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.
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About this Course
What you will learn
How to select and test agile practices to adaptively improve your team’s practice of agile
How to create an agile team charter that aligns your team’s focus with company strategy while leaving it free to work creatively
How to facilitate retrospectives with your team to iteratively, collaboratively improve your practice of agile
How to support your team’s transition to agile
Skills you will gain
- agile product management
- Agile Software Development
- backlog management
- Kanban
- XP
Offered by

University of Virginia
A premier institution of higher education, The University of Virginia offers outstanding academics, world-class faculty, and an inspiring, supportive environment. Founded by Thomas Jefferson in 1819, the University is guided by his vision of discovery, innovation, and development of the full potential of students from all walks of life. Through these courses, global learners have an opportunity to study with renowned scholars and thought leaders.
Syllabus - What you will learn from this course
The Agile Team
This week we’ll introduce the four fundamental jobs of software development to help you define what’s important to your team and, hence, which of the many agile practices might make the most sense for you to try out. Then we’ll talk about achieving alignment with your company while maintaining autonomy through an agile team charter. We’ll close by stepping through the leading agile methodologies--Scrum, XP, and kanban. You’ll finish the week with an understanding of how to pair what’s important to your team with the best of what agile has to offer.
Learning and Deciding
One of the most critical focal points for any team is facilitating a focus on outcomes over output. Without this, you’ll never graduate from responding to requests about your to-do list of output to driving better user outcomes that move the needle for your company. This week, you’ll learn how to define and prioritize what’s important to your team in the areas of learning and deciding, and to pair those with relevant agile practices from Scrum, XP, and kanban.
Building and Managing
This week we’ll dive into the jobs of building software and the core management jobs in running an agile team. Agile--and XP in particular--offers a rich body of work on specific coding practices. We’ll step through a few of the most prominent and discuss key linkages with the other concepts and practices you’ve learned. On the job of managing, we’ll dive deeper into what that means and what works in an agile context.
Practicing Agile
Now that you’ve learned about the four jobs of software development, you’ll have a chance to think through how they relate to your work in this week’s peer-reviewed assignment. You’ll finish the course with a clear plan to accomplish the jobs of learning, deciding, building, and managing for your project.
Reviews
- 5 stars77.21%
- 4 stars18.19%
- 3 stars2.92%
- 2 stars0.83%
- 1 star0.83%
TOP REVIEWS FROM MANAGING AN AGILE TEAM
I think this course is transformational. It enhance our understanding of collaboration and how to deliver value through experimentation, learning, and creating agile environment
I've really enjoyed this course on Managing an Agile Team. Comprehensive with a mix of insights from industry experts, case studies and great instructions on best practices from Alex.
Lots of good content and balance of expert interviews and examples from Spotify and Salesforce. One of my favorite courses in the Digital Product Management Specialization.
Alex was very practical while explaining Agile concepts and practices. Real industry experience was shared during the course, which for me was a effective thing.
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