Drive to Value with Agile Methods
Master an adaptive approach to product development
About This Specialization
In this Specialization, you'll gain an understanding and appreciation of the principles and practice of agile management. You'll learn to coordinate all aspects of the agile development process, including running design sprints, managing teams, and fostering a culture of experimentation. In the final Capstone Project, you'll apply what you've learned to guide a real-world software development project to successful completion.
UVA Darden
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5 courses
Follow the suggested order or choose your own.
Projects
Designed to help you practice and apply the skills you learn.
Certificates
Highlight your new skills on your resume or LinkedIn.
Courses
- Beginner Specialization.
- No prior experience required.
COURSE 1
Getting Started: Agile Meets Design Thinking
Current session: Aug 14 — Sep 25.- Commitment
- 5 weeks of study, 2 - 5 hours/week
- Subtitles
- English
About the Course
Despite everyone's good intentions, hard work and solid ideas, too many projects end up creating unneeded, unusable, and unsellable products. But it doesn't have to be this way. Agile and design thinking offer a different--and effective--approach to product development, one that results in valuable solutions to meaningful problems. In this course, you’ll learn how to determine what's valuable to a user early in the process--to frontload value--by focusing your team on testable narratives about the user and creating a strong shared perspective. We’ll show you how to: - Explain key concepts and practices from the agile product development methodology - Create a strong shared perspective and drive to value using personas and problem scenarios - Diagnose what software to develop and why using a set of agile user stories and prototypes - Facilitate narrative collaboration with user stories and prototypes - Allow for early testing and validation by analyzing and deciding on story backlogs As a Project Management Institute (PMI®) Registered Education Provider, the University of Virginia Darden School of Business has been approved by PMI to issue 25 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.COURSE 2
Running Product Design Sprints
Upcoming session: Aug 21 — Oct 2.- Commitment
- 5 weeks of study, 1-5 hours/week
- Subtitles
- English
About the Course
Typically, clients and managers don't want to pay for design (or strategy) -- they want ‘results’! Too often, this leads to solutions that just don’t make sense and aren’t valuable to anyone. Design sprints allow you to meet client's desire for quick, specific outcomes while making time to do things right. In this course, you’ll learn how to plan and run situation-appropriate sprints to avoid waste and deliver value sooner. We'll show you how to: - Plan, sell, and conduct design sprints that deliver valuable, actionable insights - Go out and learn who your customer really is and what’s important to them - Test your value propositions before you invest in building solutions - Test your user interface design to make sure it’s really usable - Focus and drive to actionable conclusions on questions of approach and architecture As a Project Management Institute (PMI®) Registered Education Provider, the University of Virginia Darden School of Business has been approved by PMI to issue 25 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. Prerequisites: Getting Started: Agile Meets Design Thinking or familiarity with agile and design thinking methodologies.COURSE 3
Managing an Agile Team
Current session: Aug 14 — Sep 18.- Commitment
- 4 weeks of study, 2-5 hours/week
- Subtitles
- English
About the Course
Traditional development processes often lead to team frustration and poor results. Agile offers a different approach to managing the complexity of software development. This course focuses on the day-to-day jobs of running a software development program and how leading agile methodologies (Scrum, XP, kanban) can help you do them better. From transitioning a team to agile to running sprints to managing stakeholders, this course gives you the skills you need to manage an agile team in your specific operating environment. We'll show you how to: - Think through and focus on the most important aspects of your projects and sprints - Facilitate your team’s initial and ongoing adoption of the specific agile practices that work for you - Anchor your outcomes and success criteria in durable ideas about what makes for valuable products - Support your team's transition from traditional approaches to agile - Create an agile-friendly environment across functional disciplines - Identify and manage outside stakeholder needs 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.COURSE 4
Testing with Agile
Upcoming session: Aug 21 — Sep 25.- Commitment
- 4 weeks of study, 2-4 hours/week
- Subtitles
- English
About the Course
To deliver agile outcomes, you have to do more than implement an agile process; you have to create a culture of experimentation. It's this commitment to experimenting that's at the heart of today’s most successful implementations of agile. This course shows you how to integrate the practice of experimentation across concept testing, usability testing, functional testing, and continuous deployment. Basically, we’ll show you how to use experiments to answer these three big questions: Should we build it? (And then: Did it matter?) Is it usable? Did it break? We'll show you how to: - Translate your product’s strategic direction into a user-centric charter with lots of small, testable ideas - Test user motivation to make sure you’re building something that matters - Design and conduct usability testing (even without working software) - Use narrative collaboration to focus your testing - Integrate functional testing into a more continuous release flow 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.COURSE 5
Agile Development in Practice (Project-centered Course)
Upcoming session: Oct 23 — Dec 25.- Commitment
- 8 weeks of study, 4-5 hours per week
- Subtitles
- English
About the Course
This project-centered course provides a guided opportunity for you to practice your agile development skills. Using the venture design process that frames the four courses in this Specialization, you will apply agile processes to a project of your choice or to a provided venture concept. From persona, problem scenario, and user story development to designing user testing and product launch, you’ll practice leading an agile project. You’ll finish the course with a portfolio-building design brief that demonstrates your learning and specialized skills in agile product development. To get the most out of this course, we suggest you first complete the other four courses in the Agile Development Specialization (Getting Started: Agile Meets Design Thinking; Running Product Design Sprints, Managing an Agile Team, Testing with Agile). By the end of this course, you'll be able to: --Formulate foundational positioning statements --Create, refine and test actionable personas --Conduct user interviews and analyze the results --Determine a 'happy path' to quickly test user stories --Run motivation and usability testing and evaluate the results As a Project Management Institute (PMI®) Registered Education Provider, the University of Virginia Darden School of Business has been approved by PMI to issue 40 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.
Creators
Alex Cowan
Faculty & Batten Fellow
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