Expert in project management
Course Goal
To form a professional level of project manager, able to independently lead IT projects from business idea to delivery, manage people, risks, budget, changes and uncertainty and make strong management decisions.
The program combines the principles of PMBOK® 8, modern Agile and hybrid approaches, IT project practice and 20 years of expertise of the course author - Maryna Melnyk.
This Course is Designed For
- IT Project Managers who are currently managing projects and want to systematize their expertise, strengthen managerial competencies, and advance to a Senior or Expert level.
- Experienced managers from adjacent domains — Product Managers, Scrum Masters, Business Analysts, Delivery Managers, Team Leads, and Operations Managers — looking to expand their scope of responsibility and master systematic project management.
- Leaders and managers responsible for executing complex initiatives, working with teams, budgets, risks, stakeholders, and business goals.
- IT professionals aiming to transition into Project Management who want not just the basics, but a comprehensive, professional IT project management framework.
- PMs working in Agile, Waterfall, or Hybrid environments who want to learn how to tailor their approach to each specific project rather than follow rigid templates.
- Project Managers striving to prepare for the next career level and sharpen their competencies in strategic thinking, leadership, decision-making, navigating ambiguity, and aligning with business needs.
Learning Format
- Course duration: 28 sessions × 14 weeks
- Homework after each lecture and personalized feedback from the trainer
- Access to video recordings and materials in Google Classroom
What you get after completing the online course:
Program
- Project lifecycle stages and Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC).
- The manager's role in a project (PM as a system leader), key project stakeholders, and effective collaboration with them.
- Industry standards.
- Business value and project deliverables
- Business Case and Vision Document
- Success criteria for project outcomes
- Project constraints and boundaries
- Systems thinking: aligning business goals, product, and project
- Software development models and methodologies
- Criteria for approach selection
- Project organizational structure
- Stakeholder Identification
- Stakeholder Analysis: power / interest / influence, expectations and interests
- Stakeholder Engagement
- Communication Strategy
- Status Reporting
- Expectations Management
- Difficult Conversations
- Negotiation
- Feedback
- Communicating with Business, Team, and Client
- Business, User, and Functional Requirements
- Requirements Documentation Formats
- Requirements Traceability
- Acceptance Criteria
- Product/Project Decomposition in Different Methodologies
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- WBS and Work Packages
- Epics and User Stories
- Requirements Dependencies
- Definition of "Ready"
- Estimation Culture and Methods
- Expert Judgment; analogous estimating; bottom-up estimating; three-point estimating
- Estimation Uncertainty
- Estimation Anti-Patterns
- Key project milestones
- Traditional planning dependencies and critical path
- Project schedule
- Buffers
- Planning in Agile and hybrid projects
- Delivery planning
- Roadmap
- Project budget
- Cost estimation
- CAPEX / OPEX; direct/indirect costs
- Forecasting and actual costs
- Financial reporting
- Positive and negative risks
- Risk identification
- Probability / impact
- Risk matrix
- Qualitative and quantitative assessment
- Risk response
- Risk owner
- Risk monitoring
- Scenario thinking
- Decision making under uncertainty
- Project system resilience
- Change requests
- Impact analysis
- Change control
- Impact on scope / cost / timeline
- Stakeholder alignment
- Process coordination
- Managing dependencies
- Execution control without micromanagement.
- Definition of quality
- Quality management
- Quality assurance
- Quality control
- Deliverable acceptance criteria
- Quality metrics
- KPI / OKR
- Process metrics
- Team metrics
- Project health dashboard
- Product metrics
- Business metrics
- Problem management
- Root cause analysis
- Crisis communication
- Recovery plan
- Lessons learned
- Final validation and acceptance
- Release readiness
- Handover
- Training
- Benefits realization
- Project team structure
- Roles and responsibilities
- RACI
- Competencies
- Distributed teams
- Cross-functional teams
- Team development
- Team agreements
- Continuous improvement
- Culture of accountability
- Leadership versus management
- Psychological safety
- Delegation
- Accountability
- Components of a project manager's resources
- Signs of project manager exhaustion
- Burnout prevention measures
- Ethical principles of a project manager
- Project infrastructure: people, processes, tools, and information
- Roles, responsibilities, and decision-making model
- Information environment and project documentation
- PM tools and AI for management
- Regular meetings
- Management reporting
- Decision-making rights
- Basics of IT product architecture and components
- Environments, releases, and CI/CD
- Technical debt, dependencies, and technical risks
- How a PM reads technical documentation and speaks the same language with the team
- Using AI to understand and control technical aspects of a project
- Final documentation, certifications, final audit
- Post mortem: how to analyze and record outcomes
- Lessons learned and knowledge transfer
- Transition to support and process management
The participant presents a comprehensive project management case study, which includes:
- Business case
- Stakeholder strategy
- Budget and schedule
- Risk register
- Communication plan
- Team structure
- Quality approach
- Metrics
- Implementation plan
- Project control
- Change management
FAQ
The course is designed for current project managers, heads of related areas and IT specialists who want to change their field. You will receive a complete set of tools for project management in IT and learn to apply them in practice, creating a real project for the final presentation.
The program includes an in-depth study of SDLC, popular development methodologies and frameworks. You'll learn how to plan timelines and budgets, manage risk, requirements, and software architecture, as well as effectively build a team, onboard new hires, and improve overall productivity.
Intensive training lasts 14 weeks and consists of 28 online lessons. After each lecture, you complete homework and receive feedback from the trainer. All videos and the complete database of materials (including checklists) will be stored in Google Classroom for another 3 months after the end of the course.
