Agile Innovation and Problem Solving Skills (edX)

As an agile problem solver, you'll need to expand your critical thinking skills to address the key sources of risk in developing best solutions for your new products and business lines. The Problem-solving techniques covered begin with problem definition, beginning with job descriptions and applying the right soft skills to enhance requirements gathering. This ensures you're targeting a good problem to solve, and that you understand the business model. The course then moves on to practices such as "brainstorm and storm drain" to target new creative solutions. You will learn how innovation works on fast feedback cycles to test possible solutions and target root causes of defects. Creative thinking isn't a straight line, and neither should the problem-solving process be a straight line. Each course of action needs early and frequent testing.
Key lessons taught in this course are:

• Delivering business value, not technical scope with User Stories
• Why innovating is the key to risk management and gaining a competitive advantage
• The best innovation process for startups in new markets or disruptive innovations, versus sustaining product and process innovations
• How to employ an innovation process that fits your business model and situation
• Using Cross-functional teams and user stories to gather accurate requirements
• Leveraging constraints to apply tested solutions to new technology and new innovations
• Applying Test-Driven Design (TDD) to deliver better designs with less designing

By following best practices of Agile, including timeboxes, constraint-based thinking processes, and empathetic problem solving, you'll learn how to provide a sustainable innovation environment for your teams.
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 innovation is accomplished in industry today. You'll finish this course more than ready to continue your agile journey, which we hope takes you to the next course in the series on “Agile Leadership Principles and Practices.”
This course is part of the Agile Project Management Professional Certificate.

What you'll learn

• How Agile manages solution risk and return more effectively
• Accurate, effective requirements gathering that avoids delusional "perspective taking"
• Paradox of structure, aka "how constraints drive creativity and luck!"
• Test-driven development for faster, better solutions in complex systems
• How to target scope to meet Performance Objectives via the Theory of Constraints

Syllabus

Week 1: The first week of Innovation revisits concepts of capability delivery from technical perspective; asking how do we achieve a project's purpose to innovate? What are the risks and methods to be successful in delivering a defined output under uncertain conditions? Here the Theory of Constraints (TOC) is used to target innovation for maximum impact.
Week 2: The second week dives into the requirements gathering and validation process, and the science behind the most powerful requirement tool, a User Story, and how it forms the basis for Test-Drive Development (TDD).
Week 3: The third week looks at how adding constraints to solutioning unleashes creativity, luck, and productivity towards solving hard, uncertain problems.
Week 4: The fourth week culminates with the application of the TOC Thinking Processes, User Stories, and Constraints along with the use of the powerful system engineering solutioning techniques (isolation, absorption, acceleration, etc.) and tools like TRIZ.