Environmental Project Management: Co-Creating Sustainable Solutions

University System of Maryland via edX Professional Certificate

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Details

This course may be unavailable.

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Provider

edX Professional Certificate
Pricing

$597.00
Languages

English
Certificate

Certificate Available
Duration & workload

15 weeks, 3-5 hours a week

Found in

Overview

In this Professional Certificate program, you will learn key project management skills needed for project execution on complex social and environmental issues. You will learn how to work on your project team collaborating to reduce environmental impact and achieve sustainability. You will develop communication competencies necessary to synthesize technical information for non-specialist audiences. You will also learn how to effectively engage with stakeholders, both in person and virtually through the outreach, collaboration and co-production stages of a project. Finally, you will learn leadership skills that will allow you to navigate the complex multi-dimensional issues associated with environmental projects.

Engineers, resource managers, environmental scientists, environmental advocates, environmental project managers, citizen scientists, and junior project managers will benefit from learning how to make smart decisions, manage dynamic teams, work toward deliverables, and develop broad support for environmental projects.

After completing this professional certificate, you will be able to clearly explain data-rich concepts to a wide range of audiences, to effectively engage with stakeholders, collaborate for effective environmental project planning and project execution, and utilize leadership skills for agile project management. Environmental projects are inherently complex, involving multiple societal entities, and spanning a diversity of different disciplines. Environmental project manager jobs are on the rise as we work toward an environment of sustainability. This series of courses will combine project management and environmental science making you feel more comfortable when communicating with stakeholders, regulatory agencies, subcontractors, environmental consultants, or your project team. The need for effective internal and external communication is paramount so that the different sectors involved understand and appreciate the activities and priorities of the various partners. You will develop techniques and a methodology to productively engage with diverse stakeholders using your new communication and environmental presentation template and narrative to effect change in environmental projects. A suite of leadership skills is critical; skills that improve your listening ability and empathy, and skills that improve your ability to manage the project life cycle as you project manage environmental issues, motivate, learn and teach new topics.

This Professional Certificate is being offered through a partnership between two renowned universities in the University System of Maryland involving both engineers and environmental scientists. Engineers from the Clark School of Engineering, University of Maryland and scientists from the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science have developed international reputations as leaders in project management (Project Management Center for Excellence) and environmental science and management (Integration and Application Network).

University of Maryland Clark School of Engineering provides high quality education in project management that encompasses the breadth of the field and prepares under graduates and graduates earning a master’s degree to have competencies in project planning, management and project execution; utilizing agile and traditional project management along with a depth of research to develop future project managers in the fields of engineering project management and a variety of fields where joining information systems and project management is essential.

University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science works every day to harness the power of science to transform the way society understands sustainable development, environmental remediation, and the preservation of our natural resources and environment. By conducting innovative research on today’s most pressing and complex environmental issues, including global climate change and disruption to sustainability. UMCES is developing new ideas to help guide state, region, nation, and the world toward a more environmentally sustainable future protecting our natural resources. UMCES’ commitment to integrating environmentally sustainable thinking in all operations, including all aspects of future planning, is essential to its mission.

Drawing from experiences in the environmental management and remediation of the Chesapeake Bay and many other environmental impact case studies, the engineers and scientists developing course materials have developed a passion and an unparalleled competency in environmental project management.

Upon successful completion of this program, learners can earn up to 30 Professional Development Unit (PDU) credits, 10 PDU credits per course, which are recognized by the Project Management Institute (PMI). PDU credits are essential to those looking to maintain certification as a Project Management Professional (PMP).

Syllabus

Courses under this program:
Course 1: Stakeholder Outreach: Effective Communication of Complex Environmental Threats

Learn how to engage communities through powerful storytelling, data visualization, and persuasive presence to motivate action on complex environmental projects.

Course 2: Stakeholder Collaboration: Organizing for Environmental Justice and Equitable Solutions

Co-produce outcomes on your environmental projects by effectively engaging and motivating diverse communities to work towards shared environmental goals.

Course 3: Co-Production: Addressing Complexity with Environmental Adaptive Management

Lead teams on your complex, distributed environmental projects through modern leadership and agile execution to co-produce powerful and sustainable outcomes.

Courses

2 reviews
5 weeks, 3-5 hours a week, 3-5 hours a week
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In this course you’ll learn how to improve your project management communication in your work environment and motivate and engage communities with clear communication to address complex environmental problems. As an environmental advocate or project manager, your active listening skills and effective communication skills are paramount to in person team members, remote teams, general employee engagement, and even more so for achieving success. The first step in solving complex societal and environmental problems is to rally support around the idea that there is a problem worth solving and that can be solved. This is achieved with good communication, teamwork, and clarifying data visualization.

This course will begin with storytelling as an effective communication skill providing powerful frameworks for establishing meaning and understanding about complex topics. However, better communication is not always verbal. A picture is worth 1,000 words (or more), and so the course continues with data visualization to help succinctly present meaningful data and engage stakeholders with powerful information. Additional communication strategies covered are the importance of presence, being confident and engaging as well as establishing trust and credibility. By improving poor communication skills and converting them into effective workplace communication across various communication channels on your project team with both verbal and non-verbal communication styles improves your environmental project management. The benefits of effective communication on workflow, teamwork, employee engagement, team collaboration, overall well-being of the project are seen in real-time as you improve your team communication. And finally, the course establishes the fundamentals of good presentations for project management, when presenting for stakeholders and project team members in-person onsite in your work environment, utilizing communication tools like zoom, or face-to-face giving a public presentation. We provide the effective communication techniques; using proven designs and techniques and the art of data and clear communication to increase engagement on your environmental projects. Whether it’s internal communication or customer outreach, the best communication process starts with a story.

Together, storytelling, data visualization, and presence can help to motivate stakeholders and give convincing clarifying presentations when managing large-scale complex environmental projects.
1 review
5 weeks, 3-5 hours a week, 3-5 hours a week
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This course is a collaboration between the University of Maryland College Park’s Project Management Center for Excellence and the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. While each course stands alone, the series works together to provide the knowledge, skills, and frameworks to lead projects that address Socio-Environmental problems.

In this course, we are building from the point of having successfully completed Stakeholder Outreach. This means that the major complex problem has been identified, measured, and distilled into a powerful narrative that can engage stakeholders to drive them to the next step: Stakeholder Collaboration.

To get started, we need to orient towards "why" we need to collaborate after collaboration. The answer? Problem complexity. Tackling complexity is a task no one person can do by its definition. Truly complex and wicked problems have no stopping point, no clarity of definition, and change as you try to improve the current state so you must reassess. Complex issues are also defined by a lack of complete information in any one party. The issues involve many standpoints, perspectives, and details partitioned among those involved. That’s why it’s “complex.” To solve this we need to tackle the problem which is termed “requisite variety,” a term coined by David Benjamin and David Komlos in their book “Cracking Complexity,” which is to say we need all the diverse representatives from those parts of the complex problem to bring their unique knowledge and perspective together.

In science when we do this it’s called “Transdisciplinary Approaches.” In Project Management we call this “cross-disciplinary” and “cross-organizational” problem solving. But what’s unique about Environmental Project Management is the often added problem of no organization existing among the rights holders that are impacted by the problems. So the added job of rallying and organizing these groups is added to the list of challenges for the Environmental Project Leader. Then the work of getting a first view of the complex problem can truly begin.
0 reviews
5 weeks, 3-5 hours a week, 3-5 hours a week
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Complex environmental projects are defined by leadership via influence and collaboration across participatory groups that see it in their interest to engage and co-produce sustainable outcomes. This requires a whole new adaptive management approach and perspective on leadership from the traditional models of “great men” to one that is a process of engagement, agile teams, and adaptive leadership. This course begins with establishing the case and need for modern management practices, especially in distributed environments and complex environmental projects. This approach emphasizes empowering team members close to the work with decision making and ownership over doing their part of the project. And it will be essential for the core project team, management actions and all involved and interested parties and especially the stakeholders to incorporate the adaptive management approach throughout co-production. Then, the course will dive into what it takes to facilitate great partnerships. From building a great team, to establishing motivation, framing purpose, and creating psychological safety that ensures voices are heard and risks are managed throughout project execution. Whether your environmental project deals with climate change, ecological systems, biodiversity, land management, international development, natural resource management, water resources or the protection of wetlands, adaptive management and stakeholder engagement are at the center of the project ecosystem. At its core, this type of facilitating and empowering leadership requires trust. As a result, the course dedicates significant lessons to understanding how to build that across one and many “teams of teams” working together, implementing interventions and iterations with a feedback loop to achieve their shared outcomes and engage in adaptive management. Leading complex teams always requires moving concertedly in a single direction together which incorporates incentives. Whether you are leading decision makers, trying to guide management objectives, or influencing management policies, it takes stewardship, and this is a learning process. Establishing a clear management process and strategic execution framework enables better management decisions at all levels. We demonstrate management strategies like objectives and key results (OKRs) and team design strategies, as well as agile execution frameworks, can help coordinate without dictating the direction. These approaches are also adaptive and enable feedback, strengthen partnerships, are iterative, and encourage participatory adaptive management. The course then wraps with an example of these approaches and case studies in action in the addressing the watershed and sustainability in the Chesapeake Bay. The Chesapeake fisheries offer a wonderful ecology to study and understand in terms of water quality, regulatory impacts, and the success of active adaptive management. With real-world examples taken and delivered so you can see what success looks like, this case study highlights the concept of adaptive management, the decision-making process and how to model it for your own complex environmental projects influencing future management, healthy ecosystems and sustainability.