SF
Excellent material & experiences shared throughout the course. highly recommended for people planning to transition from traditional methodologies to agile methodologies.

While agile has become the de facto standard for managing digital innovation teams, many wonder if they’re doing it ‘right’. Twitter is full of jokes about how teams say they do agile but don’t ‘really’ do it. The reality is that getting the most out of agile is less about observing specific procedures and more about how a team focuses and measures their progress. Rather than just boring you with an accounting of agile methodologies, this course focuses on helping you better charter your team’s focus, definition of success, and practice of agile. While learning about agile mainstays like Scrum, XP, and kanban, you’ll also learn to help your team ask the right questions about how they’re working and facilitate good answers on how agile can help. This course is supported by the Batten Institute at UVA’s Darden School of Business. The Batten Institute’s mission is to improve the world through entrepreneurship and innovation: www.batteninstitute.org.

SF
Excellent material & experiences shared throughout the course. highly recommended for people planning to transition from traditional methodologies to agile methodologies.
IS
It was my first time doing a course on Coursera and I have fully enjoyed it! I really like the structure and the last assignment we had was precious! Thanks a lot!!!
S
Greetings, I have enjoyed this course so much. it was easy to follow and full of rich information that was light to digest.Extremely grateful for the opportunity, Thank you.
NJ
This is a super course... After taking this course now I am really feeling confident to lead a team with more skills. This course taught me how to quantify the team management.
AE
This course gave me an idea on how to manage an agile team with different approaches and in different situations and learned the key role for each member of the team
EG
This course was Excellent. The Instructor is very engaging and kept my attention through all of the 4 weeks of class. The Assignment was extremely helpful in applying the learning to a project.
YY
I think this course is transformational. It enhance our understanding of collaboration and how to deliver value through experimentation, learning, and creating agile environment
AH
I found this course very useful for somebody who doesn't work in IT and who wants to understand the benefits of agile methodologies in a reasonable amount of detail.
GA
Excellent, very well structured course, relating closely to the work environment. Putting great resources at your disposal to use for any future course related assignment.
AA
I did a couple of other courses on other websites about the same subject and they really pale in comparison. Very Informative and I feel like I am ready for the next step.
JM
Alex was very practical while explaining Agile concepts and practices. Real industry experience was shared during the course, which for me was a effective thing.
RY
This was a good introduction to understanding the structure and terminology to consider when managing an Agile team. Exercises and examples were engaging.
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The course was challenging for me since I lacked the experience of working in an IT/Software Development, but I thought all the practical exercises forced me to develop some practical skills.
Great course on how to implement Agile in an organization, taking into account Agile principles and the different frameworks and methodologies there are. A very practical approach to it
I gave the first course a very bad review and the second course an ok review. Now I am very impressed about how they are constantly working to improve all aspects of the course.
For example: Now you can download the assignments on word (before you had to copy item by item from a pdf) and the test are not so ambiguous as they used to be. I remember, in the past, to continuously have the feeling that questions in test were too open to interpretation and that the right answer will be defined by some random detail, now they are definitely more straight forward.
I also happened to have to log-in in the Online University where I got my Master's Degree years ago and saw their interface is still the same 0 user friendly and a very bad feeling of impossible communication so it really helped me appreciate the effort in improving the course. I really appreciate how they are willing to apply agile methodology to the course and with each iteration they make it better!
Granted, it is difficult to teach a course that really begs for practical learning through a medium that is severely limited for that purpose. It is not practical to ask students to create groups and "role play" an AGILE team through a sprint phase, for example, given that students' enrolment periods might be different. But this is exactly what was lacking in the course, because in my humble opinion, managing an AGILE team cannot be learned through reading and writing.
I do not doubt the instructor's skill, experience and knowledge in the field of Agile, however, he's not a good teacher. This class was extremely stressful because most of the time is spent trying to keep up with what he's saying and understand the content. As such, this course is not for beginners who are looking to learn about Agile, Scrum, etc, or anyone who is not an expert to be honest.
I pushed through the course in hopes that the clarity gained along the way would make up for all the stress and turmoil from the begininnng and majority of the course, but unfortunately, I did not feel as though I learned enough to feel at ease or confident in what I gained intellectually after completing this class.
He would talk extremely fast, fly through slides, his handwriting was not legible (respectfully), and as I previously stated, he would not break down concepts and really teach them so that the viewers could gain an undrestanding of Agile. This seemed to be more of a "brush up" course for people who already are or have been in the Agile field for a while.
First of all, I would like to thank Coursera and Alex for such a wonderful course on "Managing an Agile Team".
I am working as an Engineering Manager in a semiconductor industry for the last five years without any formal training on Agile approach. I thank myself for going through this helpful material. This course has tools, techniques and a approach to appreciate and manage an Agile team.
It is the amalgamation of right tools, right assignment with peer reviews and right views/recommendations from the industry veterans who are practicing Agile principles, right at your study table.
Go for it. Worth it!
The Interviews that Alex has with the field Agile Practitioners and Project Managers, provides an in-depth perspective on how to apply these practices.
The Agile is like the Social Psychology of Project Management, and I believe that any PMP in this day and age needs to at least, understand the practice of Agile and Lean.
Waste is something that doesn't discriminate between industries, as should Agile's application not just be limited to Tech and development and can find an application anywhere, where there is a compelling Narrative.
This course is a very good closing course for the specialization. This course teach you how it all come together.
Excellent!
The information is very useful however the format of videos is too long and boring some times, I appreciate the effort to make dynamic however I think you polish the content a little bit more. Thanks for the course.
Courses 1 and 3 are so similar, they could easily be combined to be only one course. I would recommend adding either an additional week
Instructor is beating about a bush all the course.
The lectures are verbose and don't contain much substance
seemed more vague than other courses.
I was quite excite and enthused to enroll in this course as Agile is the 'in-thing' in IT industry. After going through the course content it appeared that the concept has been stretched rather tortuously. The instructor , with his long and never-ending sentences , was soporific in his style and unnecessarily verbose. The only interesting part were the interviews. The last part - Peer graded assignment is worded do convoluted , it took days to understand what is required. A thoroughly disappointing course.
The Assignments are vague and broad, how can we be asked to take any project and design Trello board for it, alteast the instructor can provide a sample project and guide with high level requirements for the project.
Also the content has been unnecessarily elongated with interviews of industry experts , the course size could easily be cut down by half, by removing atleast some of the expert interviews
It was too boring, complex & theoretical which has totally been bounced from my head. I have just completed it as it was mandatory by the company. Please kindly make it a bit interesting. :(
The Managing an Agile Team taught lessons were key to aligning essential Agile principles, and practices to non-software development business processes at my workplace. Applying Agile principles to achieve a highly functional team in the construction industry, seemed far fetched but these Agile practices have proved to produce very effective results over the years in building highly functional teams, robust to change, hence my desire to give it a try. This course has created the clarity I needed to apply Agile principles and practices to company processes, especially in a non-software development field, to achieve efficiency and save cost at work. It has also built up a series of ideas needed to approach a non-Agile friendly environment that suffers from very low alignment with some sort of autonomy.
Managing an Agile Team by the University of Virginia has been an exceptional course! I came in wanting to improve my understanding of agile frameworks, and this course went above and beyond. It not only dives into core methodologies like Scrum, XP, and Kanban but also emphasizes tailoring agile practices to meet unique team needs. The assignments are incredibly well-designed, especially the Positioning Statement & Focal Questions assignment, which really pushes you to think critically about success metrics and team alignment. Alex Cowan is a fantastic instructor—he makes complex topics easy to understand and keeps the course engaging. This course is perfect for anyone wanting a deep dive into agile beyond the basics. Highly recommended!
This course has not only been the best course I've ever taken in Coursera, but also it is the best in my entire life. The instructor has raised teaching standards so high in my perspective that I can merely imagine I would ever enjoy a course this much later on in my life. Everything was superb, outstanding and wonderful. Thank you very much Alex for the awesome job you did in this course, thanks UVA for giving this opportunity and thanks Coursera for facilitating the whole thing. This course is worthy of each second you spend in it, and believe me, words can't describe how informative and useful it is.
Very well structured and Alex gives some very practical advice. Obviously Agile is something that you can learn through practice but it is a very good starter pack. A few case studies and best practices helped me to compare scenarios that I am facing with the ones that I studied here and choose the options that i wodl want to explore with the team. Also it helped me in understanding the predicament that each stakeholder faces, while execution of a project in an Agile way and how to may be help people understand the objective and benefits of adopting Agile.