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About the Agile Specialization

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Managing an Agile Team

University of Virginia

4.7 (577 ratings) | 26K Students Enrolled

Course 3 of 5 in the Agile Development Specialization

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. As a Project Management Institute (PMI®) Registered Education Provider, the University of Virginia Darden School of Business has been approved by PMI to issue 20 professional development units (PDUs) for this course, which focuses on core competencies recognized by PMI. (Provider #2122) 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.

Skills You'll Learn

agile product management, Agile Software Development, backlog management, Kanban, XP

Reviews

4.7 (577 ratings)

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OS

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.

SA

Jun 05, 2019

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.

From the lesson

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.

About the Agile Specialization4:27

Drive to Value with Agile Methods2:26

Taught By

Alex Cowan
Faculty & Batten Fellow

Transcript

Thanks for joining me for the Agile development specialization or thinking about it, I thought I'd introduce that here. A specialization on Coursera is a set of courses, five in this case. And they are about Agile, specifically, really about two principal things. One is, how do we make sure we're creating something valuable for our user? How do we make sure that instead of just creating output, lots of software we're also making sure that we drive to valuable outcomes for the user. I'm trying to balance those things. But Agile provides some great tools to make sure that you're attending to both. Two, how do we make sure that our team is learning how to work better and better together. Because that's hard and you need to attend to that as well as well. Agile is a great way to do both those things and the nice thing is that they're kind of packaged up. So that you use the same techniques and the same. Now, Agile is a pretty big tent and I like to use this product pipeline that you see here to kind of think about the overall practice. This product pipeline is something where we say, hey, we all go where we use these terms. We'll go from observations about what we ought to build to released product of some sort that we're putting out to our users or our customers. Then we have these various steps in between. I like to think about Agile in these three big chunks, one, continuous design. How do we make sure that as we iterate, as we go through our Agile iterations, we're getting better and better at making sure that the ratio of software that we release, that users find valuable, that sees high engagement is going up? Two, there's a kind of core Agile development. Here, more than anything in reality, we're looking at really these. Are we getting better and better at releasing more software as we go along? Because even though we need to balance output with outcomes, we do need to have output for the magic to happen. Finally, the third chunk, we have continuous deliveries. How frequently are we able to release and kind of implicit with that, you get the question of are we making the release process better? Which is so important, so we making tests and deployment more automated, more reliable, more continuous. And that is a really important part of both making sure that your product deliveries and your team itself is healthy, durable and able to get better and better over time. Let me just tell you how we're going to do that in the Agile development specialization. Well, in course one, we're getting really focused on kind of this chunk here in the practice of continuous design. Well, how do we make sure that we're going out, we're getting the right observations, qualitative and quantitative. We're driving to testable and tested ideas, so we don't over-invest in building something that nobody wants. We create good designs that are highly usable by users and highly actionable for code execution. In course two, we're going to kind of continue with this general area and we're really going to look at, how do we use Agile to make space, just enough space to do that type of work? So how do we use one week iterations to go out and talk to customers about a specific design question we have? Or run a lean startup experiment or test for usability. In course three, we're going to look at Agile development and how do we take the various options? All the great practices that are out there, not all of which we're going to use the same time. And how do we pair those with the underlying jobs to be done that our team actually has? Things that we need to do, like learning about what's valuable and making good decisions about what to build and how to test it. In course four, we're going to look at this question of hypothesis driven development. So how do we, and we know a lot about how to do a lot of these different things across the pipeline. How do we use testable ideas hypothesis to really link all this work together across the pipeline? And make sure that as we iterate from observation through these steps to release product, that we have good testable ideas about what we're releasing. Whether it's having an impact as well as our Agile practices and whether they're working for us. Finally, we have a chance for you to practice all that in a project-based course where you will just basically integrate all that in a project that you'll execute. Well, I hope you'll consider joining me. I have found personally, as both an intrapreneur and an entrepreneur that Agile is a great way to really engage on the serious work of making sure that you're getting something valuable out there for the user. As well as creating healthy teams that are productive and durable.

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