Agile Development Specialization

Despite everyone's good intentions, hard work and solid ideas, too many teams end up creating products that no one wants, no one can use, and no one buys. 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. 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.

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.

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.

To deliver agile outcomes, you have to do more than implement an agile process- you have to create focus around what matters to your user and rigorously test how well what you’re doing is delivering on that focus. Driving to testable ideas (hypotheses) and maximizing the results of your experimentation is at the heart of a high-functioning practice of agile. This course shows you how to facilitate alignment and create a culture of experimentation across your product pipeline. You’ll understand how to answer these four big questions: 1. How do we drive our agility with analytics? 2. How do we create compelling propositions for our user?
 3. How do we achieve excellent usability?
 4. How do we release fast without creating disasters?
 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.