Agile Process, Project, and Program Controls

University System of Maryland and University of Maryland, College Park via edX

Go to class Write review

Details

Go to class

Provider

edX
Pricing

Free Online Course (Audit)
Languages

English
Certificate

$249.00 Certificate Available
Duration & workload

4 weeks, 2-3 hours a week
Sessions

On-Demand
Level

Advanced
Subtitles

English, Arabic, German, Spanish, French, Hindi, Indonesian, Portuguese, Swahili, Telugu, Turkish, Chinese

Found in

Part of

Agile Project Management

4.6

Overview

Agile provides greater opportunities for control and risk management and offers unique benefits that traditional methods miss. As a project manager or program manager the emphasis should always be on delivering value and benefits. With complex projects these demand increase and knowing you've delivered value can be difficult for even those with years of project management experience.

However, in this course we'll cover the agile practices and management skills necessary to delivery value with certainty, such as:

Transparency with daily standup meetings discussing work status, risk, and pace.
How a clear definition of done drives acceptance by all key stakeholders.
Measuring performance and benefits of working solutions during project delivery.
Iteratively testing to gain authentic feedback on solution requirements and stability.
Regular retrospectives that drive continuous improvement into the team.
How agile project management ensures success and uniquely tackles business risk
Quality management principles to reduce project risk and technical debt
Manage and reduce interdependencies between project teams to scale programs at speed
Making the business case for agile contracts and how they ensure deliverables achieve business outcomes and objectives

In this course, you will learn how these levers of control far exceed traditional management methods of earned value management (EVM), which relies on estimates and no changes in scope. We'll discuss how the key to unlocking the control potential is to learn what to manage, and how to measure it. It's no longer just ensure the deliverables are delivered on-time and under-budget.

This shift to benefits management is in-line with how the PMBOK is changing to integrate program management concerns into project management with an emphasis on value and not just delivery of scope specifications. The Agile revolution requires program managers to embrace this type of continuing education to advance and grow in your project management career.

So how do programs ensure smooth project delivery?

This answer is bottoms-up with different controls at each level of management, separating the concerns between the program, the individual projects, and the team processes. For teams, it’s a focus on team velocity and how to ensure its measurement is useful for diagnosing internal and external productivity constraints. For the project, the focus is on how to integrate teams of teams on related projects and ensure stead delivery of product roadmaps. For the program, the focus is on what capabilities are delivered and how to measure return on investment (ROI) capabilities provide. This also requires understanding your portfolio and contracting processes.

While this course will not make you an agile certified practitioner (PMI-ACP), or certified scrum master (CSM), it offers a more fundamental agile certification based on agile principles and how agile leadership is applied in industry today. You'll finish this course more than ready to continue your agile journey, which we hope either completes your certificate with us or takes you to one of our most popular courses in the series, "Agile Leadership Principles and Practices."

Upon successful completion of this course, learners can earn 10 Professional Development Unit (PDU) credits, 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

Week 1: The first week of the control course examines the reason for controlling projects, why traditional controls such as Earned Value Management fail so often, and the three key components to any controlling process: value, constraints, and verification. Systems Engineering models are considered for their effectiveness in controlling, with an emphasis on the predominant controlling approach, the V-Model, and how it equivocates testing with development.
Week 2: The second week examines how control is managed across the project lifecycle, with the three Ps of management: people, process, and product. Real-world approaches and tools are discussed for all three levers across varying staffing approaches, release and sprint processes for quality assurance, and the use of product-level tools for quality control.
Week 3: The third week drives home the need to “begin with the end in mind” by closing User Stories incrementally using a Definition of Done that links the three Ps together across each sprint cycle (planning, execution, and control).
Week 4: The final fourth week addresses controlling Agile processes at scale, from sampling and building intuition across Agile team ceremonies, to managing team decisions and performance, and even portfolios of projects using simplified metrics. The fourth week will also look at how to align portfolio and project management metrics to an organization’s strategy as a means of managing up the risks of being defunded or constrained by corporate policy.

Taught by

John Johnson

Reviews

4.5 rating, based on 242 Class Central reviews

4.6 rating at edX based on 30 ratings

Start your review of Agile Process, Project, and Program Controls

Breno Queiroz @BrenoQueiroz

I recently completed the Agile Process, Project, and Program Controls course offered by the University System of Maryland via edX, and I am delighted to share my positive experience. The course content was not only comprehensive but also presented…

I recently completed the Agile Process, Project, and Program Controls course offered by the University System of Maryland via edX, and I am delighted to share my positive experience.

The course content was not only comprehensive but also presented in a clear and organized manner. Professor John Johnson's teaching style made complex concepts easy to understand, and his engaging video lectures were instrumental in enhancing my grasp of agile processes.

The professor's expertise and real-world insights added significant value to the course, making it both informative and practical. I particularly appreciated the well-structured modules and the hands-on approach to learning agile controls.

Overall, I am genuinely satisfied with the quality of the course and the effectiveness of Professor John Johnson's teaching. It has been a valuable learning experience, and I feel well-equipped with the knowledge and skills necessary for implementing agile practices in project and program management.

Thank you to the University System of Maryland and Professor John Johnson for delivering such a high-quality course.
Serena Bonini @serenabonini

This was a wonderful and very informative course. I really enjoyed the real world examples and the professor is excellent at breaking down complex ideas. However, I enjoyed this course less than the others of the series. There were multiple videos and much of the course was a review of the past courses. This was good in a way because it allowed you to review what you'd learned in past courses - everything was brought together. However, when new information was introduced it felt like it wasn't given as much space as it deserved. Having said that, I still really enjoyed it and think it would be a perfect "general info" course for anyone who just wants a taste of Agile.
Anonymous

Finished the course. Good video lectures, the summary notes are excellent for revision, and the course uses real life examples you can relate to. Overall the course was great.

However i did have an issue with the final "feedback Quiz (Points!)" component, it asks for all the tags associated with this course on Class-Central. On the site it only says "Agile" however when answering that i seem to get the answer wrong.
Anonymous

The content was both insightful and engaging, providing a solid foundation for understanding program controls. It effectively covered essential concepts and mechanisms that govern the functionality and efficiency of various programming elements.
Anonymous

This course has been an amazing opportunity for me to gain knowledge and because of the real world examples given understand in greater depth the principles of agile methods. I look forward to use this new gained knowledge in my profession!
Anonymous

As someone who comes from waterfall and lean management and has a natural fear of Agile, this course added a lot to me, opened a new perspective, and encouraged me to apply agile in business and life. Can't Wait!
Anonymous

The content of the course is great. The slides and transcripts are a bit unrefined - filled with errors and a bit repetitious if you have been taking the courses in order, but overall quite good.
Anonymous

There is definitely something wrong about tags and I could not answer Class-Central Feedback Quiz. Because here at course page just one tag - agile.
Joe Bingham

The overall course was really good. The material, slides, and references were very professional. I was happy to see that I could download the slide decks.

Cons, I wish that there were exercises with each module to give the learner the experience to build Agile tools in Excel or word or other along the way. The biggest question that I kept asking, is "What tools are there, how can I build them, what would they look like". The last class, seam a little rushed.

All in all, a great overall Agile class. Especially for the novice.
Anonymous

The material was insightful, and I especially liked the lessons on anti-fragility. I also liked the concepts on protecting teams: People, Process, Product. My only issue with the course is that I felt that quiz and test questions were not geared tow…

The material was insightful, and I especially liked the lessons on anti-fragility. I also liked the concepts on protecting teams: People, Process, Product. My only issue with the course is that I felt that quiz and test questions were not geared toward testing/reviewing my knowledge of course materials, but rather at seeing how confusing the questions could be constructed. I know it's important to make the tests challenging, but I felt like I was watching more for tricky-worded questions that I was at looking for answers.

Also, I kind of wish the final exam would be an all-or-nothing event like it was with the first two courses. While it's nice to get unlimited tries at the questions, I feel it lessens the overall value of the certificate, knowing that anyone could pay the money and force their way through to a passing grade, simply by guessing enough times. I sort of feel like I paid for a participation trophy.
Anonymous

its really osam course i really enjoy this course and i really grateful to all sir and mam for this course its really very useful to me in my future goal i really appreciate to do my work and i really tankful all members of this course
Mateo Ostojić

Great course, very helpful
I really enjoyed the real-world examples and the professor is excellent at breaking down complex ideas.
Anonymous

Gives lots of useful methods to manage Agile Process, Project, and Program Controls across different environments, including good case studies such as Spotify amongst others. It has information on leadership, teams, agile team management, procurement, and what types of procurement process to employ depending upon your project.
Clare Allen

Gives lots of useful methods to manage Agile Process, Project, and Program Controls across different environments, including good case studies such as Spotify amongst others. It has information on leadership, teams, agile team management, procurement, and the type of procurement process to employ depending upon your project.
Anonymous

This was a wonderful and very informative course. I really enjoyed the real world examples and the professor is excellent at breaking down complex ideas. However, I enjoyed this course less than the others of the series. There were multiple videos and much of the course was a review of the past courses. This was good in a way because it allowed you to review what you'd learned in past courses - everything was brought together. However, when new information was introduced it felt like it wasn't given as much space as it deserved. Having said that, I still really enjoyed it and think it would be a perfect "general info" course for anyone who just wants a taste of Agile.
Anonymous

This course tried to cram a ton of new material and also serve as a sort of capstone for the other four (and the overall certificate program.) I would recommend that either (a) some of the material be spread into the other courses, or (b) this be s…

This course tried to cram a ton of new material and also serve as a sort of capstone for the other four (and the overall certificate program.) I would recommend that either (a) some of the material be spread into the other courses, or (b) this be split into two courses. For example: Linear Programming should be more than 1/3 of a slide and mentioned in passing. Likewise, some of the case studies for FFP, CPIX, and T&M would be much better if there were covered in more depth (and honestly, made more generic and abstracted: there was some first-person perspective there that may not be ideal in an academic environment.)

Of the five courses, this was my favorite. I purchased ALL of the books that were referenced which I didn't already own. Please keep a watch out for grammar errors and typos. There were two in the final.
Anonymous

Hi, I really enjoyed the course!
Please note that some of the links in the 'additional resources part' do not work correctly. You may want to check and replace them with correct ones.

Thank you!

Best,
Bonka
Anonymous

Elements of this course are excellent and provide a good understanding of anti-fragility and agile. It's useful to have worked examples from the presenter's own experience which illustrate particular points. Negatives for me can be summarised as fo…

Elements of this course are excellent and provide a good understanding of anti-fragility and agile. It's useful to have worked examples from the presenter's own experience which illustrate particular points.

Negatives for me can be summarised as follows:
- Transcripts of the videos are available but have a number of errors, including one which is completely the wrong transcript for the video being shown.
- Some of the descriptions of principles are not the clearest, and the course could be made better if there were more attention paid to really making it as simple to understand as possible.
- A number of the review questions focused on whether you understood the specifics of an anecdote rather than the principle being described.
Anonymous

Finished the course. Good video lectures, the summary notes are excellent for revision, and the course uses real life examples you can relate to. Overall the course was great.
Dimitar Pavlov Ganchev

I really enjoyed the course, I felt really inspired by it. Everything was great, however I would have liked if there were more examples from the private sector, the ones given in the lectures were great, one or two more would have been more helpful, at least for me. I'd find it very difficult to say which one of the topics or lectures I learned the most from or found to the most beneficial for me, because everything is vital to know if you seek success.
Thank you