Agile Process, Project, and Program Controls

University System of Maryland and University of Maryland, College Park via edX

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Go to class

Provider

edX
Pricing

Free Online Course (Audit)
Languages

English
Certificate

$199.00 Certificate Available
Duration & workload

4 weeks long, 2-3 hours a week
Sessions
Level

Advanced
Subtitles

English

Found in

Part of

Agile Project Management

4.7

Overview

Agile provides greater opportunities for control and risk management and offers unique benefits that traditional methods miss. As a project manager or program manager the emphasis should always be on delivering value and benefits. With complex projects these demand increase and knowing you've delivered value can be difficult for even those with years of project management experience.

However, in this course we'll cover the agile practices and management skills necessary to delivery value with certainty, 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.
How agile project management ensures success and uniquely tackles business risk
Quality management principles to reduce project risk and technical debt
Manage and reduce interdependencies between project teams to scale programs at speed
Making the business case for agile contracts and how they ensure deliverables achieve business outcomes and objectives

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. It's no longer just ensure the deliverables are delivered on-time and under-budget.

This shift to benefits management is in-line with how the PMBOK is changing to integrate program management concerns into project management with an emphasis on value and not just delivery of scope specifications. The Agile revolution requires program managers to embrace this type of continuing education to advance and grow in your project management career.

So how do programs ensure smooth project delivery?

This answer is bottoms-up with different controls at each level of management, separating the concerns between the program, the individual projects, and the team processes. For teams, it’s a focus on team velocity and how to ensure its measurement is useful for diagnosing internal and external productivity constraints. For the project, the focus is on how to integrate teams of teams on related projects and ensure stead delivery of product roadmaps. For the program, the focus is on what capabilities are delivered and how to measure return on investment (ROI) capabilities provide. This also requires understanding your portfolio and contracting processes.

While this course will not make you an agile certified practitioner (PMI-ACP), or certified scrum master (CSM), it offers a more fundamental agile certification based on agile principles and how agile leadership is applied in industry today. You'll finish this course more than ready to continue your agile journey, which we hope either completes your certificate with us or takes you to one of our most popular courses in the series, "Agile Leadership Principles and Practices."

Upon successful completion of this course, learners can earn 10 Professional Development Unit (PDU) credits, which are recognized by the Project Management Institute (PMI). PDU credits are essential to those looking to maintain certification as a Project Management Professional (PMP).

Syllabus

Week 1: The first week of the control course examines the reason for controlling projects, why traditional controls such as Earned Value Management fail so often, and the three key components to any controlling process: value, constraints, and verification. Systems Engineering models are considered for their effectiveness in controlling, with an emphasis on the predominant controlling approach, the V-Model, and how it equivocates testing with development.
Week 2: The second week examines how control is managed across the project lifecycle, with the three Ps of management: people, process, and product. Real-world approaches and tools are discussed for all three levers across varying staffing approaches, release and sprint processes for quality assurance, and the use of product-level tools for quality control.
Week 3: The third week drives home the need to “begin with the end in mind” by closing User Stories incrementally using a Definition of Done that links the three Ps together across each sprint cycle (planning, execution, and control).
Week 4: The final fourth week addresses controlling Agile processes at scale, from sampling and building intuition across Agile team ceremonies, to managing team decisions and performance, and even portfolios of projects using simplified metrics. The fourth week will also look at how to align portfolio and project management metrics to an organization’s strategy as a means of managing up the risks of being defunded or constrained by corporate policy.

Taught by

John Johnson

Reviews

4.4 rating, based on 218 Class Central reviews

Start your review of Agile Process, Project, and Program Controls

Serena Bonini @serenabonini

This was a wonderful and very informative course. I really enjoyed the real world examples and the professor is excellent at breaking down complex ideas. However, I enjoyed this course less than the others of the series. There were multiple videos and much of the course was a review of the past courses. This was good in a way because it allowed you to review what you'd learned in past courses - everything was brought together. However, when new information was introduced it felt like it wasn't given as much space as it deserved. Having said that, I still really enjoyed it and think it would be a perfect "general info" course for anyone who just wants a taste of Agile.
Joe Bingham

The overall course was really good. The material, slides, and references were very professional. I was happy to see that I could download the slide decks.

Cons, I wish that there were exercises with each module to give the learner the experience to build Agile tools in Excel or word or other along the way. The biggest question that I kept asking, is "What tools are there, how can I build them, what would they look like". The last class, seam a little rushed.

All in all, a great overall Agile class. Especially for the novice.
Anonymous

Very comprehensive course. The last of the 5 to get the certification. I would say it is more demanding than the other 4 in the sense that involves more calculations. I would like to see more practical samples (maybe some sample files in the reference sections?).
In general, I'm very pleased with the course, i learned a lot. John Johnson is very knowledgeable and passionate and make the experience go really smooth.
I highly recommend the whole series to get the best foundation into the Agile world.
Anonymous

Anonymous completed this course.

Finished the course. Good video lectures, the summary notes are excellent for revision, and the course uses real life examples you can relate to. Overall the course was great.

However i did have an issue with the final "feedback Quiz (Points!)" component, it asks for all the tags associated with this course on Class-Central. On the site it only says "Agile" however when answering that i seem to get the answer wrong.
Mateo Ostojić

Great course, very helpful
I really enjoyed the real-world examples and the professor is excellent at breaking down complex ideas.
MICHAEL PATRICK

Great course. John presents the material in a dynamic and engaging way. I would highly recommend not only completing this course but the entire set of courses in order to obtain a certificate from a prestigious school such as the University of Maryland-College Park.
Shashini Withanage

It is a great course. Learned lots of things about agile projects and programs. The course content was excellent and as a development point, I would say that it would be great If you could explain the case studies in a simpler manner. It was a bit advanced for me.
Ramesh Bharamade

Agile process , project and program controls is a good training program and must for all fields of peoples. It emphasis on trust , buffer and avoids multi tasking. From last 5 years we are trying to reduce development cycle time of products and we have achieved in 80% of areas. Agile in small teams gives better results. Thanks for giving this opportunity.
Anonymous

The course provide topics for mastering on learning Framework, Methodology, Constraint, Guidance, Business Cases, etc. to perform project delivery in agile methodology and to be happier Project Manager .
Anonymous

Really insightful course with good reference material recommendations. Video's are clear and consice, easy to understand and follow.
Anonymous

Well, It is a good course, but if you are not a native English speaker it will be difficult to understand videos. The author uses many idioms. Sometimes verbal context very complicated connecting with a presentation slide. You always can check texts but it takes double time for you.
Anonymous

Anonymous completed this course.

There is definitely something wrong about tags and I could not answer Class-Central Feedback Quiz. Because here at course page just one tag - agile.
Anonymous

its really osam course i really enjoy this course and i really grateful to all sir and mam for this course its really very useful to me in my future goal i really appreciate to do my work and i really tankful all members of this course
Anonymous

Anonymous completed this course.

This course has a lot of information , what was good for me was the part that is related to contract types and when to use it and I would like if the course dive deeper in this part, vast majority of other lectures can be considered as kind of refreshement if you have already checked the four previous courses. it would better too to change the examples and business cases used to feel that you are always getting more info and perception that just refreshing same info with same examples.
Anonymous

Anonymous completed this course.

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 workstatus, risk, and pace. How a clear definition of done drives...

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 workstatus, risk, and pace.
How a clear definition of done drives acceptance by all key stakeholders.
Measuring performance andbenefits 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.

Upon successful completion of this course, learners can earn 10 Professional Development Unit (PDU) credits, which are recognized by the Project Management Institute (PMI). PDU credits are essential to those looking to maintain certification as a Project Management Professional (PMP).
Anonymous

Anonymous completed this course.

Completes the entire program, all 5 courses.
I must say that I am very disappointed by the program. There is valuable theoretical information in there yes - but then again I could also just buy a book for 50euros and know the same.
There is 0 interaction and no practical assignments such as case studies, it really is sole theoretical which I thought is a pity...
Anonymous

Anonymous completed this course.

I really enjoyed this course. I liked the videos and summary points to help to understand project control. I took all 5 courses programme and I found this one really useful. Just the amount of information covered on the course and length of videos was, in my opinion, much more than on the past courses, making it longer to finish than others.
Anonymous

Anonymous completed this course.

I really enjoyed this course. I liked the videos and summary points to help to understand project control. I took all 5 chapter courses and I found this one really useful. Just the amount of information covered on the course and length of videos was, in my opinion, much more than on the past courses, making it longer to finish than others.
Anonymous

I would have liked more interaction with the teacher and other students in this course. Some parts of the materials are not clearly explained. Too many technical terms which make difficult to follow the explanations. The course took me more time than expected. Many typos in the written materials.
Anonymous

It is such a great course. This course will teach us how to be agile, how to increase success rate. It tells us when to use Traditional, Lean or Agile. It helps us how to deal with team effectively. It also teach us how to develop an effective contract to be agile. Thank you for the course.