Tag Archives: CSM

Agile, Education, Project Management

New 2023 Agile / Product Management Online Courses from Pluralsight

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I’ve completed zero Scrum Education Units (SEUs) and Professional Development Units (PDUs) courses for this cycle, so I need to start ASAP. Here are some relatively new Pluralsight courses in 2023 that looked interesting to me. Some of them are a brief 1 hour, but in the aggregate, they will chip away at your needed continuing education requirements. Some of these courses are for the novice, and some more advanced. Appreciate your feedback if you’ve taken any of these courses.

Pluralsight is a great source of online courses with excellent content beyond product and project management. It covers a wide variety of business and technology courses, and the price is reasonable. At the end of the year, they have a huge discount sale on an annual subscription. You can also try the service for free.

Product Management: Understanding the Business

Released – April 30th 2023; 2h 16m

This course will give you an understanding of business concepts that will help you navigate product strategy, discovery, design, and development while supporting a growing business.

Product Management: Stakeholder Management

Released – March 22nd 2023; 1h 26m

This course will teach you how to identify product stakeholders effectively, arrange them in priority groups, and engage with them in suitable ways.

Change Management: How to Avoid the Most Common Mistakes

Released – Feb 22nd 2023; 38m

This course will teach people leaders how to avoid common mistakes and improve their change leadership skills. Attendees will learn how to recognize and address challenges such as establishing a culture of change and managing the impact of change.

Minimizing, Navigating, and Resolving Conflict During Change

Released – Feb 26th 2023; 1h 6m

This course will teach leaders how to best minimize, navigate, and resolve conflict that comes when leading a team through change.

Influencing without Authority: Becoming an Agent of Change

Released – Jan 03, 2023; 1h 7m

Influencing without authority is the ability to influence others when you do not have direct responsibility for them. This course will teach you relevant skills to help employees assert themselves to influence positive change in their workplace.

Developing Project Schedules and Budgets

Released – Jan 03, 2023; 3h 41m

Effective project leaders bring their initiatives in on time and on budget, but that starts by creating a schedule and budget in the first place. Learn the fundamentals of project budgeting and scheduling and how they relate with one another.

Serving as a Project Leader

Released – Jan 03, 2023; 2h 10m

Organizations increasingly rely on projects to generate value, while emerging methodologies question how project work gets done. This course explores how an adaptive mindset and servant approach help project leaders succeed in any environment.

Agile, Business, Development, Project Management, Software Development, Technology, Work

The Power of Collective Consensus for Story Point Effort Estimations

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Blind Concurrent Flip

The bartering of effort estimations between a team of 5 or more is really cool to witness and even further awesome to negotiate the consensus process. Not quite the process of the US Congress, but still attempting those on the periphery, extreme right or left of the bell curve of outliers to move toward the consensus. Discuss and draw near the point of consensus under which individuals discover their own need for resolution under grounds of somewhat tangible to their position of an item so complex gives one hope for a grander purpose.

A synonymous flip of the cards leading to the reveal moment is humbling when a team, after several rounds of dissonance, start into a pattern yielding the voting of a collective cohesion. Why do we start voting along a mutual agreement without the need for cohesion?

Can I Convince You to..

What if Chris Wallace facilitated a Planning Poker exercise between the two presidential candidates instead of a debate, driving consensus between the two presidential hopefuls?

Agile, Business, Development, Project Management, Technology, Work

When Stakeholders Collide

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Requirements Expedition

Maybe you’ll meet them during the Project Kickoff. Maybe you’ll first hear from them during a biweekly Steering Committee. Or maybe you will first hear from them three months into the project at a quarterly meeting with the CIO and the rest of his portfolio. Maybe you will never hear from them directly.

The politics of requirements gathering and prioritization is a daunting process. I’m not going to drudge up all the stories and categorize them here because it’s a painful process.

Why are some of your milestones in your project plan:

• the milestone exists within someone’s year end evaluation

• the requirements of a milestone are so bipolar, they are bound to fail. Need a project to bucket the requirements to say “we tried”, and we can pin it to a project.

• backing into established project timelines based on expectations set at the highest levels, e.g. regulatory compliance

Legal and Compliance Stakeholders

Global representation of legal and compliance requirements are a dichotomy of legal precedence between jurisdictions.

Agile Product Owner verse Waterfall Stakeholder Committee(s)

Many a project managed using waterfall kept me balancing the needs and wants of Stakeholders from all walks of life, some exuberantly voicing their opinions regardless of their position of power, or lack therein. The Agile Product Owner (PO) is a relief of burden, a single mouthpiece of the business, which dictates backlog priority.

Does Agile make the requirements gathering and prioritization pain go away? Possibly. There are various implementations of Agile, hybrid situations, and there are lots of tools out there to help manage the Product Backlog (requirements). Another exercise, developing User Journeys, working with your Personas / actors to derive their story, that is telling and lots of fun.

Education, Jobs, Work

Continuing Certification Requirements for Project Management Professional (PMP)

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The years seem to have flown by, and it’s that time again to complete my Continuing Certification Requirements for my PMP cert.

I randomly searched the web for PMP courses, then found myself back at PMI.org “Searching Activities”.  Seems like the easiest way to lookup activities because they define the activities, and the correlated list of Professional Development Units, categorized by:

  • Technical
  • Leadership
  • Strategic & Business

Based on the activities I’ve already completed, my majority of work has been accomplished in the Technical category.  I need to focus on attaining Leadership and Strategic & Business categories.

PMP 2019 Continuing Certification Requirements
PMP 2019 Continuing Certification Requirements

Here are a few activities I thought were interesting, and took each one of these Online or Digital Media courses.  Pluralsight provides an excellent set of courses at a relatively low price.  I highly recommend Pluralsight for your learning needs.  I also took a few of the LinkedIn courses and found it to be an excellent learning platform with a wide array of courses that can be applied as PDU credits.

Customizing Your Team Workflow with the Best of Kanban and Scrum

If you have doubts choosing which methodology to use, this course will give you a comparison of Kanban and Scrum, making your choice easier. By watching this course you will learn how to take the best of both, Scrum and Kanban, and how to make a winning combination for your team and project.

Leadership: 1.25

Crisis Communication and Technology: Communicating with Colleagues

Crisis communication is one of the most challenging communication types an organization or individual can face, bringing together emotional vulnerability, ethical challenges, and high-stakes decisions amplified by informational and persuasive goals. When managed well, this communication can neutralize and calm an evolving crisis. When managed poorly, though, crisis communication makes a situation worse. This course takes viewers through the most important parts of preparing for crisis communication, including understanding crisis types and strategies, preparing foundational documents, and how to create communication in the moment. By the end of the course, viewers will have a concrete understanding of how to manage crisis communication for their own organizations, providing invaluable insight and immediate benefit.

Leadership: 1.50

Scrum Master Fundamentals – Growing Yourself and Your Team

Are you a Scrum Master ready to advance your craft? This course will teach you specific strategies for coaching each member of your team and show you how to build on your experience as a Scrum Master to advance your own career to the next level.

Leadership: 1.25

Product Owner Fundamentals – Foundations of Product Ownership

Did you know that one of the most common reasons Scrum Teams fail is the lack of a skilled Product Owner? If you’ve suddenly found yourself in this role, this course will teach you how you can use the role to help your team deliver a great product.

Technical: 0.75   Strategic & Business: 0.50

PMI-ACP®: Value-driven Delivery and Adaptive Planning (3 of 11)

This course will provide an in-depth understanding of Agile adaptive planning and value-driven delivery practices, requirements definition practices, as well as principles and practices related to stakeholder management. This course is part of the PMI-ACP Agile Project Management series.

Technical:  0.75  Strategic & Business: 1.75

Design Thinking: Lead Change in your Organization

Design thinking is a user-centered way of solving problems. It involves extensive collaboration, using strategies such as mapping customer journeys, concept creation, and prototyping. This course teaches leaders how to help their teams adopt a design thinking mindset, and provides examples from author Turi McKinley’s work at frog, a global design and strategy firm that transforms businesses at scale by creating systems of brand, product, and service.

Leadership: 2.00

Organizational Change Management for the ITIL® Practitioner

Organizational change management is as essential skill for all leaders. This course will teach you how to successfully navigate the people side of change.

Leadership: 1.50