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Learner Reviews & Feedback for Project Initiation: Starting a Successful Project by Google

4.8
stars
20,727 ratings

About the Course

This is the second course in the Google Project Management Certificate program. This course will show you how to set a project up for success in the first phase of the project life cycle: the project initiation phase. In exploring the key components of this phase, you’ll learn how to define and manage project goals, deliverables, scope, and success criteria. You’ll discover how to use tools and templates like stakeholder analysis grids and project charters to help you set project expectations and communicate roles and responsibilities. Current Google project managers will continue to instruct and provide you with hands-on approaches for accomplishing these tasks while showing you the best project management tools and resources for the job at hand. Learners who complete this program should be equipped to apply for introductory-level jobs as project managers. No previous experience is necessary. By the end of this course, you will be able to: - Understand the significance of the project initiation phase of the project life cycle. - Describe the key components of the project initiation phase. - Determine a project’s benefits and costs. - Define and create measurable project goals and deliverables. - Define project scope and differentiate among tasks that are in-scope and out-of-scope. - Understand how to manage scope creep to avoid impacting project goals. - Define and measure a project’s success criteria. - Complete a stakeholder analysis and explain its significance. - Utilize RACI charts to define and communicate project team member responsibilities. - Understand the key components of project charters and develop a project charter for project initiation. - Evaluate various project management tools to meet project needs....

Top reviews

AK

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It was very good course I developed and learned so many skills in this course which fundamentals for Initiation of project. Like project charter, shareholders analysis, RACI charts and so much more.

MT

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I would prefer that there be translation available for all languages, but in fact the course and its content are of great importance for those who want to start in the field of project management

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3551 - 3575 of 4,229 Reviews for Project Initiation: Starting a Successful Project

By Celeste

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Jan 22, 2024

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.

By Dimas M

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Nov 24, 2021

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.

By Karen R

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Oct 20, 2022

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.

By Alane A

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Oct 9, 2022

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.

By Jennifer C

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Aug 11, 2022

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.

By Jonathan W

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Apr 29, 2021

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.

By Maria F

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Jun 10, 2021

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.

By Camille F

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Sep 11, 2023

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

By Joseph G

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May 31, 2021

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.

By Fanny G

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Sep 10, 2023

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

By Mikhail L

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Oct 27, 2023

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.

By Dell N

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Feb 24, 2022

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!

By Fatimah N

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Aug 30, 2021

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.

By Tom S

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Aug 23, 2022

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.

By roberto p

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Nov 9, 2022

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.

By Apeksha S

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Jan 12, 2022

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!

By Matthew P

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May 17, 2023

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.

By Jose A C J

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Jun 20, 2021

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.

By Tim W

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Aug 7, 2021

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.

By Brian D

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Jan 20, 2024

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.

By Daniel C

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Apr 12, 2022

It was a refreshing course for me, since I used to be a project manager and I would like to be PM again.

I think this is very good to introduce yourself in this PM arena, and is good to keep up udated to.

I just would like that moderator/s or tutors would give more feedback after each evaluation.

It worth to do this course for learning about project definition and starting.

By Lea S

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Mar 8, 2023

It gave me a bunch og good tools and things to consider for initiating my next project. However, some of the materials were difficult to understand and as for the quizzes, I spent a long time understanding what the question was to answer correctly. Not because I did not know the answer, but because the question was formulated so it was difficult to know what was meant.

By Tayler S

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Apr 4, 2023

There are some issues in the questions asked during video lessons that start to confuse you during the video instead of helping to test what you have learned in the video so far. There also was a week where they had you perform an activity that was completely unrelated to the scenario they use for all previous exemplars and continue to use after that activity.

By maymay m

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Mar 30, 2021

This was a great course! I wished for a little more details about different tools (rather than just linking to them), but they gave a good overview of them in general. The only other thing I don't love is the peer assignments. Some people barely fill them out, and then you're also required to wait for them to get graded to get a completion on the course.

By Feng-Ger Y

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Oct 30, 2022

There were more than a couple of questions throughout this module of the form "which X of the following items ... " matches a certain criteria, where X is a number like 2 or 3. I wouldn't comment if it didn't happen so many times. When the correct answer is revealed there aren't the same number selected as in the question prompt. This was annoying.