12/27/21, 5:55 PM Afsheen: Listening to learn | Coursera

Getting started with the course

Understanding the key

components of project initiation

Video: Why is project initiation

Afsheen: Listening to learn
essential?
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Video: Key components of project

initiation
4 min

Practice Quiz: Reflection: Project

initiation and key components
7 questions

Video: Afsheen: Listening to learn

3 min

Explore: Project Initiation

10 min
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Reading: Performing a cost-benefit
analysis
10 min
Transcript
Review: The fundamentals of
project initiation
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0:00 [MUSIC] Hi, my name is Afsheen. I'm the Director of Core Capacity at Google, where we support
some of our key products such as Google Maps, Google Photos, Google Search, and many more.
Ultimately, what we're doing is we're managing the supply and demand for our products in the
resource space, so specifically: compute, storage, machine learning, and networking resources.
Ultimately, our goal is to provide the fuel for these products so we can support our billions of
users. I often look at establishing the project goals, and tied to the goals is discussing the criteria.
What's a successful project? What are the measurables involved in the project space? And lastly, I
always want to look at the stakeholders that are involved—maybe our clients, our key
stakeholders, and so on—and make sure that they're thought of during the formation of the
project. I'm meeting with the stakeholders, I'm trying to understand what they're trying to
achieve, what we're trying to achieve, and the goal, if you will, is a critical aspect of setting the
scope. When I'm trying to set the goals of a project, I apply very in depth, active listening. I'm
doing a lot of socializing with other stakeholders. I'm meeting a lot of players to understand
what's the landscape like. It's an active listening experience. I have a recent example of a project
that in my view did not do the proper initiation phase. Last week, in fact, a group approached
me with a process or a feature that they were going to launch. I reviewed it and immediately
realized that they were so far off. They had not discussed the topic with any of my team
members or myself, and they were day minus one from launching the feature. It was a total miss.
It really illustrates the point about when you initiate a project, you can't invest enough time in
meeting with stakeholders, meeting with your colleagues, listening to them—actively listening.
Someone taught me recently the value of building that "listening to learn" muscle. And in the
project initiation phase, to me, that is such a valuable talent, there are those that have it, there
are those that have learned it, and there those who will never do it. And I believe it's a trainable
skill, but it requires you to really slow down and look at the landscape in front of you.

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