How the Operator Program🎖️ works

Six months. One fiscal year. Four projects.

You join a company on 1 February 2027 and leave it on 31 January 2028. In between, you run an internal system rollout, a new product feature, an ongoing operations team and a fixed-price customer engagement, all competing for the same people and money.

Each week is a slice of that year. You read the chapters of Projects, For Real that the week needs, then produce the documents a real project manager would produce at that point, in the tools a real company uses. On Friday your work goes on the screen and gets challenged. Things go wrong on schedule, because they did in the book: a vendor's connector fails in August, a production incident hits in the same week, and a bank buys a subsidiary in September.

Alongside the projects run three threads: Python and SQL, an AI agent you learn to supervise, and the business core of a first-year MBA.

From day one to Operator

The program runs in five stages. Each ends with a live checkpoint against a written standard. Meet it and you earn the stage's rank; miss it and you get coaching, revise, and present again within a week. Graduates are called Operators: people who can run real work end to end.

1. S1

   Plan: Plan four projects to a steering-committee standard

   🗺️RankPlanner

   Weeks 1–8

   Learn how a 2,000-person company is wired, then plan all four projects: the business case, the charter, the RFP, the purchase request, and a schedule you can defend.

   • Write a business case, a charter and an RFP
   • Build a critical-path schedule and simulate it 20,000 times
   • Walk a $1.14M purchase through five approvals
   • Answer your own questions in Python

   Week 8

   Phase review: defend your integrated plan live. Pass, or revise and present again within a week.

   1. How a company is wired2. The workbench3. Where projects come from4. Logs, kickoff and the life cycle5. Requirements, scope and estimates6. Schedule, cost and quality7. Resources, communications and risk8. Procurement and the integrated plan

2. S2

   Run: Run the year when things go wrong

   🚦RankProject Lead

   Weeks 9–15

   The projects go live. A vendor's connector fails, a production incident hits 12% of page views, and a bank buys a subsidiary. You run sprints and flow, report honestly and control change.

   • Run Scrum and Kanban with real flow metrics
   • Report earned value a sponsor believes
   • Lead a live incident and write the blameless review
   • Price a change order on a fixed-price contract

   Week 15

   Phase review: a closure report, and a retrospective you facilitate live.

   Mini Career Day in week 9

   9. The operating rhythm and Scrum10. Flow, Lean and engineering practice11. Teams, leadership and conflict12. Stakeholders, steering committees and vendors13. Measuring progress honestly14. Change, incidents and quality15. Closing and learning

3. S3

   Product: Decide what's worth building

   💡RankProduct Lead

   Weeks 16–21

   Follow Beacon from twelve customer interviews to general availability: vision, OKRs, discovery, prioritization, specs, design, metrics, experiments, pricing and launch.

   • Run customer interviews and find the pattern
   • Set OKRs and score a backlog with RICE
   • Write a spec and a metrics tree
   • Design an experiment with a decision rule

   Week 21

   Phase review: a product decision presented and defended, plus the data exercise.

   Mini Career Day in week 17

   16. The portfolio year and the product manager's job17. Vision, OKRs and discovery18. Prioritization, roadmaps and specs19. Design, metrics and experiments20. Business models, launch and AI products21. Enterprise products and data-informed decisions

4. S4

   Systems: Rebuild it in the tools employers run

   🛠️RankSpecialist

   Weeks 22–24

   Your capstone, rebuilt in GitLab in depth, Jira and Confluence, Microsoft Project, and a spreadsheet someone else can audit. Then you automate the boring parts.

   • Run the same project in GitLab and in Jira
   • Schedule in Microsoft Project with a baseline
   • Build a workbook anyone can audit in 30 seconds
   • Ship a working automation with your agent

   Week 24

   Automations demoed live, including what happens when they fail.

   22. GitLab in depth, then Jira and Confluence23. The Microsoft stack and spreadsheets you can trust24. Communication, enterprise systems and automation

5. S5

   Hired: Show employers what you can do

   🎖️RankOperator

   Weeks 25–26

   No new reading. You publish your portfolio, sit a timed 160-question practice exam, rehearse interviews with working project managers, and present at Career Day.

   • Publish a portfolio employers can open
   • Sit a timed 160-question practice exam
   • Interview with real work to point to
   • Present your work at Career Day

   Week 26

   Career Day: online, with every employer in our network.

   25. Portfolio and exam practice26. Interviews and Career Day

6. ∞

   Guild: Keep growing after you're hired

   ♾️RankGuild member

   After week 26

   If your employer chooses Graduate Support, your training continues for another 6 to 12 months while you work. Either way, your portfolio and the book are yours to keep.

   • Weekly training alongside your new job
   • Monthly coaching on your employer's tools
   • Manager check-ins with a written progress note
   • Your portfolio and the book, yours for good

   Optional

   Graduate Support is chosen and paid for by your employer. It never costs you anything.

   About Graduate Support

The skills you'll gain

Ten skills, and where our reviewers expect each one to be at every checkpoint. Pick a point in the program to see the levels.

How a week works

Cohort 1 starts in the first week of December 2026. Every week has the same shape, so you can plan the rest of your life around it. Live sessions run in US-friendly hours, and we share detailed notes after each one.

Live about 6 hours a week On your own time the rest, about 14 to 19 hours

The four projects

The book's four projects run through one fiscal year at a 2,000-person, all-remote software company modeled on GitLab's public handbook. The people and numbers are fictional; the practices are real.

• LedgerReplace the company's expense system

  An IT program to move 2,000 employees off an aging expense tool that takes eleven days to reimburse, before its support ends on 31 December. Sarbanes-Oxley controls apply to everything.

• BeaconShip a forecasting feature inside GitLab

  A product team builds delivery forecasts (“85% likely by 5 November”) into GitLab's milestones and epics, from twelve customer interviews to general availability.

• Run the EngineKeep a product area healthy

  The same engineers who build Beacon also own bugs, security fixes and performance for a large product area. Work that never ends needs flow, not sprints.

• HarborDeliver a fixed-price migration for a bank

  Professional services moves Meridian Bank's 3,000 developers to a dedicated GitLab instance: 8,000 repositories, 40 pipelines and training, for a fixed fee of $420,000.

The business core

Weeks 1 to 8 cover how 24 company functions work, from the close to the board. Weeks 9 to 24 add seven MBA core subjects, one case and one exercise a week, built around the program's case companies: Larkspur, a $140M freight-software company; an outdoor-gear brand; and a construction-tech start-up.

Gantt Guild is not affiliated with, or endorsed by, Harvard University or Harvard Business School.

Code and AI

No coding background is needed. Everyone starts from installing Python, and everything you build uses the projects' own data.

• Python

  Weeks 1 to 8, then alongside SQL

  Install Python and Jupyter, then strings, lists, dictionaries, pandas, graphs and simulation. By week 7 you re-run Ledger's Monte Carlo and get the book's numbers to the decimal.

• SQL

  From week 9

  DuckDB on your own laptop: SELECT and GROUP BY, COUNT(DISTINCT), joins and the fan-out trap, window functions, funnels and cohorts, incident timelines and earned value.

• Your AI agent

  Every week

  Claude Code or Codex. It scaffolds your GitLab project in week 1; by week 24 it builds an automation that drafts your weekly status. Every week, you check its work and log what it got wrong.

• Your AI playbook

  Weeks 16 to 26

  The prompts, checks and failure cases that held up over the program, written up as a document you bring to interviews.

Tools and accounts

You'll work in 47 tools, 33 of them documented in GitLab's public handbook, plus the ones other companies run on: Jira, Confluence, Microsoft Project and Smartsheet. We don't hand out accounts. You create your own, mostly on free plans, and start free trials in the weeks that need them. Setting up a workspace is part of the job.

Every tool, how you get access, and the weeks you'll use it

Career Days

Employers meet the cohort online three times. At each one they see real work, not a résumé line.

• Week 9Integrated project plans, defended live.
• Week 17Sprints, earned value, an incident review and a closed project.
• Week 26Complete portfolios, tool builds and an AI playbook.

If you're hired before the end, congratulations. Leave with nothing to pay back, or keep attending if your new job allows.

Who can apply

• You're 18 or older, live in the United States and are authorized to work there.
• You have a college degree or equivalent experience. Career returners, career changers and people who left college early are welcome.
• You can give 20 to 25 hours a week for 26 weeks.
• You have a laptop that runs a modern browser and Python, reliable internet, and a webcam.

We can't sponsor visas. If you need an adjustment to apply or take part, write to accessibility@ganttguild.com.

Certificate and exams

Graduates get a Gantt Guild certificate of completion and, more usefully, a public portfolio employers can open. Employers can confirm a graduate's completion by writing to admin@ganttguild.com.

The program also prepares you for PMI's CAPM exam, including a timed 160-question practice exam in week 25. The live instruction is well beyond the 23 hours of project management education PMI asks for, but Gantt Guild isn't a PMI Authorized Training Partner, so check PMI's current rules before you book.

What it costs

Employers fund Gantt Guild. A company that hires a graduate it met through us pays us a flat placement fee once they start, and some also pay for Graduate Support, 6 to 12 more months of training for the person they hired. The fee is between the employer and us: it never comes out of your pay and never limits where you can work.