Agile Project Management

University System of Maryland via edX Professional Certificate

Overview

Nominated for the 2020 edX Prize

In this Professional Certificate program, you will learn the mechanics of how to design and facilitate projects using “pure” Agile Scrum and Lean Kanban techniques. You will also learn the trade-offs of using hybrid techniques such as Lean Startup, Scaled Agile For the Enterprise (SAFe), and Disciplined Agile Development.

We will then go beyond these frameworks to the science and essential principles you’ll need to ensure you get the greatest benefits of Agile Project Management methods: Speed, Innovation, Leadership, and Kaizen (Change for the Better).

After completing this course series, you will be able to clearly explain how Agile techniques address faults in traditional project management techniques, the tradeoffs (benefits and risks) of these approaches, and when it’s best to apply them to maximize value to the organization.

Engineers, managers, designers, writers, creators, and executers of all types will benefit from learning these principles of Agile. Whether you’re delivering a small part of a project or portfolios of large multi-million-dollar government works; these principles scale and apply to all industries to achieve delivery success. This is why companies that are embracing these principles continue to set record earnings and stock prices (e.g. AMZN, APPL, TSLA); and those that ignore them find themselves unable to compete.

Upon successful completion of this program, learners can earn up to 50 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: Applied Scrum for Agile Project Management

Learn the project management processes, roles, mechanics, and philosophies behind Scrum, the simplest and most pure approach to managing work at the team level.

Course 2: Sprint Planning for Faster Agile Team Delivery

Drive speed into any project with prioritized backlogs, limiting work-in-process, and engaging the entire agile team in effective sprint planning.

Course 3: Agile Innovation and Problem Solving Skills

Learn how to deliver greater value through Agile solution targeting and theory of constraints that unleash your team's innovative potential.

Course 4: Agile Leadership Principles and Practices

Accelerate and improve team decisions by learning Agile’s facilitating leadership principles to unleash team productivity, motivation, and problem solving.

Course 5: Agile Process, Project, and Program Controls

Learn Agile controls that get work done with confidence by using true transparency (actuals not estimates) and continuous improvement to ensure your people, process, and products deliver valuable, working solutions.

Courses

1K reviews
4 weeks, 2-3 hours a week, 2-3 hours a week
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Scrum and Agile are often considered synonymous, and there is a good reason. Scrum embodies the simplest and most pure approach to managing project work at the team level. Scrum is employed by over half of all Agile practitioners across all industries. While agile may have started in software development, many industries now use an agile methodology to deliver their work. The basis for agile, the agile manifesto, extends well beyond its origins in extreme programming and agile software development. Development teams around the world are now using kanban boards and assigning strong product owners to direct self-organizing teams to deliver on prioritized product backlogs. And nearly every new product has some sort of IT component and goes through an agile development lifecycle.
- Today nearly 100% of IT organizations use Agile and many other industries are quickly following;
- The likelihood of being on a Scrum or Scrum-like project is quickly approaching 50/50 or better over time.
While the Mastering Agile Professional Certificate program emphasizes principles at the heart of all Agile frameworks, in this course we start by learning the key project management processes, roles, mechanics, and philosophies behind Scrum. This will provide the basis for all understanding Agile in its purest form over four weeks exploring Why, Who, How, and finally What Scrum looks like applied in the real world. From understanding the agile team members, like scrum master and product owner, to the important differences in lean and agile 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 scaled agile is applied in industry today. You'll finish this course more than ready to begin your agile journey, which we hope takes you to the next course in the series on “Sprint Planning for Faster Agile Team Delivery.”

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).
286 reviews
4 weeks, 2-3 hours a week, 2-3 hours a week
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Speed is by far the most sought-after benefit of Agile.

First mover advantages, the economic cost of delays, and the enabling effect on innovation drive the search for speed. Agile offers the fastest means of attaining speed: managing scope. But beyond the hype over scope management, there are key principles of non-traditional task management that ensure the scope chosen is delivered as efficiently as possible.

In this course, you'll learn how to drive speed into any project by selecting and limiting work-in-progress through agile planning and task management. There are two principle roles involved, the scrum master and the product owner. However, the entire scrum team needs to understand the principles behind backlog refinement, sprint planning, and execution throughout the sprint cycle.

In this course we'll show you how to run effective sprint planning meetings that produce a sprint backlog ready to deliver on your sprint goals and release objectives. You'll learn the power of prioritizing backlog items, and why we agile planning and sprint planning isn't just a managed list you work top-down in priority order. Instead, scrum teams commit to achieving goals and work together to ensure the user stories that are highest priority get delivered in this sprint, so the upcoming sprint isn't delayed. This also means understanding your team capacity and how to ensure safe and on-time delivery of the highest items on the product backlog that actually matter to your customer.

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 sprint planning enables hyper productivity in industry today. You'll finish this course more than ready to continue your agile journey, which we hope takes you to the next course in the series on “Agile Innovation and Problem Solving Skills.”

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).
271 reviews
4 weeks, 2-3 hours a week, 2-3 hours a week
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Innovative products and services change lives, and having the right innovative process creates an competitive advantage. Ultimately, innovation is about one thing: problem solving.

As an agile problem solver, you'll need to expand your critical thinking skills to address the key sources of risk in developing best solutions for your new products and business lines. The Problem-solving techniques covered begin with problem definition, beginning with job descriptions and applying the right soft skills to enhance requirements gathering. This ensures you're targeting a good problem to solve, and that you understand the business model. The course then moves on to practices such as "brainstorm and storm drain" to target new creative solutions. You will learn how innovation works on fast feedback cycles to test possible solutions and target root causes of defects. Creative thinking isn't a straight line, and neither should the problem-solving process be a straight line. Each course of action needs early and frequent testing.

Key lessons taught in this course are:
- Delivering business value, not technical scope with User Stories
- Why innovating is the key to risk management and gaining a competitive advantage
- The best innovation process for startups in new markets or disruptive innovations, versus sustaining product and process innovations
- How to employ an innovation process that fits your business model and situation
- Using Cross-functional teams and user stories to gather accurate requirements
- Leveraging constraints to apply tested solutions to new technology and new innovations
- Applying Test-Driven Design (TDD) to deliver better designs with less designing
By following best practices of Agile, including timeboxes, constraint-based thinking processes, and empathetic problem solving, you'll learn how to provide a sustainable innovation environment for your teams.

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 innovation is accomplished in industry today. You'll finish this course more than ready to continue your agile journey, which we hope takes you to the next course in the series on “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).

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).
490 reviews
4 weeks, 2-3 hours a week, 2-3 hours a week
View details
Agile can often challenge project managers in the realm of leadership. Old styles of command-control are now a thing of the past, except for the most conservative organizations. While good leaders employ a variety of leadership skills and leadership styles to motivate team members, even this is not enough. Simply setting a common goal and maintaining positive attitudes while raising your emotional intelligence will make you a better leader; but will it truly unlock your team's potential?

Instead of leadership traits, Agile leadership emphasizes facilitation and communication skills. This is teachable and much more powerful. This unique and effective leadership style challenges traditional beliefs in what leadership means.

Great leaders understand that the leader can no longer stand in the way of their team. Modern society, mindsets, and global competition demand new leadership roles, and leadership qualities all together that empower and motivate the team to new levels of productivity. Business leaders that miss this critical shift in leadership styles concede a powerful competitive advantage to the Agile leader.

In this course, you will learn how this new style of leadership redefines and redistributes team roles by:
- Motivating through empowerment to gain better decisions
- Facilitating the creativity and inclusivity of a high-functioning team
- Identifying and managing decision making biases
- Negotiating conflicts across individuals, teams, and organizations
- Ensuring success through delegation and powerful constraint-based metrics.
- You’ll learn to turn one internally motivated and critically thinking mind into many; and driving speed and innovation through leveraging all talents on the team.
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 takes you to the next course in the series on Agile Process, Project, and Program Controls.

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).
242 reviews
4 weeks, 2-3 hours a week, 2-3 hours a week
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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).

Taught by

John Johnson

Reviews

4.6 rating, based on 8 Class Central reviews

Start your review of Agile Project Management

Ruy Perez

The Professional Certificate in Agile Project Management is ideal for all level of professionals. I am sure junior Agile Project Managers or Scrum Masters will learn the necessary skills to start with good practices their journey. I also think more experienced Project Managers or Scrum Masters will benefit from this course since it covers a wide number of topics that are meant to have a much better performance.
I personally enjoyed this course because not only I could refresh topics I have learned before, but also learn new ones with clear examples. I could study the lessons anytime anywhere, and read the additional links.
If you can afford the cost, I encourage anyone to enroll and enjoy the five courses of this program.
Anonymous

This course is a great introduction to Agile Project Management using Scrum. I enjoyed the videos and also the additional resources that it provides. I also highly recommend taking the other courses for more real-world examples. I can't wait to finish the whole program.
Anonymous

This course is a great introduction to Agile Project Management using Scrum. I enjoyed the videos and also the additional resources that it provides. I also highly recommend taking the other courses for more real-world examples. I can't wait to finish the whole program.
Anonymous

This course will help to understand how agile frameworks work and what are the benefits to use it, It gives knowledge of how the scrum help team to work collaboratively and deliver the working product over the lengthy document
Anonymous

This is a great avenue to acquire more profound skills and knowledge needed in the area of leadership and management practices.

It is a great honor to be part of this family of teaching and learning system.
Shalom
Hanna Cecilia Bramfeldt

While packed with technical information and examples, there is also a large HR ingredient which is great. All supported by clear and useful notes.
Mona Elkamhawy

Informative and astonishing program, the order of the courses allows you to step into the Agile concept gradually and deeply till you master them and understand the big "Why".

Mentioning the references draws the guidelines for any passionate candidate to move forward in the career of project management.

What's the most amazing is the use of multiples references besides the strong experience. I highly recommend it to everyone in the project management field.
Eduardo Valério

The course has an adequate load for an introductory course on applying Scrum in project management. The quality of the material and the videos is good, however, for immediate application, it would be interesting to make available templates.

Go to class

Applied Scrum for Agile Project Management

Sprint Planning for Faster Agile Team Delivery

Agile Innovation and Problem Solving Skills

Agile Leadership Principles and Practices

Agile Process, Project, and Program Controls

Taught by

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