Course Details:
Overview of Agile

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Course Overview:

This course aims at introducing its attendees to the core values, principles, and practices of Agile. This course discusses how to plan and manage Agile practices, not only those in Scrum. The course also goes into greater depth about all the roles and responsibilities on the team and not just the ScrumMaster and Product Owner roles.

The use of agile as an approach to managing projects has been increasing dramatically over the last several years. Gartner predicted that agile development methods would be used on 80% of all software development projects.

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Course Description:

About this course
Many of today’s Project Management and Business Analyst Professionals are finding themselves leading, managing and conducting analysis while on Agile development teams. We have found that many of the tools and techniques applied during a traditional project management approach no longer work as effectively, or at all. In order to do more than survive in this iterative development environment, today’s Project Managers and Business Analysts must employ additional project management and business analysis tools and techniques to effectively lead their teams and deliver projects successfully.

This course will explore how your projects can successfully make the transition to an effective Agile environment.

Agile is an incremental, iterative framework for project management and software development - where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing cross-functional teams. This disciplined project management process involves:

A leadership philosophy that encourages teamwork, self-organization and accountability
A set of engineering best practices intended to allow for rapid delivery of high-quality software
A business approach that aligns development with customer needs and company goals.

At course completion
After completing this course, students will be able to:

Plan, manage and close requirements for a project in reduced time using Agile practices
Minimize project uncertainty and risk by applying Agile principles
Ensure your project delivers required functionality and adds value to the business
Create an environment of self-management for your team so that they will be able to continuously align the delivered product with desired business needs, easily adapting to changing requirements throughout the process.
Learn how to apply Agile by measuring and evaluating status based on the undeniable truth of working, testing software, creating a more accurate visibility into the actual progress of projects.

Course Outline

Section 1: Introduction (Estimate 40 minutes)

Why Agile?
Exercise 1a: Waterfall-Lean-Agile Simulation
The Agile Lifecycle
Introducing Agile to the organization - benefits of Agile – why organizations implement this approach
Concrete industry statistics confirming the organizational and business benefits of using Agile
Roles and Responsibilities that executive leadership must adopt before transitioning to Agile
Establishing core hours - How will the team work during a day?
Description of how a pilot project can be used as a prototype before rolling out Agile to the broader organization

Section 2: Value Driven Delivery – Identify the Stakeholders (Estimate 40 minutes)

Value-Driven Development: Understand why agile development focuses so heavily on working products, its more general casting as "value-driven" development, with incremental, iterative and risk-driven approaches. Themes, theory and applications.

BREAK 10 minutes (10 am)

How to build end-to-end systems in early iterations
Value-based work breakdown, tracking progress, incremental-based planning and associated risk
Setting Expectations with Stakeholders Prototypes, demos and feedback
Exercise 2a: Identify the “Product Owner”
Identify Project Success Criteria
Exercise 2b: Review the Scrum Cheat Sheet

Section 3: Stakeholder Engagement – Envision the Product (Estimate 30 minutes)

Setting expectations with stakeholders. Understand the value, the concepts, the theory, and some applications for working with stakeholders, buyers and users to get an optimal result.
Envision the Product vision with your product owner and other stakeholders
Exercise 3a: Review Agile Checklist
Document Business Functionality
Exercise 3b: Product Vision Goals and Strategies
Document Technical Functionality

BREAK 10 minutes (11 am)

Section 4: Plan the Iteration (Sprint) (Estimate 60 minutes)

Sprint Zero activities
Elements of a successful Sprint Planning meeting
Create a Sprint Backlog
How to create a task board
Create a Sprint plan – Establishing Sprint success metrics
Managing the Solution Scope and Requirements using 2-4 week Sprints
Adapting a change-driven (Agile) Project plan that works – what are the key differences from traditional (waterfall) project plans?
Finalize the Iteration Plan and how the team will operate
Managing your Scrums
Prepare for the Sprint review
Obtain customer acceptance of the product increment
Hold a Sprint retrospective Update the product backlog
Exercise 4a: Hold a Sprint Review and Retrospective

BREAK – LUNCH- 50 minutes (12 pm)

Section 5: Estimating and Prioritizing Effort (Estimate 60 minutes)

Planning Releases. Understand the value, the concepts, the theory and some applications for learning and adapting at all levels and on all topics (the product, the process, the team, and the organization).
Establishing decision and acceptance criteria for user stories
Different processes/methodologies for different situations
Preparing for change
Communicate status
Create a Sprint backlog
Establishing Sprint success metrics
Estimating the level of effort (LOE) The art of slicing user stories
Prioritize themes and releases
Prioritize user stories
Estimating team velocity
Preparing for change – Is the organization ready?
Exercise 5a: Hold a daily Scrum

BREAK 10 minutes (2 pm)

Section 6: Tools and Techniques for Managing Scrums (Estimate 90 minutes)

Agile Tools and Techniques Agile estimating, analysis and design Envision product, project outcomes and Project chartering
Compile the product backlog
Create a Sprint backlog Plan sprints and releases
Exercise 6a: Discussion and handout – Tools and Techniques for Scrum
Planning, Monitoring and Adapting
Scrum Task Board

BREAK 10 minutes (3pm)

Agile Estimating
Agile Analysis and Design
Team Velocity
Exercise 6b: Create a Scrum board and hold a Daily Scrum
Soft Skills Negotiation

Section 7: Boosting the Team Performance (Estimate 30 minutes)

How to implement Agile – What it takes to make it work Create an environment for continuous improvement Manage the 'learning curve' of introducing any new type of project improvement approach Increasing team cohesion, visibility displays, and collaborative requirements/planning applications.
Exercise 7a: Review Discussion - Remove Impediments to Progress
Discussion regarding the unique challenges faced by the organization while attempting to move from Waterfall to Agile
- How to work with labor unions who will not agree with the idea of cross-functional roles?
- How to deal with external vendors who do not consider themselves part of the Agile team?
- How to transform an organization from a traditional (hierarchical), to one that is open and self-managing?
- How to make Agile work when faced with challenges both internal and external
- How to meet aggressive Agile sprint goals, when most of the resources are working on multiple projects at the same time?
- How to negotiate the dependencies of enterprise groups (i.e., architects and database designers) when Agile teams demand their involvement in order to meet their sprint deadlines
Coaching the Team – How to keep them motivated and moving forward towards the desired outcome
How to promote processes that promote sustainable development
Verifying and validating using an Agile approach
What does sign-off really mean?

Section 8: Additional Information (Estimate 15 minutes)

Useful books and links on Agile

Course Title

Overview of Agile

Course Number

AGL-101

Course Outline

Click here to open course outline

Duration

1 day

Price

$650.00

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Course Details:
Overview of Agile

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Course Details:
Overview of Agile