PM Skills® PMSCP® Certification

Negotiation is a key element of any project management approach. Project leaders regularly negotiate with various stakeholders—clients, teams, management, and leaders of other organizational projects—to move their own project toward completion. In some cases, a project's success may depend on the project leader's ability to address competing interests through negotiation. Fortunately, anyone can develop strong negotiation skills through learning, practice, focus, and negotiations training.

This self-paced, fully online course will provide learners with the skills they'll need to successfully negotiate with internal and external project practitioners. It will help them establish their negotiation strategies and refine their techniques to successfully execute and complete projects.

Communication is a critical aspect of any successful project. Effective project teams communicate continuously, to share knowledge, clarify project objectives, and address issues. Project practitioners spend a large amount of their time engaged in interpersonal communication activities, ensuring that information is widely distributed and participants are kept up to date on all project objectives. But some project participants may not have the required expertise or ability to communicate effectively.

This self-paced, fully online course will help project leaders understand and coordinate verbal and written forms of communication within and between project teams. It will help focus and clarify communication techniques and allow clear, concise, and direct interactions among all project practitioners and stakeholders.

In recent years, views of leadership have changed. Today there is a greater understanding of the varieties of leadership in business, government, education, healthcare, and not-for-profit organizations, as well as in more personal areas like team leadership and family settings.

As a project leader, honing your leadership skills will allow you to successfully meet project objectives while motivating and engaging your team. Improving your leadership skills will enhance your standing as an asset to your organization while fostering team, project, and organizational evolution.

Because projects bring so many people together to work collaboratively, it's inevitable—conflict will happen at some point. But a properly structured conflict resolution process will not only address problems in a timely manner, it may actually spark creativity and innovation as a team finds a new pathway to complete its work.

This self-paced, fully online course will help project leaders recognize potential workplace conflicts early and intervene at the appropriate point so they can minimize disruptions. It introduces a robust infrastructure that can prevent stalemates and resentment from interfering with the team's cohesion and solidarity. And it helps guide team members through forms of self-management so they can begin to correctly organize and settle disputes on their own.

Effective project leaders rely on their project teams to complete work in a timely manner, but often, these teams need coaching and training that will encourage them to work together to achieve their objectives. The members of a project team could be talented individuals, but the team may need to be shaped into a unit that acts collaboratively to meet a project's goals.

This self-paced, fully online course will help learners enhance their team's ability to work cooperatively by clearly defining roles and responsibilities and inviting team members to play to each other's strengths. Learners will create, implement, and evaluate development programs that will help team members advance and improve and will learn to capitalize on team dynamic concepts to achieve success by better understanding team interactions.

Very few projects—even the simplest and smallest—are completed without having someone request a change of some form. Changes will happen—they can't be avoided—so it's important to prepare your team for any disruptions that may occur to ensure the project is not delayed or derailed.

This self-paced, fully online course will help you address and manage the impact of any changes your team may encounter. You will explore the types, forces, and factors for change, and you'll learn how to use change management initiatives and models to overcome resistance and foster engagement. You'll discover how you can best communicate about change, and you'll learn how to sustain the gains you make as you incorporate changes into your projects.

As a project leader, your project's stakeholders are some of your greatest assets. However, those assets are only valuable if you collaborate with and involve them on a regular basis. Customers, colleagues, team members, management, the community at large—they all have something to offer, but to capitalize on these resources, you'll need effective interaction and continuous stakeholder engagement to uncover their true worth.

This self-paced, fully online course will help you successfully collaborate with your stakeholders to improve your chances for project success. You'll learn to identify, analyze, manage, and encourage your stakeholder groups to be an integral part of your project's outcomes. And you'll see how meaningful interaction and engagement can strengthen cooperative efforts and enhance results to exceed expectations and requirements.

At the beginning of a project, your responsibilities as a project leader will largely revolve around designing a plan that aligns with your organization's corporate strategy while providing fully functional deliverables that meet your stakeholders' needs. But project planning is not a one-time event: it occurs throughout a project's life cycle, so you need to remain prepared to make changes and have contingency plans in place to address unexpected situations.

This self-paced, fully online course will introduce you to the tools, techniques, and strategies you can use to develop successful projects and release plans. These tools and strategies can guide you in your efforts to create a just-in-time methodology that will complement your organization's strategic and tactical plans and enhance your product life cycle planning in the most efficient way possible.

As a project leader, one of your main responsibilities will be to not only collect project data but to also analyze that data to uncover any patterns and trends in project outputs. You will then have to mesh those data analysis skills with creative problem-solving techniques to keep your project on pace and aligned to meet its goals.

This self-paced, fully online course will help you develop the expertise you'll need to assess information, define problems, and uncover their root causes. You'll learn how to develop and implement solutions in ways that will resolve issues without creating new risks. And you'll begin to recognize the key role that analysis plays in your decision-making and problem-solving approaches, so you can efficiently guide projects to their successful conclusion.

Upon successful completion of the PM Skills® courses, learners will be required to achieve a passing mark of 70% or higher on the PMSCP® exam to earn their certification. The exam consists of 200 questions randomly selected from material across all 14 PM Skills® courses. The exam is administered online, so learners will need to have an active internet connection to complete the test. Learners have a maximum of two hours to complete the exam and will be allowed three attempts to achieve a passing grade. Once the exam is complete, learners will be notified immediately with their score, but they will not have access to their answers; question answers will be kept confidential.