I recently completed the Project Initiation: Starting a Successful Project course certification offered by Google on Coursera, and I found it to be a valuable and informative experience. The course is well-structured and easy to follow, with engaging videos and interactive quizzes to reinforce the material.

One of the things I appreciated about this course was its focus on practical skills and techniques that can be applied to real-world project management scenarios. The instructors did an excellent job of breaking down complex concepts into simple, easy-to-understand terms and providing practical examples and case studies to illustrate their points.

Overall, I would highly recommend this course to anyone interested in learning more about project management, especially those who are just starting out in their careers or looking to transition into a project management role.

The course itself was quite interesting, and I learned quite a bit.

I am however extremely frustrated at the Peer-Reviewed Assignment. While I took the time to actually not only grade but leave constructive comments to all Assignments I graded, the people assessing my work were careless, did not leave any feedback, and someone actually "failed" me because they were unable to open my file (which I cannot understand, since 1) the other peer was able to open the file, it was a simple PDF file; and 2) why would a peer give ZEROS to an assignment because they are unable to read the file??? Flagging the issue never occured to them? I see the good intention in having a peer-reviewed system, but with colleagues who just don't care, it becomes a game of hoping for people to give me a good grade, since constructive feedback and actual learning will not happen.

Overall, great beginner-friendly summary of Project Initation steps (initating, defining scope/goals/deliverables, measuring, stakeholders, tools). As a learner, I am leaving the course with a bit of confusion defining scope, goals, deliverables, measurables, tasks and differentiating between all of those. It also says it covers the usual tools, but it does not. It give you a chart to go and adventure and fill out yourself. It would elevate the training to have walkthroughs of examples of how each of the programs are used for a real project, but I understand the tools change so often they would have to invest money into updating that every year, but then I wouldn't make a whole section that doesn't have enough content.

I have gone through a process that really gave me new insigths and tools on project management, in ways I find very useful (I have an MBA and over 30 years of working experience), so kudos for the quality content, the quality instructor and the materials.

Feedback note:

I have been a university Business Administration final courses professor, so I understand the pros and cons in grading, but I think inserting quiz questions based on semantics isn't the best choice. Example: is a spreadsheet a "communication" tool?... of course it is... but you want to grade on a narrower definition of communication.. which is fine, but the way the question is structured feels tricky, and the latter is not fine!!

I enjoyed the beginning of this Project Initiation online class certification. I learned the importance of gauging of the thoughts of stakeholders before you launch a project. It is like feeling the cardiac pulse and vital signs of the patient before the physician acts and intervenes. You have to know the success criteria that the project sponsor has in mind. Also, I learned about the importance of documentation. I call documentation CYA (Covering Your Ass). If there is a disagreement about the project results, you can rely on a contract or documentation to see what was the agreement before add-ons were made.

Moderately useful, but I kept looking for answers to 2 important things that I never got a clear answer to: 1) feasibility research, 2) difference between Initiation stage (this course) vs. Planning stage (next course). Since I haven't taken the Planning course yet (which is next), as of now I'm left to infer that Initiation stage in large orgs has mostly to do with stakeholders, getting their buy-in and official approval, and resource allocation of budget-time to even get to the green light, while Planning must be what happens after the project has been officially greenlit by sponsors, I guess.

I had great experience with the lessons. It has great content and exercise. I had great experience in the learning journey.

Unfortunately, I can't give full star because of its peer review assignment. I could see the value from applying Peer Grade Assignment. However, there is no clear indication if the assignment has moderator or support that will make sure your submission is getting reviewed. I can't end my course because two of my submissions have not been graded. I had spent about 10 hours to clear the course, and I'm afraid to fail this course if I don't get any peer-review.

The class is great but the peer review is too subjective! I received bad scores from one peer, but excellent from others which caused me to fail. The comments was that I did not list any smart goals, deliverables or measures on my charter, whereas I completed everything comperable to the Exemplar example. I resubmitted the same charter for re-grading and received a 100 with comments that the charter was excellent with great smart goals and measures. Its just frustrating when you know you did great work and receive confusingly negative peer grades.

The peer grading of projects is a bit problematic. There needs to be more criteria to help with the rubric. There are people who are grading who truly don't understand some of the concepts, so they are grading an assignment incorrectly. The rubric should have some content associated; for example to rank the deliverables, the only criteria is the number of deliverables. Some guidelines about what could be included would be super helpful to those grading. It would give me more confidence that I am truly understanding the content.

These courses were very informative & helpful and the course topics and subjects are very relevant to current trends and best practices in project management. The practice quizzes are helpful review tools. The instructors are very knowledgeable. The only aspect that is very frustrating is the unavailability of Google support for troubleshooting technical difficulties such as document uploading and/or navigating the Coursera portal. It would be very helpful to have a live chat or live customer service support available.

It was very informative and fairly straightforward, however, there were quite a few questions in some of the weekly quizzes that addressed things that weren't talked about in the videos and weren't present in the readings. I have no experience in formal project management so I am not going into this course familiar with project management programs and tools. I feel like this course was made more for supplementing what people already know about project management than for people that are totally new to it.

I love the format. The videos are excellent and help/beat reading through all the material. It helps getting tired of just reading through so much material that needs to be covered. I'm a little put off in the peer graded assignments in that it seems some students don't quite understand the assignments so they grade based on their understanding of the assignment which can be incorrect. I don't think that is fair as there is no way to correct it. Other than that, the rest of the format is great.

This probably shouldn't cost 50$ a month. I'm making this worth the money by breezing through the weeks, and its easy to do because most of the information is generic and easy to digest (which is a plus and a minus.) What I'm looking for is job experience, and that's something these courses just can't provide.

Basically what I'm paying for is the confidence and encouragement to go out and snag a decent job in project management. For that I am grateful. Thanks, GOOGLE & COURSERA

The instructor is wonderful—I really connected with her. She was so calm, precise, and friendly in all of the videos that I found myself becoming an active listener in all of the course lessons, which contributed to my success.

The multiple choice questions are often confusing, especially the "choose all that apply" categories. The answers can be written in a misleading way, and I would prefer a multiple choice exam that has ONE correct answer for each question.

Asi como el primer curso, quedé encantada con lo completo que es y la manera en que es explicado, admito que una de las cosas que más me gustaban eran las evaluaciones y aunque sigue siendo un curso excelente en la ultima semana tuve inconvenientes con las tareas ya que no aparecian, no podia verlas por ello no podia ser evaluada por eso doy 4 estrellas en vez de 5, espero puedan darle arreglo a este porblema asi poder culminar esas pequeñas tareas

It was a very strange part about tools in the end. It looked like that something was needed to be added and it was. Don't think that anyone can receive any benefits understanding the difference between Work-management, Productivity and Collaboration tools. Moreover, in the present, many tools combine many types. The best example is MS Teams which was just Collaboration tool two years ago but today you can use it for Work-Management.

The Project Management Coursework excels at every level and is interesting and keeps you on your toes; what caused me difficulty, was manipulating the software program that the course is written in. This definitely need to be made more user-friendly for students to access assignments, test-taking and sharing information. Please make this better, then the 4-Star rating will be definitely become a 5-Star rating. Thank you!

It's perfect. The only thing I absolutely hate is the deadlines; all the other students have the same problem; you have to pick a deadline and I've got limited free time since there's a lull at work so I wanted to finish this course on my own time but all the assignments and quizzes are locked until September 6th so I'm losing time and money. Other than that giant thorn in my side, the course is great; no complaints.

I really enjoyed the course and learnt some useful things regarding project management. I found the peer review assignment really annoying though as I submitted the exact same assignment 3 times and got widely different scores each time. It definitely seems like some people just didn't bother to mark it properly so when one person gave me 9 out of 9 the second mark just put 0 for all of them and so I failed.

I'was very excited for the 4th part of the course (tools for PM) but it left me quite disappointed.

1. lessons could be more clear: infact is needed a deeper explanation about differences of tools (collaboration, scheduling and PM). also because this is matter of the final test of the week;

2. a lesson about tools should focus about practice. there is only an example with spreadsheets and it's not enough.

Great course, a lot of concepts overlap each other but the overall idea is clear, and making changes to an spreadsheet or assignment of tasks to keep your teammates informed is also a sort of communication. Discussing about the timeline initially is also important so as it would make sense if the pursuit of the project is justified before any further discussions of the project. Overall, great insights!

Overall it is done well. The peer review is less than desirable due to some people not knowing how to grade and not leaving feedback. I don't mind failing if I am given at lease some feedback on how to improve. N/A is not acceptable nor is saying you need to add what I say you are missing. Feedback needs substance and it appears many taking this course do not have that skill to give peer reviews.

Content in the course is great, unfortunally the evaluated question are very unforgiving, there are many concepts that are extremely similar and some of the time even interchangable within the course content, so, for some question I need to accurated guess what is the expected answer instead of just input the logical one based on the explanations provided, I saved a couple of examples of this.

This isnt real world but its okay for a free offering. Unfortunately you cant really educate for the real world as nothing goes as smoothly as you might want it. Its a grind and projects have many twists and turns. The biggest thing required is adaption. Adapting to the circumstances given and they are not always ideal. You cant plan for that although you can make allowances for some of it.

The only real hiccup was in the peer graded section. The course stated you should grade 2 peers when 3 peers are required. Additionally many of the peer assignments presented were not viewable Google documents as the users didn't know how to share them. This was most likely due to the fact that the help on sharing documents is outdated with an older icon and slightly different instructions.