Project
ManagementCornell Certificate Program

Successful projects begin with a solid plan. In this course, you'll learn the foundational principles, frameworks, and terminology that effective project managers use to initiate, plan, and manage projects across industries.

Professor Linda Nozick, Director of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Cornell, introduces practical tools for defining project scope, breaking complex work into manageable tasks, developing project schedules, and establishing realistic timelines and resource plans. Through hands-on exercises, you'll build the skills needed to organize, track, and manage projects with greater confidence.

Whether you're new to project management or preparing for future PMP® certification, this course provides a strong foundation in the concepts and practices that support successful project delivery.

Note: This course uses Microsoft Excel (with the free Solver add-in) for selected exercises. No specialized project management software is required.

Research shows that a high percentage of projects take significantly longer than expected and cost more than anticipated. Moreover, if you ask people for an estimate of how long a task will take them to complete, their estimate will usually be overly optimistic.

Sometimes, if you bring in extra people to help with a task, that actually slows down progress instead of accelerating it. Why is this so? And what can you do about it? In this course, from Linda K. Nozick, Director and Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Cornell, you will examine these questions. Students will identify strategies to integrate resource availability constraints into project planning, scheduling, and control.

This course is designed for project managers who seek better practical results for aligning available resources with tasks and bringing activities to completion on time. Students will examine compression strategies for bringing a project that's running late back on track and will explore how to handle common types of project creep, such as handling customer requests that require extra time, and working with team members who decide independently to invest extra effort in a task.

This course combines a focus on formal project management mechanisms with an emphasis on the human element: what can project managers do to resolve issues brought about in the normal course of working with customers, team members, and stakeholders?

You are required to have completed the following course or have equivalent experience before taking this course:

• Organizing the Project and Its Components

Risk management is a key function in project management. Project managers should be able to apply a variety of risk-management tools in their work, including performing risk identification, quantification, response, monitoring, and control.

In this course from Professor and Director of Civil and Environmental Engineering Linda K. Nozick, you will examine the nature and types of project risk and learn to apply specific mitigation strategies.

You'll have an opportunity to analyze a past project you've worked on and assess what the risks might have been and why. Then you'll analyze the outcomes: Did the known risks come to fruition? What were the leading indicators? What could they have done for contingency planning at the beginning? By asking these questions, you'll then be able to perform several calculations to compute the probability that a project will finish on time.

You are required to have completed the following courses or have equivalent experience before taking this course:

• Organizing the Project and Its Components
• Planning and Managing Resources

Successful project managers don't wait until a project is complete to evaluate performance—they monitor progress throughout the project lifecycle to identify issues early and make informed decisions. Earned Value Management (EVM) is a proven framework for measuring project performance, forecasting outcomes, and keeping projects on track.

In this course, Professor Linda Nozick, Director of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Cornell, introduces the principles and practical application of EVM. You'll learn how to measure project performance against scope, schedule, and budget, interpret key performance metrics, forecast project outcomes, and determine when corrective action is needed to improve project success.

Through practical examples and exercises, you'll build the confidence to use EVM as a decision-making tool that supports stronger project controls and more effective communication with project stakeholders.

Students will be most successful if they have a foundational understanding of project planning concepts, including project schedules, budgets, work breakdown structures, and project networks.

You are required to have completed the following courses or have equivalent experience before taking this course:

• Organizing the Project and Its Components
• Planning and Managing Resources
• Assessing, Managing, and Mitigating Project Risk

In traditional project management, we tend to make assumptions: the customer knows precisely what they want, or the team's workflow and tasks will go according to plan and in sequence.

Practically speaking, this is rarely the case. Sometimes the customer doesn't know what they need until they see an early iteration of your team's work and can provide feedback. Because of this, work is usually done incrementally. We must build flexibility, even agility, into the model in order to succeed.

This course is designed for project managers who want to get better practical results with adaptive approaches to projects. Students in this course will be most successful if they have a foundational understanding of traditional project management tools and processes including project networks, budgets and schedules.

You are required to have completed the following courses or have equivalent experience before taking this course:

• Organizing the Project and Its Components
• Planning and Managing Resources
• Assessing, Managing, and Mitigating Project Risk
• Using Earned Value Management for Project Managers