Course Overview and Requirements

Despite everyone’s good intentions, hard work and solid ideas, too many projects end up creating unneeded, unusable, and unsellable products. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Agile and design thinking offer a different–and effective–approach to product development, one that results in valuable solutions to meaningful problems. In this course, you’ll learn how to determine what’s valuable to a user early in the process–to frontload value–by focusing your team on testable narratives about the user and creating a strong shared perspective.

We’ll show you how to:

• Explain key concepts and practices from the agile product development methodology.
• Create a strong shared perspective and drive to value using personas and problem scenarios.
• Diagnose what software to develop and why using a set of agile user stories and prototypes.
• Facilitate narrative collaboration with user stories and prototypes.
• Allow for early testing and validation by analyzing and deciding on story backlogs.

Project Management Institute (PMI®) Professional Development Units (PDUs)

Are you interested in PDUs for your PMI certification? As a Project Management Institute (PMI®) Registered Education Provider, the University of Virginia Darden School of Business has been approved by PMI to issue professional development units (PDUs) for this course, which focuses on core competencies recognized by PMI. (Provider #2122)

Learn more about reporting PDUs by clicking here

Course Format and Resources

This course is divided into four required weeks as follows:

1. Problems Agile Solves
2. Agile Design with Personas, Problem Scenarios, and Alternatives
3. Writing Great Agile User Stories
4. Enhancing Your User Story

Each week contains:

Lecture videos: These videos provide the core content of the course.

Demos: These videos illustrate how to tackle processes described in the lessons.

Skits: These videos illustrate examples of how agile works in the real world by using actors to role-play the scenarios.

Tests: You’ll complete three 5-question graded tests. Weeks 1, 2, and 4 all contain a test. At the end of the test, you’ll get feedback on your responses to help you understand why an answer is correct or incorrect. You have three attempts to answer each question.

Peer-reviewed assignments: In Weeks 3 and 4 you will complete a peer-reviewed assignment. The two peer-reviewed assignments provide an opportunity for you to apply agile practices to a project of your choice. Once you’ve uploaded an assignment, you’ll be requested to peer review your classmates’ work. Remember, your careful review and feedback not only helps your classmate better understand the material–it helps deepen your understanding as well.

Resources:

Make sure to view/download all of the powerpoint slides for the course and each week that are included below under “Downloads.”

As a Reminder You Can Get Extra Benefits By Upgrading Your Course

You can now get extra benefits by upgrading this course, including:

Unlimited access to the course: Go at your own pace with unlimited access to the course for as long as it exists on FutureLearn.

Access to tests: Ensure you’ve mastered the material with access to tests on the course.

A Certificate of Achievement: To help you demonstrate your learning we’ll send you a Certificate of Achievement when you become eligible.

This course is supported by the Batten Institute at UVA’s Darden School of Business. The Batten Institute’s mission is to improve the world through entrepreneurship and innovation: www.batteninstitute.org.