Course Preview | Professional Certificate in Advanced Project Management from MIT xPRO

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Welcome to MIT's professional certificate program in Technical Project Management. We are delighted that you have chosen to invest in your professional development by enrolling in this three course sequence. I am Professor Steven Eppinger at the MIT Sloan School of Management and I will be one of your two instructors. And I'm Brian Moser, your other instructor in this course series. I come to you from MIT's System Design and Management Program, a graduate program in Engineering and Management. Together we've developed this program for you based largely on what we teach to our graduate students here at MIT and also based on our own work experience and research on project management and leadership. This certificate program is intended to help you become a more skilled and more effective leader of technical projects. I know that there are thousands of books, articles, podcasts, and online courses where you can learn about general project management. But technical project management is a particular challenge because technical projects involve engineering, design, and usually a great deal of uncertainty. They are often distributed and largely digital in both content and methods.

And we work with a wide range of technical professionals as peers. Most importantly, project management skills which you can learn are essential to delivering results. So, we have created these three courses comprising 18 modules with the essential background you need to apply technical project management skills in your professional work. We've designed this program with you in mind recognizing that many will have recent project and technical experience and even formal project management education. Whether you're experienced in planning and engineering, building prototypes, writing code, running tests or supporting technical teams. In other ways, we can add project management and leadership to your set of skills. For some, this may be a first exposure to project management and project management methods. Others have some background and are looking for a skill upgrade. This professional certificate program involves three courses taken in sequence. Let's briefly introduce them. I'll be teaching the first course, Project Management Fundamentals. Project management has been around for a long time. Over centuries people have organized to work and accomplish amazing things.

Some of the most interesting and impactful projects have been technology projects but technology projects are different and that both the technology and people combined with dynamic behaviors, linkages, and complexities. Together we'll cover the fundamentals of technical projects, how they're shaped, how they're launched, how teams are allocated and perform, and the effect of structuring and controlling the project in various ways. We'll try to understand why projects sometimes make progress at other times they don't with the actual cost, actual schedule, and scope emerging sometimes in really surprising ways. There's more than one way to organize a technical project. We'll discuss several project concepts from waterfall and flow based approaches popular for a century or more to set based, spiral, and agile approaches more common in recent years. Importantly, we'll discuss why as project managers and leaders even in the face of standard work, old habits, and many constraints we have choices. I will be your instructor for the second course, Agile Project Management. I'm sure that you've heard about agile in some form or another. Perhaps mostly, you know agile as it applies to software development. But in fact, agile today is being applied to a much wider range of technical projects. So, in our second course, Agile Project Management, I'm going to explain the modern agile process and how it works in a variety of contexts. If you wanted to learn specifically about agile software development, there are plenty of courses specialized on that. So, instead of focusing on software projects I will discuss agile more broadly, including how agile projects are organized into timeboxed sprints, the key leadership roles, scrum master and product owner, how to run all of the sprint events, such as sprint planning, daily meetings, backlog, refinement, sprint reviews, and retrospectives. And this course will set you up to lead projects using modern agile techniques. And we'll both be teaching the third course, Project Leadership. In that course, we build upon the fundamentals of project management as well as the recent ideas and practices from agile. We'll start with advanced methods for technical project management, including risk management, model-based project design, critical chain, dependency structure matrices, and scaled agile.