Duration: 2 Days
Course Overview
This course introduces attendees to the key ideas of agile ways of working. The course gives the attendees a foundation level understanding of key agile principles, the most common agile approaches such as Scrum and Kanban and guides them on how to practically apply these ideas in their own projects within their organization.
These approaches can be used both on large projects, but also smaller projects and day-to-day team work. There are no pre-requisites for this course, for example people do not require any project management experience.
Course Content
Introduction to the Agile Landscape
• The key principles of agile
• The history of agile approaches and the connection with lean approaches
• Comparing the agile approach to the waterfall approach
• Introducing common agile frameworks such as Scrum and Kanban
The Key Principles of Agile
• The benefits of incremental delivery in engaging the users
• The agile communication approach using rich communication channels
• The focus on delivering quality products and how to stop quality degrading
• Using agile to engage with stakeholders throughout the project
• Exercise: challenges of applying the agile principles
Creating an Agile Vision
• The key benefits of creating a vision: inspiring stakeholders, keeping focused, building consensus
• Common examples of project visions
• Exercise: Creating a vision for a case study project
Overview of Scrum
• Understanding the key roles of Scrum such as the Product Owner and the Scrum Master
• Understanding the key events of Scrum such as Sprint Planning, Scrum Stand ups, Sprint Reviews and Spring
Retrospectives
• Creating a Product and Sprint Backlog to identify requirements for projects
• Developing User Stories to understand user needs and values
• Estimating in Scrum using a Planning Poker approach
• Exercise: Delivering an app using Scrum
Overview of Kanban
• Exercise: Learning Kanban with the Pizza Game
• Overview of a Kanban board
• Learning the six key practices of Kanban: visualizing the workflow, limit work in progress, manage the flow, making policies explicit, implement feedback loops and improve collaboratively and evolve experimentally
Creating an Agile Culture
• What is organizational culture?
• How culture can push back on agile
• Exercise: describing your workplace culture
• What does an agile culture look like?
• How to implement an agile culture
Measuring Agility
• How agile are you?
• Guidelines on measuring agility. Areas of focus such as quality, speed, resilience and culture
• Exercise: setting up agility measures in your organization
Course Retrospective
• Creating an agile action plan for your work
• In course coaching by the agile facilitator