (PMP) certification establishes a common language among project managers and helps each of you work within a common framework. Once you have the PMP, you need to consider the best way to apply the processes, tools, and techniques you’ve developed to your projects. By sharing how you apply the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) framework and demonstrating your newly-acquired skills through your actions, you’ll build your own personal brand within your organization as someone who can deliver. You can build on each success enabling you to participate and lead on larger projects across your organization and allowing you to branch out into other programs in different business units. By demonstrating greater competency through managing more complex projects, you’ll also be able to compete for more senior positions.

The University of Tennessee breaks project management into logical and manageable chunks. The 24-hour Project Management Course is a practical review of project management techniques, tools, and practices. You’ll learn the hows, whys, and whens of projects and the best way to approach each scenario. As part of the course, you’ll be asked to work on take-home exercises to drive home key points from the in-class discussions. Some of the main areas we’ll cover include:

Course Framework & Project Leader Assessment

You’ll receive an introduction to the course syllabus, requirements, and deliverables and become acquainted with the terminology, 10 knowledge areas, relationships to other disciplines, and project management context and processes.

Skills and Abilities for Effective Leadership of Teams

We’ll enhance your project team leadership skills, define the work environment of project teams, develop a team charter, clearly define the roles and responsibilities of all team members, set team guidelines, and learn methods to promote teamwork and manage team dynamics.

Project Management: Initiating the Project and Planning Scope and Schedule

You’ll discover important techniques for deciding whether or not it is feasible to undertake a project, for planning project outcomes and schedules, for developing a project charter and a scope statement, and for organizing a plan and budget.

Project Management: Planning Resources, Communication, Quality and Risk Management

You’ll learn how to estimate the needs for personnel and other project resources—emphasizing the type, amount, and timing of resource needs—and how to plan for additional project support activities.

Project Leader Communications Expertise and Evaluating Team Performance

The purpose of this section is to strengthen your communication, change-management, conflict resolution, and team evaluation skills.

Implementing and Managing Projects

You’ll develop techniques and processes for starting and performing the actual project work and for working successfully in a matrix management environment.

Controlling Performance and Assessing Outcomes

You’ll learn how to monitor and control project activities in progress, how to bring a project to closure, and how to design and conduct a post-project review.

Problem Solving, Decision Making and Ethics

We’ll focus on developing ethical problem solving and decision making skills, ensuring you always keep ethics and best practices at the forefront of all your decisions.

Here is a testimonial from a recent PMP Certificate holder:

"The Project Management course gave me the structure I needed, and it also gave me the language I needed to be effective in my job. I've been able to draw an applicable example in my head from almost everything Tony taught. Tony is dynamic, fun, and very relatable. To me, it makes the learning so much easier." ~ Jessica Hatcher

If you’re planning to take the PMP exam, it’s required that you buy the current paperback edition of A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK Guide). The book is approximately $70 and can be purchased online at pmi.org, amazon.com, or barnesnoble.com.