Program Management and the Art of Communication Specialization

Persuasion is the central to leading leaders. As a program manager or project manager, you may lead a team with many senior contributors. Often they will have more experience, more skin in the game, and more reputation at stake. As a program manager, this task is even greater because your time is limited and your span of control across projects even greater. Being a compelling communicator takes more than what you learned for the Certified Associate in Project Management (CAPM) exam or Project Management Professional (PMP) exam. It takes program or project management experience and this certificate program.

Program managers must persuade quickly, and with great lasting impact. Program and project managers must persuade and manage their leadership presence for program or project success. Even if you are a traditional program or project manager or manage agile programs or projects, persuasive communication is vital to your success. Communicating more persuasively will lead to more effective risk management. There are complete blindsports in the Project Management Institute, Inc's (PMI)"A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge" (PMBOK Guide). Applying those processes and skills are just the basics of efficient communication. That’s why certified project managers will earn 10 professional development units (PDU) in this program. You will learn the balance needed to communicate effectively. Aristotle first wrote about balancing logic, emotion, and presence over 2,000 years ago. Creating a balance between ethos, pathos, and logos, the persuader creates a message that grabs the attention of the audience and engages them as people. A person doesn’t understand when they are not paying attention, is not engaged with the speaker, and doesn’t remember what was said. Ethos, pathos, and logos aid the speaker and the listener, by helping to select information to present and how to fashion its delivery for the best effect. In this program management and project management training course, you will go beyond the communication skills you learned for the PMP exam to gain your project management certification. You will learn about the rhetorical triangle and how to use it to craft persuasive communications. Social media and online collaboration tools require new ways of establishing your presence and generating trust between you and your audience. You will also learn how to create an emotional impact even through text messages and emails. Syllabus

Every program and project has a social world. The program managers, project managers, project teams, and stakeholders mutually agree on roles and interact based on those roles.

Great program managers sense, manage, and influence the social worlds across their projects. They bring order and understanding through conflict management and conflict resolution. Success is not guaranteed, and often teams clash as a new social order is established on every project. They heal divides that can grow under the stress of projects and increase the team’s problem solving ability. Dr. Pearce, the inventor of the Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM), explains the social world as a “dance between the two faces of the communication process: coordinating actions and making/managing meaning. A social world is the site where speech acts, episodes and forms of communication, selves and forms of consciousness, and relationships and minds are made.” Our cultural differences and emotions significantly shape our social worlds. The program and project manager with good emotional intelligence and cultural intelligence (EI/CI) can better understand and navigate the social worlds of the project team and the stakeholders. High EI/CI also aids in creating understanding in program/project management communications. A program manager or project manager with high EI/CI is more adept at creating understanding because they are self-aware while understanding other’s emotions.Thus, the program manager or project manager can test if the recipient of his or her communication has the requisite know-what, know-how, and know-why understanding of the intended messages. Program managers and project managers with high EI/CI will be perceived as having a high ethos. Team members will see the high emotional intelligence and cultural intelligence even in the manager’s nonverbal communication. Being more aware of our feelings and other people’s feelings helps enhance our connection to others and make us more credible. Program managers and Project managers with high EI/CI can use pathos more effectively and make the logos portion of their communication more effective. The right balance of ethos, pathos, and logos makes the project manager more persuasive. Along with increasing the program manager or project manager’s EI/CI, this course will aid the manager in using the tools of CMM. Dr. Pearce created Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM) in the mid-1970s. Over the years, CMM practitioners have created methods and tools to make the communication perspective visible. One such tool is SEAVA, which is an acronym for Storyboarding, Enriching, Analyzing, Visioning, and Acting. You can use the SEAVA tool to examine communication problems among your project team members and to generate a solution. Understanding the different social worlds of your program and its project team members and stakeholders will help you create persuasive communications, have a positive impact, and increase understanding among the project team members and stakeholders. CMM will help you become a master of communication and persuasion.

Communication complexity rapidly increases even with a few program or project team members and stakeholders. Project managers are the “hub” of their project communication. Program managers are the “hub” of their organization communication to meet strategic goals. Managing these networks is essential whether you manage traditional programs or projects. Or agile programs and projects.

Program managers have two additional challenges. First, they must empower their project managers with skills, processes, and assets for information management. Second they must sense and integrate the key performance data to ensure strategic objectives are met, and project processes are improved across the program. As you learned from the Project Management Institute, Inc.'s (PMI)"A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge" (PMBOK) when preparing for the PMP exam, the number of communication channels grows geometrically with team size. If there are “n” communicators, then the number of communication channels is n*(n-1)/2. That means five team members have 10 channels, but 10 team members have 45 channels to manage. That’s over four times as many channels for doubling the size of a small team! If you imagine each communication channel as a radio station, you can see how quickly the program or project manager can be overwhelmed with all the information coming in. As you gain more program or project management experience, what you learned for the PMP certification or similar professional certification is not sufficient. This course will help you go beyond the knowledge you needed to become a certified project manager. This applies to all project leaders. Whether you are a just getting started as a Certified Associate in Project Management (CAPM), or a seasoned Project Management Professional (PMP), you need to manage a lot of information transfer and exchange. And this challenge is even greater for agilists, like certified scrum masters (CSMs) and PMI-ACP holders. No matter the scaling methods, having timely information is critical for agile teams at scale, who need to move fast without driving up overhead in team-to-team communication as technical scope changes. In this program and project management training course, you will learn effective and efficient project management tools to receive and transmit program and project-level information. Program managers and project managers need to ensure that information flows freely and where the information can do the most benefit. This online course will teach you how to build communication networks for your program or project’s success. Gain 10 professional development units (PDUs) while sharpening your program or project management skills.

Program and project managers are master storytellers. They have to be in order to weave high-priority information into a memorable narrative for their people. Customers must commit to and understand their goals, and how the program is meeting them. Stakeholders need to trust the direction and stay engaged with the program intent. Program and project teams and leaders, need to understand what matters and how their work connects to the greater whole.

Storytelling is not a part of the Project Management Institute, Inc's (PMI) "A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge'' (PMBOK). Storytelling is not something that Certified Associate In Project Management (CAPM), Project Management Professional (PMP), PMI-Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP), certified scrum masters, or other certified project manager credential holders will encounter on an exam. Storytelling is something that successful program or project managers learn from years of experience. If storytelling is not on the PMP exam or similar project management certification exams, why should you bother learning how to tell good stories? Because, human brains are naturally designed for stories. We have brain structures devoted to making sense of the world in cause-effect terms. Good stories are like flight simulators in that you can try out various approaches to a problem before tackling the real problem. Risk management for programs and projects is more effective when using compelling narratives. Stories are also effective ways to transmit large amounts of information to your project teams and stakeholders. People can remember more information and act effectively on that information. For agile project management, stories are how customers communicate their requirements to the agile project team. Stories are the foundation of persuasive communication and will help you become an expert communicator. In this online course of the Program Management and the Art of Communication certificate program, you will learn how great program and project managers use their storytelling skills to create compelling project visions, persuade stakeholders, and design effective risk management strategies. Earn 10 professional development units (PDUs) while completing the only professional certification program that helps you develop storytelling as part of your collection of project management tools.