Course Overview

Addiction is such a common problem today that people experiencing alcohol, nicotine or other drug problems present in many different healthcare settings. The challenge of linking people experiencing addiction to the right response is a serious one, and much depends on understanding addiction and recognising the role that we all play in the pathway to recovery.

This course is intended to help you meet this challenge by increasing your understanding of the biology of addiction and the available treatment options in the different stages of the recovery journey.

Key questions we will look at in this course include:

• When do we call “excessive use” addiction?
• Why is it so difficult to change addictive behaviour?
• Who can play a role to get people on the track to recovery?
• How do you respond to people with mild to moderate problems?
• How can you assess and increase motivation to change?
• What sort of interventions can support a person experiencing severe addiction?
• What is my role as a professional, either within or outside of addiction care?
• How can I identify the best of the many options available?
• What are hurdles to get the right support to manage addiction around the world?

What You’ll Learn

• Framework for pathways to recovery
• How to identify people at risk of addiction
• Applied understanding of intervention and treatment options

Prerequisites

About this course

Bioethics provides an overview of the legal, medical, and ethical questions around reproduction and human genetics and how to apply legal reasoning to these questions.

This law course includes interviews with individuals who have used surrogacy and sperm donation, with medical professionals who are experts in current reproductive technologies like In Vitro Fertilization and Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis, and bioethicists and journalists who study the ownership and use of genetic information within human tissue. Additional Harvard colleagues will also share with you their thoughts on topics such as disability law as it relates to reproductive technology.

While the law and ethics surrounding these technologies are a central component to this course, we also show you examples of the deeply personal and human side of these issues. Throughout the course, and with the help of law students, we will discuss leading legal cases in this field, which will illuminate the types of questions the law has struggled with – stretching and evolving over time. From the famous Baby M surrogacy case, to cases on the paternity of sperm donors, to a case related to the ownership of human tissue turned into a commercial product, and others. We will show you the ethical, legal, and rhetorical underpinnings, which have served as the basis for various court decisions over the past 20 or 30 years. We will also explore potential future technologies and their implications for society: genetic enhancements to increase our intelligence, let us live a hundred years longer, or make us immune to diseases – and the possibility of creating animal-human hybrids, for example a mouse with a humanized brain.

The content within this course is intended to be instructive, and show how legal reasoning has been applied, or could be applied, to questions related to parenthood, reproduction, and other issues surrounding human genetic material. The material organized within this course should be considered an authoritative overview, but is not intended to serve as medical or legal advice.

What you’ll learn

• How the reproductive technology industry works, and issues raised related to buying and selling human reproductive materials
• The law and ethics of surrogacy
• Civil lawsuits when things go wrong with reproductive technology: wrongful birth and wrongful life lawsuits
• The law and ethics of sperm donation and the legal status of sperm donors
• thical and legal issues raised by human enhancement
• The law and ethics of mixing human and animal genetic material
• The ownership of human tissue and its underlying genetic information

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Program overview

In this Professional Certificate program, you will learn the mechanics of how to design and facilitate projects using “pure” Agile Scrum and Lean Kanban techniques. You will also learn the trade-offs of using hybrid techniques such as Lean Startup, Scaled Agile For the Enterprise (SAFe), and Disciplined Agile Development.

We will then go beyond these frameworks to the science and essential principles you’ll need to ensure you get the greatest benefits of Agile Project Management methods: Speed, Innovation, Leadership, and Kaizen (Change for the Better).

After completing this course series, you will be able to clearly explain how Agile techniques address faults in traditional project management techniques, the tradeoffs (benefits and risks) of these approaches, and when it’s best to apply them to maximize value to the organization.

Engineers, managers, designers, writers, creators, and executers of all types will benefit from learning these principles of Agile. Whether you’re delivering a small part of a project or portfolios of large multi-million-dollar government works; these principles scale and apply to all industries to achieve delivery success. This is why companies that are embracing these principles continue to set record earnings and stock prices (e.g. AMZN, APPL, TSLA); and those that ignore them find themselves unable to compete.

Upon successful completion of this program, learners can earn up to 50 Professional Development Unit (PDU) credits, 10 PDU credits per course, which are recognized by the Project Management Institute (PMI). PDU credits are essential to those looking to maintain certification as a Project Management Professional (PMP).

What will you learn

• Learn Scrum mechanics and how to translate other Agile frameworks such as SAFe, Disciplined, and LeSS
• Gain a deep understanding of Agile principles and how to apply them in any industry, with case studies in Software, Aerospace, Finance, and Construction
• Reduce risk of project failure by adopting agile results-based controls to close projects more effectively
• Increase speed using lean/agile work management techniques proven to deliver faster
• Improve project benefits with innovation and leadership approaches that unlock your team’s potential

About this course

Innovative products and services change lives, and having the right innovative process creates an competitive advantage. Ultimately, innovation is about one thing: problem solving.

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.”

Upon successful completion of this course, learners can earn 10 Professional Development Unit (PDU) credits, which are recognized by the Project Management Institute (PMI). PDU credits are essential to those looking to maintain certification as a Project Management Professional (PMP).

What you’ll learn

• How Agile manages solution risk and return more effectively
• Accurate, effective requirements gathering that avoids delusionary “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

About this course

Agile provides greater opportunities for control and risk management and offers unique benefits that traditional methods miss, such as:

• Transparency with daily standup meetings discussing work status, risk, and pace.
• How a clear definition of done drives acceptance by all key stakeholders.
• Measuring performance and benefits of working solutions during project delivery.
• Iteratively testing to gain authentic feedback on solution requirements and stability.
• Regular retrospectives that drive continuous improvement into the team.

In this course, you will learn how these levers of control far exceed traditional management methods of earned value management (EVM), which relies on estimates and no changes in scope. We’ll discuss how the key to unlocking the control potential is to learn what to manage, and how to measure it. This answer varies across levels of management, separating the concerns between the organization and the team. For the organization, the focus is on what capabilities are delivered and how to measure return on investment (ROI) capabilities provide. For teams, it’s a focus on team velocity and how to ensure its measurement is useful for diagnosing internal and external productivity constraints.

Upon successful completion of this course, learners can earn 10 Professional Development Unit (PDU) credits, which are recognized by the Project Management Institute (PMI). PDU credits are essential to those looking to maintain certification as a Project Management Professional (PMP).

What you’ll learn

• Agile systems engineering to ensure valuable, integrated solutions
• Controlling projects through actual measurements vs. estimates (e.g. EVM)
• Essential methods for managing People, Process, and Product on empowered teams
• How to always be closing (ABC) with every project increment using a definition of done
• How real-world constraints and agile simplify portfolio management and decision science methods: go beyond LP, IP, and Genetics-based Search
• Enterprise alignment: how and why strategic plans, portfolio optimization, and project management can align with simple metrics, with facilitative leadership

About this course

Agile can often challenge project managers in the realm of leadership. Old styles of command-control are now a thing of the past, except for the most conservative organizations. But Agile takes self-empowerment to new levels and challenges traditional beliefs in what leadership means.

In this course, you will learn how this new style of leadership redefines and redistributes team roles by:

• Motivating through empowerment to gain better decisions
• Facilitating the creativity and inclusivity of a high-functioning team
• Identifying and managing decision making biases
• Negotiating conflicts across individuals, teams, and organizations
• Ensuring success through delegation and powerful constraint-based metrics.

You’ll learn to turn one internally motivated and critically thinking mind into many; and driving speed and innovation through leveraging all talents on the team.

Upon successful completion of this course, learners can earn 10 Professional Development Unit (PDU) credits, which are recognized by the Project Management Institute (PMI). PDU credits are essential to those looking to maintain certification as a Project Management Professional (PMP).

What you’ll learn

• Building self-organizing teams
• Facilitating leadership and the power of play
• Decision science and human mind heuristics
• Negotiation styles and techniques
• Managing bias through mindfulness and emotional intelligence (EQ)

About This Course:

This course is part of the Leadership in Global Development MicroMasters program. In order to get the most out of this course, we recommend that you have experience working in the development sector or a strong interest in this area. We also recommend that you complete the other three courses that make up the Leadership in Global Development MicroMasters program: Leaders in Global Development, The Science and Practice of Sustainable Development, and Adaptive Leadership in Development.

There is a vast array of different arguments about what development is and how development can be achieved. A leader in development must be able to understand, appreciate, evaluate and broker between differing and sometimes conflicting perspectives and ideas.

In this course you will develop skills in critical thinking and analysis, while being introduced to some of the contemporary debates and current challenges facing development practice. The wide variety of topics covered will also give you a sense of the diversity of issues that development encapsulates. Learners are encouraged to reflect on their own ideas and practice, and share their perspectives with other learners and the course team.

Each module in the course focuses on a contemporary topic in the development field. Within each module you will engage with key readings that argue different perspectives on the same topic. Interviews with the author complement these readings. Some of the authors we interview include Philip McMichael (Cornell University), Doug Porter (Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, Australian National University), Blessings Chinsinga (The University of Malawi), Naila Kabeer (London School of Economics and Political Science), and Rachel Glennerster, (The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, MIT).

What You’ll Learn:

• To identify the key arguments in academic papers
• To identify different methodological and conceptual approaches to research
• To compare and contrast different perspectives in development
• To evaluate the merits of different arguments
• To apply these different perspectives to practice and discuss their implications

About this course

Speed is by far the most sought-after benefit of Agile.

First mover advantages, the economic cost of delays, and the enabling effect on innovation drive the search for speed. Agile offers the fastest means of attaining speed: managing scope. But beyond the hype over scope management, there are key principles of non-traditional task management that ensure the scope chosen is delivered as efficiently as possible.

In this course, you’ll learn how to drive speed into any project by selecting and limiting work-in-progress through agile planning and task management.

Upon successful completion of this course, learners can earn 10 Professional Development Unit (PDU) credits, which are recognized by the Project Management Institute (PMI). PDU credits are essential to those looking to maintain certification as a Project Management Professional (PMP).

What you’ll learn

• Kanban boards to limit work-in-progress (WIP)
• Time boxing activities to eliminate delays and gain schedule advances
• Application and iteration of the Pareto Principle
• Rolling Wave Planning