Managing Product Development and Operations
Explore the evolution of modern management methods for operations and product development, and learn how to effectively run large-scale product development with lean-agile engineering and operations.
Delivery
Online
Duration
12 Weeks
Commitment
8-10 Hours per Week
Modern management methods for operations and product development are rapidly changing, with each five years a new management breakthrough driving higher levels of product development and innovation. The need for exiting linear, taylorist-driven models of precision and entering approaches that optimize for learning and optionality to manage uncertainty in product discovery, design and development. These approaches to management are fundamentally different from traditional projects and more complex than simply running scrum teams. This course brings together learning from the source and explores cases that demonstrate how to effectively innovate at the speed and scale of the digital age.
What You'll Learn
- Understand the fundamentals of lean operations, manufacturing, and process development.
- Use lean-agile techniques to design and model for fast feedback and idea sharing.
- Apply system optimization with open architectures, modular designs, and lean platform principles that take an economic view of development and production systems.
- Develop modern approaches to validate functions and verify performance through development-operations pipeline evolution and cross-functional teams.
- Appreciate how real-world constraints and agile techniques can simplify portfolio management and decision science methods.
- Practice enterprise alignment through strategic planning, portfolio optimization, agile project management and value stream management.
Who Will Benefit
- Aspiring product managers interested in learning how to facilitate and lead development across networked teams of development and operations.
- Active product managers who need to ramp up productivity and align their teams to reduce deadlocks, confusion, and to start releasing working products.
- Agile coaches interested in understanding how concepts of value streams originated, their core tenants, and immutable needs for optimizing agile trains.
- Educators, consultants, and organizational leads desiring to improve their capacity to teach, advise, or empower their constituencies to effectively lead innovation and drive growth across emerging and established markets.
Course Topics
Module 1: Taylorism and the System of Scientific Management
Module 2: Fordism and Mass Production
Module 3: Fundamentals of Operations Management
Module 4: Toyota Production System
Module 5: Theory of Constraints and the Goal
Module 6: Core-Context Deployment
Module 7: Value Stream Identification and Mapping
Module 8: Engineering Paradigms, MBSE, Coupling, and Open Set Innovation
Module 9: Leading Product Development with Modern Leadership
Module 10: Building, Motivating, and Managing Conflict with the Team
Module 11: Product Evangelism and Communicating with Data Across the Enterprise
Module 12: Disccovering and Delivering Products at Scale with Program Leadership, Vision, Strategy, and Roadmapping
Learning Experience
Asynchronous Lectures
Coaching and Mentoring
Live Office Hours
Peer Interactions and Networking
Project-Based Learning
Real-World Assignments
Faculty
Michael O'Conner
Managing Product Development and Operations
As the Senior Research Program Director in Program Management for Medtronic, the work that UMD alumni Michael O’Connor does on a daily basis makes positive impacts on the health and wellbeing of people all over the world. Medtronic is a global healthcare solutions company committed to improving the lives of people through medical technologies, services, and solutions. Michael works in their operational headquarters located in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
While O’Connor has worked at Medtronic for over 20 years, his academic background is unique. After first pursuing two years of engineering, O’Connor earned his bachelor’s degree in business, while at the same time also attending a vocational school which allowed him to acquire hands-on engineering experience. He went on to earn a Master of Science (M.S) in technology management from the University of St. Thomas engineering school, a second M.S. in project management from the University of Wisconsin-Platteville, an MBA from the University of Phoenix, and a Doctorate in Project Management from the University of Maryland’s Project Management Center of Excellence.
O'Connor is a member of the Project Management Institute (PMI) Global Executive Council.
