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Learner Reviews & Feedback for Managing an Agile Team by University of Virginia

4.7
stars
1,326 ratings

About the Course

While agile has become the de facto standard for managing digital innovation teams, many wonder if they’re doing it ‘right’. Twitter is full of jokes about how teams say they do agile but don’t ‘really’ do it. The reality is that getting the most out of agile is less about observing specific procedures and more about how a team focuses and measures their progress. Rather than just boring you with an accounting of agile methodologies, this course focuses on helping you better charter your team’s focus, definition of success, and practice of agile. While learning about agile mainstays like Scrum, XP, and kanban, you’ll also learn to help your team ask the right questions about how they’re working and facilitate good answers on how agile can help. This course is supported by the Batten Institute at UVA’s Darden School of Business. The Batten Institute’s mission is to improve the world through entrepreneurship and innovation: www.batteninstitute.org....

Top reviews

FB

Nov 12, 2018

I have learned new things about agile practices and it worth the time to take the course. Sometimes I had the impression that some subject are vague, but overall the course rised to the expectations

EG

Dec 11, 2019

This course was Excellent. The Instructor is very engaging and kept my attention through all of the 4 weeks of class. The Assignment was extremely helpful in applying the learning to a project.

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1 - 25 of 335 Reviews for Managing an Agile Team

By Oleg S

Jun 26, 2017

The course was challenging for me since I lacked the experience of working in an IT/Software Development, but I thought all the practical exercises forced me to develop some practical skills.

By Javier D H M

Jan 18, 2021

Great course on how to implement Agile in an organization, taking into account Agile principles and the different frameworks and methodologies there are. A very practical approach to it

By Ico R

Jun 18, 2016

I gave the first course a very bad review and the second course an ok review. Now I am very impressed about how they are constantly working to improve all aspects of the course.

For example: Now you can download the assignments on word (before you had to copy item by item from a pdf) and the test are not so ambiguous as they used to be. I remember, in the past, to continuously have the feeling that questions in test were too open to interpretation and that the right answer will be defined by some random detail, now they are definitely more straight forward.

I also happened to have to log-in in the Online University where I got my Master's Degree years ago and saw their interface is still the same 0 user friendly and a very bad feeling of impossible communication so it really helped me appreciate the effort in improving the course. I really appreciate how they are willing to apply agile methodology to the course and with each iteration they make it better!

By Wahyu Q P R

Apr 18, 2019

Granted, it is difficult to teach a course that really begs for practical learning through a medium that is severely limited for that purpose. It is not practical to ask students to create groups and "role play" an AGILE team through a sprint phase, for example, given that students' enrolment periods might be different. But this is exactly what was lacking in the course, because in my humble opinion, managing an AGILE team cannot be learned through reading and writing.

By Lara S

May 28, 2022

I do not doubt the instructor's skill, experience and knowledge in the field of Agile, however, he's not a good teacher. This class was extremely stressful because most of the time is spent trying to keep up with what he's saying and understand the content. As such, this course is not for beginners who are looking to learn about Agile, Scrum, etc, or anyone who is not an expert to be honest.

I pushed through the course in hopes that the clarity gained along the way would make up for all the stress and turmoil from the begininnng and majority of the course, but unfortunately, I did not feel as though I learned enough to feel at ease or confident in what I gained intellectually after completing this class.

He would talk extremely fast, fly through slides, his handwriting was not legible (respectfully), and as I previously stated, he would not break down concepts and really teach them so that the viewers could gain an undrestanding of Agile. This seemed to be more of a "brush up" course for people who already are or have been in the Agile field for a while.

By Krunal S P

Feb 25, 2019

First of all, I would like to thank Coursera and Alex for such a wonderful course on "Managing an Agile Team".

I am working as an Engineering Manager in a semiconductor industry for the last five years without any formal training on Agile approach. I thank myself for going through this helpful material. This course has tools, techniques and a approach to appreciate and manage an Agile team.

It is the amalgamation of right tools, right assignment with peer reviews and right views/recommendations from the industry veterans who are practicing Agile principles, right at your study table.

Go for it. Worth it!

By Magnus S

Jul 27, 2020

The Interviews that Alex has with the field Agile Practitioners and Project Managers, provides an in-depth perspective on how to apply these practices.

The Agile is like the Social Psychology of Project Management, and I believe that any PMP in this day and age needs to at least, understand the practice of Agile and Lean.

Waste is something that doesn't discriminate between industries, as should Agile's application not just be limited to Tech and development and can find an application anywhere, where there is a compelling Narrative.

By Johannes G S

Aug 11, 2020

This course is a very good closing course for the specialization. This course teach you how it all come together.

By Gabriel M

Jul 28, 2020

Excellent!

By Ulpiano I

Oct 7, 2019

The information is very useful however the format of videos is too long and boring some times, I appreciate the effort to make dynamic however I think you polish the content a little bit more. Thanks for the course.

By Lauren R

Oct 3, 2017

Courses 1 and 3 are so similar, they could easily be combined to be only one course. I would recommend adding either an additional week

By Константин К

Aug 28, 2018

Instructor is beating about a bush all the course.

The lectures are verbose and don't contain much substance

By Michael F

Jun 6, 2019

seemed more vague than other courses.

By arun v

Jan 16, 2020

I was quite excite and enthused to enroll in this course as Agile is the 'in-thing' in IT industry. After going through the course content it appeared that the concept has been stretched rather tortuously. The instructor , with his long and never-ending sentences , was soporific in his style and unnecessarily verbose. The only interesting part were the interviews. The last part - Peer graded assignment is worded do convoluted , it took days to understand what is required. A thoroughly disappointing course.

By Pradnya P B

Oct 10, 2019

The Assignments are vague and broad, how can we be asked to take any project and design Trello board for it, alteast the instructor can provide a sample project and guide with high level requirements for the project.

Also the content has been unnecessarily elongated with interviews of industry experts , the course size could easily be cut down by half, by removing atleast some of the expert interviews

By Nirav S

Mar 25, 2022

It was too boring, complex & theoretical which has totally been bounced from my head. I have just completed it as it was mandatory by the company. Please kindly make it a bit interesting. :(

By Miriam J

Aug 3, 2020

The Managing an Agile Team taught lessons were key to aligning essential Agile principles, and practices to non-software development business processes at my workplace. Applying Agile principles to achieve a highly functional team in the construction industry, seemed far fetched but these Agile practices have proved to produce very effective results over the years in building highly functional teams, robust to change, hence my desire to give it a try. This course has created the clarity I needed to apply Agile principles and practices to company processes, especially in a non-software development field, to achieve efficiency and save cost at work. It has also built up a series of ideas needed to approach a non-Agile friendly environment that suffers from very low alignment with some sort of autonomy.

By Mehrdad D

Nov 8, 2021

This course has not only been the best course I've ever taken in Coursera, but also it is the best in my entire life. The instructor has raised teaching standards so high in my perspective that I can merely imagine I would ever enjoy a course this much later on in my life. Everything was superb, outstanding and wonderful. Thank you very much Alex for the awesome job you did in this course, thanks UVA for giving this opportunity and thanks Coursera for facilitating the whole thing. This course is worthy of each second you spend in it, and believe me, words can't describe how informative and useful it is.

By Amit M

Aug 12, 2019

Very well structured and Alex gives some very practical advice. Obviously Agile is something that you can learn through practice but it is a very good starter pack. A few case studies and best practices helped me to compare scenarios that I am facing with the ones that I studied here and choose the options that i wodl want to explore with the team. Also it helped me in understanding the predicament that each stakeholder faces, while execution of a project in an Agile way and how to may be help people understand the objective and benefits of adopting Agile.

By Jaime S

Jun 25, 2018

This course was a great overview and foundation of key principles and concepts in agile practices among teams. This course would benefit anyone that is managing agile projects or teams. Even if you understand agile principles, I would still recommend this course to gain a good understanding of the methodologies and practices that are popular today. I like the Coursera content that incorporates interviews with influencers in the industry.

By Jesús D

Nov 15, 2020

This is one the better course in development product/software. It has a very practical with examples than help to you in the journey to undertand, assimilate and capture the real value of Agile Development.

Mr Cowan, thank you very much. I appreciatte your time in developing the course together with tools than help to support the learning process. Finally, this is the first step, now I´m going to apply in. Thank you again.

By Fakhar I

Sep 27, 2023

Alex approach to teaching is very effective. He is able to break down complex concepts into easy-to-understand terms. The course content is up to mark, He also uses a variety of teaching methods video discussions with industrial experts, and real world problems solving, exercises, to keep students engaged. Overall, I highly recommend Managing an Agile Team course to anyone who wants to learn about Agile Management.

By Abigail G E

Aug 24, 2020

This was a great course, each video delivers a lot of value, sometimes I had to watch and read it more than once to take advantage of everything Alex said. Very good guests, enrich the points of view and complement the idea of the benefits of agile. Widely recommended. I already had experience in agile and without a doubt this still helps to refine concepts and add new ones.

By Benoit d L

Mar 25, 2017

Great course with a very good mix of theory, practice and real-world practitioners.

I believe this course will be especially helpful for teams transitioning to agile and for "classical" project managers. The age of "command and control" has passed and Agile is a great iteration on top of this management style. Great teacher, great content and great course!

By Erez M

Apr 30, 2018

It might sound strange, but there are only a few good courses that really deal with agile development. This course is definitly one of them. I have enjoyed the format of this course and the journey it took me through. The live interviews with experts from the industry are a great bonus to the learning. Thank you Alex!.