Graduate Certificate in Lean & Agile Practices
Course Details
To earn a Graduate Certificate in Lean & Agile Practices, you must successfully complete the 4 required courses (12 credits total) listed below. Fundamentals must be taken first; the remaining three courses can be taken in any order you choose.
Agile Project Management Fundamentals (must be taken first)
The course provides students with a comprehensive understanding of Agile Project Management Fundamentals. The course not only teaches students how to manage projects with an adaptive approach, but also allows students to understand the differences and similarities between agile and traditional project management. Throughout the course, students acquire the essential knowledge on agile values, principles, practices, tools, and benefits of applying a lean-agile approach to Project Management. The course also provides students with the tools necessary to select an adequate approach to project management while considering degree of uncertainty and complexity. Through simulations and demonstrations of agile concepts, students gain experiential learning and acquire essential Agile PM skills to operate in an agile setting. By the end of the course, students can apply insights on how to blend linear, incremental, and iterative approaches in a traditional, agile, or hybrid environment.
Lean-Agile with Scrum and Kanban
This course provides students with a solid foundation and a good understanding of practicing Agile with Scrum and Kanban. Scrum is a framework for designing, developing, and delivering products, services, and/or solutions of the highest value incrementally. Scrum is also known as a popular agile method in the computer software industry for addressing unknown and complex requirements iteratively and incrementally. Scrum implementations require the use of self-organized teams who are flexible individuals willing to adapt quickly to change. Students will learn about the rules of the game specific to Scrum events (the sprint, sprint planning, daily Scrum, sprint review, and sprint retrospective), Scrum artifacts (e.g. product backlog, sprint backlog, and increment), and the importance of the definition of done. Kanban is another lean framework for developing and delivering products and services by balancing demands with available capacity, and by improving the handling of system-level bottlenecks. Students will also learn essential lean principles and discover how to use a Kanban board to help them visualize workflow and prioritize work items more effectively.
Agile Frameworks for Lean Enterprises
Agile organizations quickly sense and adapt to external and internal changes to deliver relevant results in a productive and cost-effective manner. This course explores merging life cycle approaches, which lead to greater organizational agility, and provides an in-depth examination and evaluation of Lean-Agile principles and values and the drivers behind becoming a more agile organization. Students learn how organizations can achieve agility at scale by funding ecosystems of teams that deliver large initiatives, allowing decentralized financial decision making within the portfolio, and continuously prioritizing their backlog of activities within each agile project. Learning objectives for this course include the ability to achieve true end-to-end business agility by utilizing industry standard agile frameworks (such as Scrum, Kanban, and SAFe); establishing the strategic themes that guide an organization's strategy and investments; determining and funding the relevant value streams; defining and prioritizing cross-cutting portfolio backlog epics; and monitoring the performance of the portfolios using applicable Lean portfolio, program, and team metrics. Students learn how to link an organizational strategy into relatively small investment increments called epics, study the breakup of epics into features that can be delivered by program teams, and explore the decomposition of features into user stories delivered by single teams in individual sprints. This course also explores organizational factors that impact the use of agile approaches, such as culture, readiness, business practices, and the role of the PMO.
DevOps Essentials
DevOps, as a movement and methodology since the mid-2000s, is still transforming the way value is delivered by information technology (IT) organizations. Deriving from practices supporting modern technology management methodologies such as Agile, enterprise DevOps adoption has been demonstrated to create value by reducing the amount of unnecessary rework, improve the quality, speed and tempo of production deployments, create feature reinvestment opportunities, and reduce operational downtime significantly. This course in DevOps is an exploration in the practice of operations and development engineers participating together in the entire service lifecycle, from design through the development process to production support.