Detailed Course Outline
Module 1: Complexity, Agile Values and Principles
- Embracing complexity in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world
- Recognising how Business Agility enables organisations to continuously innovate in the face of change
- Articulating the values of the Agile Manifesto and the principles behind them
- Understanding that Agile product development is disruptive to traditional ways of working
- Locating the current drive to Agile in the history of development practice and theory
Module 2: Growing Self-Organising Teams
- Rooting the concept of self-organising teams in complex thinking
- Delivering 'early and often' for Return on Investment and feedback
- Exploring the characteristics of a 'real team'
- Shifting roles and responsibilities toward a self-managing team
- Navigating conflict so that it drives team behaviours in a positive direction
- Developing genuinely collaborative behaviours
- Establishing environments that facilitate collaboration
Module 3: Value-Driven Delivery
- Delivering business-valued functionality as a priority
- Resolving the efficiency paradox: resource efficiency vs. flow-of-value efficiency
- Explicitly focusing on outcomes rather than outputs
- Limiting Work In Progress (WIP)
- Understanding the importance of 'pull' systems for product quality
Module 4: Planning, Monitoring and Adapting with Agile
- Exploiting the 'Chain of Goals' to efficiently deliver customer value
- Understanding the need for continuous product discovery
- Envisioning products to establish the 'big picture'
- Planning to achieve product, business, and user goals and iteration goals
- Regarding customers as individuals or groups who extract or generate business value
- Viewing other stakeholders as people or groups who exert oversight or impose constraints
- Prioritising customers as the most important and relevant stakeholders
- Writing user stories to drive conversations with different classes of customer
- Splitting user stories so that they fit into inspect-and-adapt cycles
- Coordinating work through information radiators
- Estimating effort with relative sizing units (e.g., story points)
- Tracking progress by measuring velocity and/or cycle time
- Holding reviews and retrospectives to adapt product and process
Module 5: The Agile Mindset
- Reflecting on Agile adoption as a paradigm shift
- Thinking about 'being Agile' in order to 'do Agile'
- Transforming leadership styles to accommodate Agile
- Comparing the 'growth' mindset to the 'fixed' mindset
- Enumerating aspects of the 'professional' Agile mindset
- Contrasting the professional Agile mindset with the 'bureaucratic' mindset
- Recognising the key indicators of the mindset in teams
- Observing the Agile mindset in individuals
- Comparing the Agile Fluency ® Model with traditional maturity models for growing the Agile mindset
- Using business goals to select fluency levels needed
- Changing muscle memory to improve fluency