Program overview

The Project Management MicroMasters® program from RIT is a graduate level series of courses designed to provide you with the in-depth knowledge and skills needed to be a successful project manager in any industry. This online sequence is a semester’s worth of work from RIT’s Master’s degree and consists of three courses and a final capstone exam.

By earning the MicroMasters® program certificate you will develop the leadership skills needed to effectively manage a team that will meet the expectations of your customers and business goals. Build on your MicroMasters® program certificate by applying to RIT’s School of Individualized Study for a customized master’s degree.

What you will learn

• The tools and techniques to manage the comprehensive project management life cycle for a project – from initiation through closing.
• To balance the critical tradeoffs of time, cost and scope to meet customer expectations.
• The ability to apply best practices across a variety of industries and businesses.
• Lead a project to success, and how to capitalize on the leadership and behavioral facets to do so.
• To navigate the social and cultural aspects, legal and regulatory practices, technology and infrastructure that influence projects’ success in the global market.

Program overview

Are you an IT professional new to project management or a manager who wants to develop more robust project management skills? Perhaps you are looking to forge a career as a full-time project manager (PM). This program will introduce you to the fundamentals of project management, specifically as they apply to the field of information technology (IT).

This program will help you select project management techniques and strategies that best fit your IT project or organization. You’ll also explore how project management offices are organized and how they develop a project portfolio. Throughout the program, you’ll come to understand some of the challenges of the field, including management of diverse teams and projects that are potentially based anywhere in the world. By the end, you’ll determine your own competencies as an IT project manager and will have developed core skills required for this role.

What will you learn

• Why IT organizations use project management to deliver business value and how organizational culture can influence the role of the PM and individual projects;
• How to describe and distinguish among the major project management methodologies and project lifecycles as applied to IT and to identify strategies for managing distributed teams;
• The purpose of a Project Management Office (PMO), high-level strategies to set up, maintain, and close a PMO, and how it can work within your organization;
• Techniques to intake, prioritize, and select projects and programs so that they align with an organization’s overall business strategy; and
• Which personal and performance competencies are necessary for project management in IT, and strategies for developing those skills.

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