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Remote Project Management: Lead Distributed Teams [EN]

Name: Remote Project Management: Lead Distributed Teams [EN]
Rating: 5.0 (6 reviews)

Created byPapaHR ★ 160K students: Courses in Human Resources, HR, SHRM, AI Talent Analytics, HRMS, HRIS, CIPD, Claude, HRCI, PHR, Rewards

Last updated 8/2026

English

English [Auto],

What you'll learn

Run a project end to end by PMBOK 7: business case, charter, scope, plan, budget, closure
Build a work breakdown, a network diagram and a Gantt chart, and estimate durations you can defend
Identify, assess and manage risk instead of discovering it at the deadline
Set up supervision of a distributed team that does not depend on watching people work
Choose the tool stack and the meeting cadence for a team spread across time zones
Design a communications plan with segments, channels and a way to measure whether it landed
Run Agile delivery remotely: backlog, story points, sprint planning, daily and review
Protect your own week with GTD, time-blocking and the Eisenhower matrix
Learn alongside Mike's 1.6 million students from 185 countries
Get the author's experience from Preply, Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank

Course content

14 sections • 38 lectures • 19h 31m total length

What a Project Is: Four Stages and the PMBOK 7 Performance Domains36:56
What actually counts as a project, and what is just work
The four stages a project moves through
The role of the project manager and the main difficulties of the job
An overview of the PMBOK 7 principles and performance domains
Starting a Project: Business Case, Charter and Cost-Benefit Analysis27:00
Collecting the ideas and turning them into a proposal
Building the business case and the project charter
Cost-benefit analysis and the documentation that goes with it
Choosing which project to actually run
Stewardship, ethics and stakeholder interests as selection criteria
Stakeholders: Building the List, Prioritising and Planning Engagement23:50
Who your stakeholders are, including the ones nobody named
Compiling and prioritising the list
Assessing influence and interest
Ways of engaging, and the Stakeholders performance domain

Project Scope: Boundaries, Assumptions and the Delivery Life Cycle21:33
Establishing that the project is needed at all
Defining where the project starts and where it ends
Setting the boundaries and documenting assumptions
The development approach and life cycle domain
The Project Plan: Work Breakdown, Risk Identification, Time Planning25:58
Breaking the project into parts and labelling them
Describing the plan as a diagram
Identifying risks at the planning stage
Time planning and the network diagram
Planning and measurement domains, with adaptability built in
Schedule and Resources: Duration Estimates, Gantt and the RACI Matrix16:31
Time planning methods and determining activity durations
Displaying the schedule, including the Gantt chart
Identifying participants and using a human resources matrix
Applying the Team performance domain

Budget and Risk: Cost Types, Three Budget Stages, Risk Assessment22:27
Project cost and the different types of it
The three stages of a project budget
Identifying risk factors and assessing them
Risk management, and the Uncertainty domain
Team Work: Structure, Matrix Environments, Roles and Task Allocation19:25
Building the structure for the project
Working in a matrix environment, where nobody reports to you
Defining roles and responsibilities, and allocating tasks
Kicking off and then running the team

Managing the Project: Control, Reporting, Deviations and Meetings26:13
What project control actually means
The progress reporting system and monitoring spend
Handling deviations before they become the status update
Communicating progress, running meetings, the communications plan
Closing the Project: Administration, Results Survey and Lessons24:00
Planning closure rather than letting a project fade out
Handling the administrative matters
Surveying the results with the people who received them
Bringing the PMBOK 7 principles together at the end

Moving a Team to Remote: The Checklist, Process Impact and Security38:38
Three environments that shape how it feels to work somewhere
The key differences from office work
What changes in every process once the team is distributed
The checklist for moving, and the security part nobody plans for
Organising Remote Work: Rules, Workplace, Family and Communication34:28
The rules of the job when there is no office to define them
Sleep, nutrition, and why they belong in a management course
Organising the workplace, and rules with family and pets
Communication tools and the rules for using them
Control or Self-Control: Supervising Without Watching People Work34:09
How to organise supervision of a distributed team
The control tools available, and what each actually tells you
Organising work so people control their own output

Tools and Technology: Communication, Work Organisation, Meetings26:15
Tools for communication and for organising work
The types of meetings a distributed team needs
Tools for document storage
Deciding what belongs in a meeting and what does not
Motivation and Engagement: Socialising and Team Building at Distance28:59
Why motivation behaves differently without a shared room
Working with engagement deliberately
Socialisation, and what happens when it is left to chance
Team building for people who have never met
Caring for a Remote Team: Benefits, Safety and Mental Health29:12
The benefits that are actually used
Security for remote employees
Support for mental health
Physical health care at a distance

Remote Skills: Autonomy, Written Communication and Automation32:59
Time management and independence as job requirements
Working in isolation without losing output
Technical confidence and written communication
Automation as a personal skill
Hiring and Onboarding Remotely: Who to Hire and Where to Find Them19:41
Which candidates work well remotely and which do not
Where to look for them
Adapting the hiring process for distance
Onboarding someone who will never visit an office

Retention and Exit: Low Performance and Dismissing at a Distance34:27
Working with retention before someone is already leaving
The real reasons people leave distributed teams
Handling low performance you cannot observe directly
Dismissing a remote employee
Culture and Security: Describing It, Supporting It, Force Majeure30:18
Describing the culture explicitly, since it is no longer absorbed
Supporting it in daily practice
Business security with a distributed team
Dealing with force majeure

What Team Communication Is: Running a Communications Audit31:45
Why an announcement nobody read was not communication
How communication helps delivery when it is designed
Running a communications audit
Surveying people about how they actually receive information
Communication Goals: Solving a Problem and Changing Behaviour26:36
Aiming communication at a problem rather than at coverage
Helping decision-makers decide
Influencing behaviour instead of informing
Knowing Your Audience: Segments, Personas and Message Templates26:11
Whether you actually know who your stakeholders are
Segmenting them and building personas
Where the data for that comes from
Building the message, and a template for an effective one

Channels and Attention: The Mix, and Managers as a Channel21:13
Choosing channels and what each is suited to
A real channel mix from a company that got it right
Getting attention in a saturated environment
Managers as a channel, and preparing them for it
Implementing Communication: Change, Bad News and Culture20:45
Building the communication process
Managing change through it
Delivering news nobody wants, including slipped deadlines
Communicating culture
Evaluating Communication: KPIs and the Report for Management15:50
Why evaluation is the step everyone drops
Communication KPIs
Gathering the information for them
Preparing the report for management

Requirements

A project you are running or about to run, ideally with people you rarely see in person
No PMP or certification background required — the course starts from what a project is
Access to any task tracker. Trello, Jira, Asana — the method matters more than the tool
English at intermediate level or above, since all lessons are in English
Willingness to write things down, because remote delivery runs on written artefacts

Description

This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

A project plan that worked in an office quietly stops working when the team is spread across four time zones. Nothing dramatic happens. The status just becomes less true every week.

In a room you notice trouble without being told. Remotely you find out at the deadline.

What actually breaks at distance

The reporting still arrives, and it is optimistic. The daily meeting turns into eight people reading their tasks aloud to a muted call. Risks that someone spotted in week two never travel upward, because raising them requires an act of initiative rather than a hallway. And the manager compensates by asking people how it is going, more often, which produces more reassurance and no more information.

This is not a communication problem you can fix with a better tool. It is a project management problem that the office used to hide.

How the course is built

Thirty-eight lessons in five parts. Ten lessons on project management by PMBOK 7 first, because remote work does not replace the discipline, it removes the slack that was covering its absence. Business case, charter, stakeholder map, scope boundaries, work breakdown, network diagram, Gantt, three-stage budget, risk register, team structure in a matrix, progress control, and a closure that actually happens.

Then ten lessons on distributed teams: what changes in every process, supervision that does not require watching people, the tool and meeting stack, engagement, hiring and onboarding someone who will never see an office, low performance you cannot observe, and culture that now has to be written down because nobody absorbs it by sitting nearby.

Communication, Agile and your own week

Then six lessons treating communication as a designed process — audit, goals, audience segments, channel mix, delivering slipped deadlines, and measuring whether behaviour changed. Then six on Agile delivery without a physical board: product vision, MVP, backlog, story points, sprint planning, daily meetings, and reviews that are honest.

And six on your own week, because a distributed project manager has no office to separate work from everything else. SMART, the Eisenhower matrix, 4D, Pomodoro, GTD, time-blocking, delegation, and the procrastination problem underneath all of it.

Who is teaching this

Mike, the number one HR instructor on Udemy. More than 1.6 million course enrolments, over 150,000 professionals trained, PHRi and SHRM-CP certified, HRCI representative in more than 10 countries. I built the people function of the unicorn Preply and worked at Wargaming, Alfa-Bank and iDeals — distributed companies, where every process had to survive without a shared room.

What is included

Lifetime access to all course materials
Active instructor support in the Q&A section
Udemy Certificate of Completion
Practical assignments and real business cases
A section with additional courses, tools and resources

Start with this

Take your current project and write down how you would know, this week, if it were three weeks behind. If the answer is that someone would tell you, that is the gap. Enrol now and start the first lesson today.

Who this course is for:

Project managers whose team is distributed across cities or countries
Team leads promoted into delivery who have never been taught the PMBOK vocabulary
Managers who ran projects well in an office and are struggling to repeat it remotely
Product and delivery people who need Agile ceremonies to work without a physical board
Founders and operations leads running projects with contractors and freelancers
Anyone whose status reporting currently consists of asking people how it is going
Specialists preparing for a project management role and needing the full picture first

Remote Project Management: Lead Distributed Teams [EN]

What you'll learn

Explore related topics

Course content

Project Foundations: PMBOK 7, the Business Case and Stakeholders3 lectures • 1hr 28min

Scope, Plan and Schedule: Boundaries, Work Breakdown and Gantt3 lectures • 1hr 4min

Budget, Risk and Building the Project Team2 lectures • 42min

Control, Reporting and Closing a Project Properly2 lectures • 50min

Going Remote: The Checklist, Working Rules and Communication3 lectures • 1hr 47min

Remote Tools, Meetings, Motivation and Employee Care3 lectures • 1hr 24min

Remote Skills, Hiring and Onboarding at a Distance2 lectures • 53min

Retention, Performance and Culture in a Distributed Team2 lectures • 1hr 5min

Team Communication: Audit, Goals and Knowing Your Audience3 lectures • 1hr 25min

Channels, Difficult News and Measuring Communication3 lectures • 58min

Requirements

Description

Who this course is for: