Agile Project Management Certification | Northwestern SPS - Northwestern School of Professional Studies

Designed for project team members and newer project managers / professionals who are managing projects as one part of their job, this course provides a detailed examination of the fundamental processes of project management and meets the 23 contact hour training requirements for PMI®'s Certified Associate Project Manager (CAPM)® exam. Using lectures, case studies, discussions and individual and group exercises, participants will learn how to apply the standard project management process to successfully initiate, plan, execute, monitor, and close a project. This will include an emphasis on determining how to meet customer/client needs, planning activities, and communication skills.

Total Professional Development Units (PDUs): 23 (Technical: 17; Leadership: 3; Strategic: 3)

Course materials:

Project Management from Start to Finish, 1st Edition. Barnes, Lisa-Ann. Access Alliance for Education, 2020. eText ISBN: 9781685649494

Students may purchase this digital textbook from any retailer where it is available. Additional course materials will be provided via the online course site.

Registered students can access their online course site here. An activated NetID and password is required for login. *Please note: It may take up to 24-hours for registered students to be added to the online course platform.

Designed for project team members and project managers / professionals who are managing projects as one part of their job, this 7 week course provides a detailed examination of the fundamental processes of project management and meets the 23 contact hour training requirements for PMI®'s Certified Associate Project Manager (CAPM)® exam. Using lectures, case studies, discussions and individual and group exercises, participants will learn how to apply the standard project management process to successfully initiate, plan, execute, monitor, and close a project. This will include an emphasis on determining how to meet customer/client needs, planning activities, and communication skills.

Total Professional Development Units (PDUs): 23 (Technical: 17; Leadership: 3; Strategic: 3)

Course materials:

• Project Management from Start to Finish, 1st Edition. Barnes, Lisa-Ann. Access Alliance for Education, 2020. eText ISBN: 9781685649494

Students may purchase this digital textbook from any retailer where it is available. Additional course materials will be provided via the online course site.

Registered students can access their online course site here. An activated NetID and password is required for login. *Please note: It may take up to 24-hours for registered students to be added to the online course platform.

This course is designed for project managers / professionals who have four or more years of work and project experience. Through course readings and videos, students review fundamental concepts, learn standard processes and best practices, and explore advanced techniques. Participants apply this knowledge to various case studies through discussions, individual activities, and group exercises.

By the end of the course, participants have reviewed project management processes, and explored the core aspects of integration, scope, time, cost, quality, human resources, communication, and risk. This course includes an emphasis on determining how to adapt project management processes to meet the needs of the project team, stakeholders, and customers/clients. Leadership, communication, and team-building skills for projects area also discussed.

After completing this course, students are able to demonstrate the following:

• Align their project management methods with industry-recognized principles and best practices
• Deliver project results aligned with organizational capabilities and strategic objectives
• Develop project plans addressing interdependencies with other projects
• Manage the complexity that distributed teams or external vendors can pose to a project
• Define requirements for procuring additional project resources
• Allocate and assign project work leveraging team member capabilities and capacities
• Respond to situations requiring changes to project plans and activities
• Communicate project plans, status, issues, and other complex topics with leadership
• Lead issue resolution, manage conflicts, and communicate with multiple differing audiences
• Apply project management tools and Generative AI applications to meet project needs

Total Professional Development Units (PDUs): 35 (Technical: 15.75; Leadership: 10.5; Strategic: 8.75) 

Recommended Course Materials:

Schwalbe, Kathy. An Introduction to Project Management, Seventh Edition: Predictive, Agile, and Hybrid Approaches. © 2021, Schwalbe Publishing. ISBN-13: 979-8695713459

Students may purchase these books from any retailer where they are available, in any format.

Optional Course Materials:

Project Management Institute, Inc. A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide) – Seventh Edition and The Standard for Project Management. Published August 2021. ISBN: 9781628256642

Access to optional course materials is provided to students enrolled in this course through the online course site.

Registered students can access their online course site here. An activated NetID and password is required for login. *Please note: It may take up to 24-hours for registered students to be added to the online course platform.

This course is designed for project managers / professionals who have four or more years of work and project experience. Through course readings and videos, students review fundamental concepts, learn standard processes and best practices, and explore advanced techniques. Participants apply this knowledge to various case studies through discussions, individual activities, and group exercises.

By the end of the course, participants have reviewed project management processes, and explored the core aspects of integration, scope, time, cost, quality, human resources, communication, and risk. This course includes an emphasis on determining how to adapt project management processes to meet the needs of the project team, stakeholders, and customers/clients. Leadership, communication, and team-building skills for projects area also discussed.

After completing this course, students are able to demonstrate the following:

• Align their project management methods with industry-recognized principles and best practices
• Deliver project results aligned with organizational capabilities and strategic objectives
• Develop project plans addressing interdependencies with other projects
• Manage the complexity that distributed teams or external vendors can pose to a project
• Define requirements for procuring additional project resources
• Allocate and assign project work leveraging team member capabilities and capacities
• Respond to situations requiring changes to project plans and activities
• Communicate project plans, status, issues, and other complex topics with leadership
• Lead issue resolution, manage conflicts, and communicate with multiple differing audiences
• Apply project management tools and Generative AI applications to meet project needs

Total Professional Development Units (PDUs): 35 (Technical: 15.75; Leadership: 10.5; Strategic: 8.75)

Recommended Course Materials:

• Schwalbe, Kathy. An Introduction to Project Management, Seventh Edition: Predictive, Agile, and Hybrid Approaches. © 2021, Schwalbe Publishing. ISBN-13: 979-8695713459

Students may purchase these books from any retailer where they are available, in any format.

Optional Course Materials:

• Project Management Institute, Inc. A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide) – Seventh Edition and The Standard for Project Management.  Published August 2021. ISBN: 9781628256642

Access to optional course materials is provided to students enrolled in this course through the online course site.

Registered students can access their online course site here. An activated NetID and password is required for login. *Please note: It may take up to 24-hours for registered students to be added to the online course platform.

Since the software development industry first adopted the term Agile in 2001, it has quickly become a popular buzzword that has spread beyond software development. Unfortunately, the term agile has come to mean many things to many people.

This course is an in-depth, workshop-style course that will teach participants the principles and values of Agile, the most popular agile frameworks like Scrum, Kanban, Lean Software Development and Extreme Programming (XP), and help them apply Agile practices and techniques to their current projects.

This course qualifies as education contact hours for the Project Management Institute’s Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP) exam. Note that in order to sit for the PMI-ACP® exam, students must meet additional requirements set forth by PMI that can be found on their website.

Course Learning Goals

By the end of this course, you will be able to:

• Explain various Agile frameworks and why they are used—including Scrum, XP, Lean, and Kanban
• Apply the Scrum framework to develop a new product
• Create a product backlog and user stories
• Create Agile communications tools that create transparency and stakeholder trust
• Demonstrate how teams drive business value using product backlogs
• Contrast Agile Planning with traditional ways of planning projects
• Understand how to establish an Agile team and help encourage high-performance
• Apply agile approaches to manage project scope, schedule, budget and quality
• Understand the knowledge and experience requirements necessary to apply for and pass the PMI-ACP® certification exam

There are no prerequisites for this course. This course assumes some experience working in organizations.

Total Professional Development Units (PDUs): 26 (Technical: 20; Leadership: 6)

Registered students can access their online course site here. An activated NetID and password is required for login. *Please note: It may take up to 24-hours for registered students to be added to the online course platform.

As a project manager, it is part of your job to work with a team to achieve a specified outcome. Whether it is an existing team or a cross-functional team put together for this project, working with teams has its advantages and challenges. How can you best manage the strengths of your team to reach its goals? How can you help prepare a team for the developmental stages they will encounter while working together? In Developing People and Teams, students will look at individual development including coaching, mentoring and motivation theory. Team development will be explored through the topics of facilitation and collaboration. Participants will also have the opportunity to assess their personal style of conflict resolution.

Total Professional Development Units (PDUs): 13 (Leadership: 13)

Registered students can access their online course site here. An activated NetID and password is required for login. *Please note: It may take up to 24-hours for registered students to be added to the online course platform.

The effective project manager possesses deep interpersonal skills and is able to use their skills to lead their project teams to deliver results. This course will help you improve the essential skills needed to be an effective project manager such as communication, relationship-management, conflict resolution, decision-making, and team motivation. Format includes lecture, case studies/group activities, discussions and Q & A.

Total Professional Development Units (PDUs): 12 (Technical: 1; Leadership: 9; Strategic: 2)

Registered students can access their online course site here. An activated NetID and password is required for login. *Please note: It may take up to 24-hours for registered students to be added to the online course platform.

The Executive Team is counting on you to commit a project completion date. Mistakes will be costly due to penalties if there is any delay. Your project team is counting on you to guide their effort so the critical tasks are identified and prioritized. You are buried in a ton of project information arriving to you daily. How do you collect and organize it? How do you make sense of it? How do you use it to make the best decisions for the project?

From committing to a project completion date based on the organization's risk tolerance to creating compelling reports and charts that can drive actions from your organization to address critical issues to keep your project on track, Excel is one of the best and more flexible tools available for Project Managers to simplify tasks related to managing information and also to help on daily decision making on many levels.

Students will learn advanced excel skills through this hands-on workshop that will help them to create analytical tools, formulas, charts, graphs and macros that will support them on making critical project management decisions. Real-world experiences from project initiation to project completion will be used so students will leave each day of the training with the ability to apply what they have learned in their workplace.

Total Professional Development Units (PDUs): 10 (Technical: 7; Leadership: 3)

Registered students can access their online course site here. An activated NetID and password is required for login. *Please note: It may take up to 24-hours for registered students to be added to the online course platform.

One of the critical challenges facing project managers today is managing a team that is distributed locally or globally. Distributed teams consist of project team members who work together on a project but are not located in the same physical location. Collaborating remotely is now part of daily work for many project team members.

Distributed teams must develop adaptive ways of working in a virtual setup to work productively from any location with well-defined rules of engagement.

This 4-week course, designed for project managers and project team members, addresses challenges associated with distributed teams and provides innovative solutions to minimize project disruptions. Using lectures, HBR articles, discussions, and group exercises, students learn how to effectively project manage a distributed team using communication protocols and collaboration tools, roles and responsibilities, decision rights and influence, and business knowledge and judgement capabilities.

You are the project manager for a multi-million dollar project, and there can be no mistakes. Your Executive Team is depending on you to manage successfully! What do you need to do know to assess risk so you can deliver against stakeholder expectations?

Through this course, students will gain an in-depth understanding of types of risks that threaten projects and the use of various techniques for assessing and managing risk and approaches to reduce project risk. Particular emphasis is placed on areas of risk identification, analysis, response planning and monitoring and control. Use of case studies will help illustrate how risk management is used successfully and will allow the students to develop practical skills for use in the workplace.

Total Professional Development Units (PDUs): 15 (Technical: 11; Leadership: 4)

Registered students can access their online course site here. An activated NetID and password is required for login. *Please note: It may take up to 24-hours for registered students to be added to the online course platform.

You are the project manager for a multi-million dollar project, and there can be no mistakes. Your Executive Team is depending on you to manage successfully! What do you need to do know to assess risk so you can deliver against stakeholder expectations?

Through this course, students will gain an in-depth understanding of types of risks that threaten projects and the use of various techniques for assessing and managing risk and approaches to reduce project risk. Particular emphasis is placed on areas of risk identification, analysis, response planning and monitoring and control. Use of case studies will help illustrate how risk management is used successfully and will allow the students to develop practical skills for use in the workplace.

Total Professional Development Units (PDUs): 15 (Technical: 11; Leadership: 4)

Registered students can access their online course site here. An activated NetID and password is required for login. *Please note: It may take up to 24-hours for registered students to be added to the online course platform.

The effective project manager is able to create an effective set of project plans that communicate the work, assignments, decision-making flows, and risks to the project sponsor, stakeholders, and team members. These plans must be at the level appropriate to manage the risk of the project, and at the same time be understandable by the project team, and easy-to-maintain as the project progresses. During this three-day workshop, designed for project managers, you will complete a comprehensive set of project plans, learning and applying practical techniques. Using hands-on activities, case studies, and your own projects, you will improve your capabilities completing the project charter, the project participation matrix, communication plan, and risk management plan. You will also learn practical techniques for establishing project ground rules, meeting cadences, and collaboration tools.

Total Professional Development Units (PDUs): 16 (Technical: 12; Leadership: 2; Strategic: 2)

Registered students can access their online course site here. An activated NetID and password is required for login. *Please note: It may take up to 24-hours for registered students to be added to the online course platform.

The effective project manager is able to create project plans that clearly communicate the work, assignments, decision-making flows, and risks to the project sponsor, stakeholders, and team members. These plans must be at the level appropriate to manage the risk of the project, be usable by the project team, and be easy to maintain throughout the project. During this 5-week course, you will complete a comprehensive set of project plans, learning and applying practical techniques. Using hands-on activities with case studies and/or your own projects, you will improve your planning capabilities.

Course Objectives

By the end of this course, you will be able to:

• Define the planning principles and how they can be reflected in project plans.
• List the steps and deliverables of the planning process.
• Complete project planning deliverables, given inputs, templates, and examples.
• • Tailor project plans to meet the needs of the project and avoid “planning bloat."
• Adapt plans to respond to new scope, feedback, changes, and information.

Total Professional Development Units (PDUs): 16 (Technical: 12; Leadership: 2; Strategic: 2)

Course materials:

Course materials will be provided via the online course site. Some course materials require a Northwestern student email address to access.

Registered students can access their online course site here. An activated NetID and password is required for login. *Please note: It may take up to 24-hours for registered students to be added to the online course platform.

Agile frameworks empower teams with flexible tools to manage timelines, deliverables and budgets, and still meet stakeholder needs. This overview course will provide leaders and coaches insights into how to support Agile teams. Participants will learn the mindset, culture, values, and principles that make Agile techniques work. They will also learn some of the key differences between traditional and Agile approaches. Finally, participants will learn and practice the key leadership and coaching skills needed to provide an environment for Agile teams to thrive.

This course uses "experiential learning", meaning that students will learn new skills and practice them in the course. Students will use exercises and case studies to gain hands-on experience with various Agile techniques and leadership tools.

Please note: This class is best suited for individuals who have some experience working in teams.

Total PDUs: 14 (Technical: 7; Leadership: 7)

Registered students can access their online course site here. An activated NetID and password is required for login. *Please note: It may take up to 24-hours for registered students to be added to the online course platform.

As Agile methods and tools continue to grow in popularity, people are interested in how to leverage Agile to improve their projects. Contrary to what some people think, planning in Agile projects is more rigorous and disciplined than it is in traditional projects. The purpose of this course is to provide project managers, Scrum Masters, product owners, functional managers and Agile team members with an in-depth understanding of how to plan for Agile projects.

Agile estimating and planning helps to get a project off on solid footing. Working together in teams, participants will select a product to use for their case study and will apply the planning and estimation techniques for the course on that product.

Planning for Agile projects starts with the big picture of product roadmaps and release plans, and drills down into the work that an Agile team will do within an iteration. Participants will learn how to plan for iterative and incremental solution development, and how to address change in a plan.

The course also looks at the two types of estimates used on Agile projects, relative estimates in story points and absolute estimates in ideal days. Participants will learn when to use each of these, and how to include the entire team for more accurate estimates that team members will support.

Please note: This course will be helpful to those who are familiar with estimating and planning traditional projects or who have an agile background but want additional detail on how to effectively plan agile projects. This course is not recommended as an elective for those in the Essentials of Project Management track

This course qualifies as education contact hours for the Project Management Institute’s Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP) exam. Note that in order to sit for the PMI-ACP® exam, students must meet additional requirements set forth by PMI that can be found on their website.

Total Professional Development Units (PDUs): 14 (Technical: 14)

Registered students can access their online course site here. An activated NetID and password is required for login. *Please note: It may take up to 24-hours for registered students to be added to the online course platform.

The use of Agile frameworks and approaches are quickly becoming the new norm. In fact, a 2015 Hewlett Packard survey showed that Agile has become the primary approach for technology projects.

The purpose of this course is to provide managers, project managers, agile practitioners and other leaders a broad understanding of popular agile methods, how Agile relates to culture, how organizational change succeeds, and how to support an organization undertaking a transformation from traditional development to agile development.

Whether you are an agile novice or experienced agile practitioner, this course will provide you with a basic understanding of what an Agile Transformation means, how to assess the cultural fit for Agile, and success patterns that other organizations have used to introduce and sustain Agile. Participants will learn the 8-stage model of leading change based on the work of John P. Kotter. Participants will use instruments to assess the culture of their own organization, to determine the receptiveness for Agile, and to assess the risk and readiness for an Agile initiative. Finally, participants will develop their own custom transformation roadmap based on patterns that others have found useful.

This course qualifies as education contact hours for the Project Management Institute’s Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP®) exam. Note that in order to sit for the PMI-ACP® exam, students must meet additional requirements set forth by PMI that can be found on their website.

Please note: This is an advanced class which is best suited for those who have some previous training or experience with Agile frameworks. It is not recommended as an elective for students in the Essentials of Project Management track.

Total Professional Development Units (PDUs): 14 (Technical: 4; Leadership: 10)

Registered students can access their online course site here. An activated NetID and password is required for login. *Please note: It may take up to 24-hours for registered students to be added to the online course platform.

The Managing Product Backlogs course is designed for individuals who work closely with agile teams and have the responsibility to manage or update product backlogs. The two-week course provides an in-depth understanding and hands-on practice with establishing, prioritizing and refining backlogs to optimize the delivery of business value.