PMGT18101 - Project Management Essentials: Agile and Traditional Practices
Course Description
This course addresses the core principles, concepts, techniques, and practices that are essential to aligning project work with organizational value creation. It presents an objective and intuitive approach to leveraging agile principles and practices in project management and to blending them with traditional/waterfall techniques to reap the best of both spheres. The approach is also attuned and applicable to projects whose team members and managers/executives have varying degrees of geographical dispersion: from full colocation to completely remote team members across several time zones. The overarching direction and focus of the course is on enabling organizations to realize mission- and vision-critical goals and objectives by performing project work in a manner that enhances value creation, reduces chaos, raises productivity, and fosters innovation and creativity.
The course steers clear of a one-approach-fits-all stance and promotes a project management mindset that draws from relevant traditional practices and agile practices like Scrum, Kanban, XP, Lean, Crystal, etc. It emphasizes the need to customize and scale practices to the context of the specific project and to the mission, goals, values, and mores of the firm or organization. Although the course slants predominantly toward praxis and addressing real-world situations and challenges, it also has a high degree of logical coherence and intuitive appeal.
A recap of the key concepts, tools, and techniques in traditional project management is followed by coverage of agile methodologies - Scrum and Kanban in-depth, along with an insightful overview of XP, Lean, Crystal, etc. Soft skills like communication, motivation, culture, emotional intelligence, leadership, etc. are also woven into the overall fabric of the approach, and so are enablers like technology, data science (such as Machine Learning/AI), and high-visualization dashboard/report generation, as well as productive interaction with stakeholders, and well-informed and timely decision making. By the end of this course, students will have a mastery of the essential theory and practice of project management (traditional, agile, and hybrid).
The course blends reading and lectures with short quizzes, online synchronous and asynchronous class discussions, and a few individual and team assignments. The team assignments simulate how a typical workplace project (or a project-related activity) is completed in a geographically dispersed setting with participants working from remote locations and possibly spread across several time zones. Participants are encouraged to approach and complete their team assignments as mini projects to which course learning and principles can be applied. There will also be weekly synchronous instructor-led sessions to enable live interaction with the instructor and classmates.
Although this course is not intended to be a prep course for professional certifications (like CAPM® and PMP®) it encompasses most of the essential concepts and knowledge required for these certifications.
Applies Toward the Following Certificates
- Project Management: Strategy Essentials : Core Online