Agile Process, Project, and Program Controls

Overview

The Agile Process, Project, and Program Controls Certificate from EdX in partnership with University System of Maryland - USMx is part of the Agile Project Management Professional Certificate.

Agile provides greater opportunities for control and risk management and offers unique benefits that traditional methods miss, such as:

• Transparency with daily standup meetings discussing work status, risk, and pace.

• How a clear definition of done drives acceptance by all key stakeholders.

• Measuring performance and benefits of working solutions during project delivery.

• Iteratively testing to gain authentic feedback on solution requirements and stability.

• Regular retrospectives that drive continuous improvement into the team.

In this course, you will learn how these levers of control far exceed traditional management methods of earned value management (EVM), which relies on estimates and no changes in scope. We'll discuss how the key to unlocking the control potential is to learn what to manage, and how to measure it. This answer varies across levels of management, separating the concerns between the organization and the team. For the organization, the focus is on what capabilities are delivered and how to measure return on investment (ROI) capabilities provide. For teams, it’s a focus on team velocity and how to ensure its measurement is useful for diagnosing internal and external productivity constraints.

What you will learn

• Agile systems engineering to ensure valuable, integrated solutions

• Controlling projects through actual measurements vs. estimates (e.g. EVM)

• Essential methods for managing People, Process, and Product on empowered teams

• How to always be closing (ABC) with every project increment using a definition of done

• How real-world constraints and agile simplify portfolio management and decision science methods: go beyond LP, IP, and Genetics-based Search

• Enterprise alignment: how and why strategic plans, portfolio optimization, and project management can align with simple metrics, with facilitative leadership