49-771 Process and Project Management
12 units, Carnegie Mellon University
Process and Project Management (PPM) focuses on how software products and services are built, delivered, and sustained efficiently and effectively. While prior courses in the MSSM curriculum emphasize choosing the right products to pursue, this course centers on the disciplined execution required to turn those choices into durable value. The course is grounded in the principles articulated in Project to Product, reframing traditional project management as an end-to-end product value stream that spans Discovery, Development, and Operations. Students will examine how value moves through software lifecycle value streams, why it often stalls, and how organizational structures, operating logic, and leadership behaviors shape outcomes. Flow is treated as the backbone of effective product and process management, with attention to how it manifests differently across Discovery, Development, and Operations. Software development and delivery methods such as Agile, Kanban, DevOps, and hybrid delivery models are examined as ways to express value streams under different organizational constraints, rather than as prescriptive solutions. The course also addresses how AI-enabled and AI-native products fundamentally alter delivery dynamics, introducing probabilistic behavior, new risks, and new opportunities for acceleration, including how generative and agentic AI introduce autonomous decision-making loops that reshape value stream boundaries, risk profiles, and flow governance. Throughout the course, students will learn how leaders can intervene to improve flow without breaking coherence across technical, organizational, and human systems.
Prerequisites: none listed
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