Learn Agile controls that get work done with confidence by using true transparency (actuals not estimates) and continuous improvement to ensure your people, process, and products deliver valuable, working solutions.

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.

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.»

The Program

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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).
4. 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.

What you will learn

• Agile systems engineering to ensure valuable, integrated solutions.
• Controlling projects through actual measurements vs. estimates (e.g. EVM).
• Essential methods for managing People, Process, and Product on empowered teams.
• How to always be closing (ABC) with every project increment using a definition of done.
• How real-world constraints and agile simplify portfolio management and decision science methods: go beyond LP, IP, and Genetics-based Search.
• Enterprise alignment: how and why strategic plans, portfolio optimization, and project management canalign with simple metrics, with facilitative leadership.