Agile Project Management

University of Maryland, College Park via Coursera Specialization

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Provider

Coursera Specialization
Pricing

Paid Course
Languages

English
Certificate

Certificate Available
Duration & workload

16 weeks, 3 hours a week

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Overview

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In this Professional Certificate program, you will learn the mechanics of how to design and facilitate projects using “pure” Agile Scrum and Lean Kanban techniques. You will also learn the trade-offs of using hybrid techniques such as Lean Startup, Scaled Agile For the Enterprise (SAFe), and Disciplined Agile Development. We will then go beyond these frameworks to the science and essential principles you’ll need to ensure you get the greatest benefits of Agile Project Management methods: Speed, Innovation, Leadership, and Kaizen (Change for the Better). After completing this course series, you will be able to clearly explain how Agile techniques address faults in traditional project management techniques, the tradeoffs (benefits and risks) of these approaches, and when it’s best to apply them to maximize value to the organization. Engineers, managers, designers, creators, and executers of all types will benefit from learning these principles of Agile. Whether you’re delivering a small part of a project or portfolios of large multi-million-dollar government works; these principles scale and apply to all industries to achieve delivery success. This is why companies that are embracing these principles continue to set record earnings and stock prices (e.g. AMZN, APPL, TSLA); and those that ignore them find themselves unable to compete. Upon successful completion of this program, learners can earn up to 50 Professional Development Unit (PDU) credits.

Syllabus

Course 1: Applied Scrum for Agile Project Management
Course 2: Sprint Planning for Faster Agile Team Delivery
Course 3: Agile Innovation and Problem Solving Skills
Course 4: Agile Leadership Principles and Practices
Course 5: Agile Process, Project, and Program Controls

Courses

39 reviews
7 hours 31 minutes
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By completing this course, you’ll gain a strong foundation in Agile principles and Scrum practices, the most widely used Agile framework across industries today. You’ll learn not only why Agile has become the standard in IT and beyond, but also how to apply Scrum’s core roles, processes, and tools to drive team success. Through real-world case studies and practical exercises, you’ll explore how Agile teams organize, plan, and deliver value faster, and how Scrum adapts to different industries and project scales. This course stands out by focusing on the essential skills and mindsets needed to thrive in any Agile environment—without requiring prior experience or advanced certifications. You’ll finish ready to contribute confidently to Agile teams, with a clear understanding of Scrum’s mechanics, common pitfalls, and how Agile principles can accelerate your career. Plus, you’ll earn 10 PMI-recognized Professional Development Units (PDUs), helping you maintain your Project Management Professional (PMP) certification and advance your professional growth.
6 reviews
5 hours 49 minutes
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Speed is by far the most sought-after benefit of Agile. First mover advantages, the economic cost of delays, and the enabling effect on innovation drive the search for speed. Agile offers the fastest means of attaining speed: managing scope. But beyond the hype over scope management, there are key principles of non-traditional task management that ensure the scope chosen is delivered as efficiently as possible. In this course, you'll learn how to drive speed into any project by selecting and limiting work-in-progress through agile planning and task management. There are two principle roles involved, the scrum master and the product owner. However, the entire scrum team needs to understand the principles behind backlog refinement, sprint planning, and execution throughout the sprint cycle. In this course we'll show you how to run effective sprint planning meetings that produce a sprint backlog ready to deliver on your sprint goals and release objectives. You'll learn the power of prioritizing backlog items, and why we agile planning and sprint planning isn't just a managed list you work top-down in priority order. Instead, scrum teams commit to achieving goals and work together to ensure the user stories that are highest priority get delivered in this sprint, so the upcoming sprint isn't delayed. This also means understanding your team capacity and how to ensure safe and on-time delivery of the highest items on the product backlog that actually matter to your customer. 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 sprint planning enables hyper productivity in industry today. You'll finish this course more than ready to continue your agile journey, which we hope takes you to the next course in the series on “Agile Innovation and Problem Solving Skills.” 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).
10 reviews
6 hours 48 minutes
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Innovative products and services change lives, and having the right innovative process creates an competitive advantage. Ultimately, innovation is about one thing: problem solving. As an agile problem solver, you'll need to expand your critical thinking skills to address the key sources of risk in developing best solutions for your new products and business lines. The Problem-solving techniques covered begin with problem definition, beginning with job descriptions and applying the right soft skills to enhance requirements gathering. This ensures you're targeting a good problem to solve, and that you understand the business model. The course then moves on to practices such as "brainstorm and storm drain" to target new creative solutions. You will learn how innovation works on fast feedback cycles to test possible solutions and target root causes of defects. Creative thinking isn't a straight line, and neither should the problem-solving process be a straight line. Each course of action needs early and frequent testing. By following best practices of Agile, including timeboxes, constraint-based thinking processes, and empathetic problem solving, you'll learn how to provide a sustainable innovation environment for your teams.
15 reviews
7 hours 35 minutes
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Develop Agile Leadership skills. Master change management, evolve leadership theories, and Agile principles to drive collaboration, empower teams, and lead effectively in dynamic environments. This Agile Leadership Principles course takes you from foundational leadership concepts to advanced agile practices. You’ll explore how modern leadership values collaboration, continuous improvement, and empowering teams. Learn to facilitate self-organizing teams, delegate effectively, and align your team around shared goals. The course covers evolving leadership theories, the difference between leadership and management, and how agile integrates the best of modern leadership practices. Understand key agile roles like Scrum Master and Product Owner to lead projects smoothly and foster a motivated, autonomous team environment. Designed for new and experienced leaders, this course emphasizes developing an agile mindset—embracing transparency, adaptability, and continuous learning. By the end, you’ll be ready to create high-performing teams, improve decision-making, and navigate change with agility. Join now to transform your leadership approach and make a lasting impact in your organization.
2 reviews
10 hours 22 minutes
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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: 1. Transparency with daily standup meetings discussing work status, risk, and pace. 2. How a clear definition of done drives acceptance by all key stakeholders. 3. Measuring performance and benefits of working solutions during project delivery. 4. Iteratively testing to gain authentic feedback on solution requirements and stability. 5. Regular retrospectives that drive continuous improvement into the team. 6. How agile project management ensures success and uniquely tackles business risk 7. Quality management principles to reduce project risk and technical debt 8. Manage and reduce interdependencies between project teams to scale programs at speed 9. 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).