Getting Started with Agile and Design Thinking

Offered By: University of Virginia via FutureLearn

Course Description

Overview

Discover how to create useful digital products using agile and design thinking.

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.

This course is for people interested in developing digital products, who are using agile methods and have some experience working in the digital space.

For people interested in receiving professional development units (PDUs), as a Project Management Institute (PMI®) Registered Education Provider, the University of Virginia Darden School of Business has been approved by PMI to issue 25 PDUs for this course.

Syllabus

Problems Agile Solves

Prepare for Course Success
What is Agile?
What’s Hard About Creating Excellent Products?
How Does Agile Help You Through the Hard Stuff?
Week 1 Wrap Up Activities

Agile Design with Personas, Problem Scenarios, and Alternatives

How Do Actionable Personas Help You Avoid Waste?
How Do Problem Scenarios Help You Avoid Waste?
Week 2 Wrap Up Activities

Writing Great Agile User Stories

How Do You Know What Matters to the User?
Peer-reviewed Assignment: Persona Development
Week 3 Wrap Up Activity

Enhancing Your User Story

How Do You Write Your Best Possible User Story?
How Do Successful Practitioners Enhance Their Stories?
Practical Tips for Creating Your Best User Story
Peer-reviewed Assignment: Agile User Story and Test Case Development
Week 4 and Course Wrap Up Activities

Taught by

Alex Cowan