Agile Foundations

The plan driven approach to managing projects, which is so successful in predictive contexts, will focus on value to the customer at the early planning stages, focus then shifts to execution. In cases when the understanding of value to the customer evolves though time, when adapting to the changing needs of the business and of the customer is necessary, so called adaptive, value driven, or most commonly “Agile” approaches become very powerful. Deploying agility is however not as easy as it sounds. Very often companies end up creating what is known as “Agile in name only”, i.e. a predictive approach with agile sounding terminology. In order to avoid the many pitfalls of a shift to agility, this course will show you the key elements which empower a real adaptive, value driven, “Agile” approach.

Goals

At the end of this program, you will be able to:

• Understand the difference between predictive and adaptive approaches
• Know some history, where do adaptive approache originate
• Know the difference between push and pull planning
• Implement iterative approaches correctly acording to project needs
• Implement monitoring and reporting also in Agile without breaking it

Contents

• Foundation Concepts
  • What are the key elements of agility?
  • Where do adaptive and iterative approaches originate?
  • Predictive vs. adaptive approaches, which when?
• Most common adaptive approaches
  • Scrum
  • Kanban
• The Key Elements
  • The big picture, the vision, product, and roadmap
  • The aglie roles
  • Artifacts and Cerimonies
  • Grooming the Product Backlog
  • The User and the user stories
• Measuring the unmeasurable
  • Story points vs. objective units
  • Velocity
  • Agile Reporting, key charts to track iterations and releases
• Summary and conclusions

Methodology

This training is an interactive 2-day workshop with countless real-life examples, including your own experiences. We work with hands-on role plays, prepare and conduct discussions with feedback.

Target Group

• Group, team, department and project leaders
• Employees preparing for a leadership role in the near future