Agile Project Management Specialization

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).

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. 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.

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: 1. Transparency with daily standup meetings discussing work status, risk, and pace. 2. How a clear definition of done drives acceptance by all key stakeholders. 3. Measuring performance and benefits of working solutions during project delivery. 4. Iteratively testing to gain authentic feedback on solution requirements and stability. 5. Regular retrospectives that drive continuous improvement into the team. 6. How agile project management ensures success and uniquely tackles business risk 7. Quality management principles to reduce project risk and technical debt 8. Manage and reduce interdependencies between project teams to scale programs at speed 9. 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).