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The Agile Coach Accelerator

The realm of Agile coaching is vast and complex, requiring coaches to be adept at facilitating change across diverse contexts. By leveraging the wisdom of Integral Theory, Agile coaches can gain critical new perspectives on the intricate dynamics at play within individuals, teams, and organizations, as well as new tools to impact Agile transformation.

Beginning with the health of the individual, this course equips Agile coaches to assess and elevate the well-being and effectiveness of Agile practitioners, teams, ceremonies, and the wider organizational structures. We introduce key Integral Theory concepts, primarily Holons and Quadrants, and provide a roadmap for effectively weaving them into the fabric of Agile practices.

By incorporating a four-quadrant assessment inspired by Integral Theory, coaches will be better prepared to facilitate optimal performance at every level of an Agile organization.

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Scrum Workshop

This Introduction to Scrum training course will lay the foundation for understanding and building successful agile teams using the Scrum Framework. In this powerful course, you'll grasp the concepts, principles and methods of the Scrum framework and become empowered to execute on your plans for incorporating Scrum practices and techniques into your organization.

  • Gain an understanding of the Agile framework and the methodologies under the Agile "umbrella" including: Scrum, Extreme Programming, AgileUP, Feature Driven Development, Lean Development and DSDM.
  • Understand the roles and responsibilities of a Scrum team.
  • Talk the talk: learning the Scrum terminology, ceremonies, and cadences.
  • Walk through the processes that support the Scrum principles to enable the delivery of great products.
  • Begin to map the transition of your existing team or enterprise-level processes, artifacts and forums to Agile
  • Discover the power of Scrum through communication, collaboration and cadence.
  • Uncover the pitfalls that teams will encounter in an Agile transition and understand how to overcome those challenges.
  • Lay the foundation upon which you can build an agile environment and organization.
  • Understand Agile planning at all levels of execution from product vision down to daily development of features
     

Kanban Workshop

Kanban methods have increased in popularity. Going beyond the manufacturing origins, more and more teams in information technology are adopting the practices. Kanban methods go beyond the visual aspects of the Kanban board. In addition to visualizing the work in progress, Kanban provides techniques to manage the flow of work and continuously improve on that flow. You learn how to focus on the work that is needed and reduce the time spent on the wrong work. Other advantages include flexibility of process, increased productivity, and improved efficiency. The concepts are easy to understand yet difficult to master.

The Kanban training Workshop provides guidance on Kanban implementation and bootstrapping a Kanban system in your own organization. You will learn how Kanban is a cultural change initiative and what that shift means, how Kanban can be applied to your software development workflow, and how it differs from other development methods.

  • What is Lean
  • Kanban origins, evolution, and benefits
  • Kanban concepts, principles, and terminology
  • Why Kanban
  • How Kanban differs from other methodologies
  • Difference from Scrum
  • Kanban Team and Roles
  • Visualization of Work
  • Limiting Work-In-Process
  • Analyzing the Flow of Work
  • Optimizing your Kanban system
  • Continuous improvement culture
  • Common misunderstandings and pitfalls of Kanban
  • Experiments and analysis to improve team performance
  • Kanban Metrics and Management Reporting
     

Story/Feature Writing

Project failures are often due to poor requirements gathering, analysis and planning. Traditional requirements documents may not contain complete and accurate requirements due to rapidly changing business environments. Agile requirements gathering, by moving detailed requirements closer to implementation, allows for rapid response to change. "Collaborating and Communicating Agile Requirements" will show you how to gather and manage these requirements.

Organizing and Managing Requirements

Traditional requirements are documented in a requirements specification. Changes to the requirements are managed through a change process. This course will demonstrate alternative ways of documenting requirements and managing changes. These alternatives can allow for a less "heavy" process in projects that can benefit from quick changes in direction.

Discover Real-World Techniques

This Agile requirements training course will give you hands-on experience with techniques for gathering Agile requirements. Explanatory lectures with demonstrations, combined with practice exercises will provide you with the experience needed to create requirements that meet business needs.

  • Master writing user stories and features
  • Appreciate how best-known methods in traditional requirements processes can apply to Agile methods
  • Communicate requirements using agile techniques to bridge the customers' and developers' needs.
  • Identify stakeholders and user roles to ensure that all requirement viewpoints are elicited
  • Create and maintain a product backlog
  • Prioritize requirements so that the most important customer needs are delivered first
  • Formulate an iterative project plan with feedback cycles that keep the project on track
  • Estimate business value for requirements to track how a project contributes to the enterprise
  • Develop requirements in an iterative approach to capture the details at the appropriate time
     

Design Thinking

Inventors like Thomas Edison and Steve Jobs were quintessential innovators who used a problem-solving process called “design thinking” to revolutionize entire industries and establish an enviable competitive advantage for their companies. Focused on listening, user empathy, whole-brain thinking, collaboration, and experimentation, design thinking can be applied in any field—from architecture and design to healthcare and product development to urban planning and beyond.
This intensive two-day program delves into the fundamentals of this creative approach by immersing you in dynamic discussions, relevant readings, and team exercises. As you put your knowledge to work in several design challenges, you’ll learn how to harness the power of design thinking to create a path to innovation, unveil new possibilities, and make a greater contribution to your organization’s future success.

PROGRAM BENEFITS

  • Learn the fundamentals of design thinking to improve organizational performance 
  • Solve complex challenges through the process of structured design thinking
  • Drive better results by combining design thinking with analytical decision making 
  • Establish a framework for building an environment that fosters creativity
  • Develop new ways to collaborate across all functions of the organization

 

TOPICS COVERED

  • Implementing design thinking processes and tools to drive innovation
  • Understanding the role of people in successful design thinking
  • Transitioning through the phases of inspiration, ideation, and implementation
  • Using tools like visualization, mapping, and storytelling to create solutions
  • Applying the design thinking methodology to your specific challenges
  • Testing, refining, and improving new ideas, business models, and processes
     

Agile Organizational Design

Organizational design is a way for managers to expose and use the variety of organizational pushes, pulls, stresses, and levers in a way that helps the organization work. This workshop facilitates your thinking about what your organization needs to look like, to deliver product.
This is an experiential, hands-on workshop. We will discuss your goals and experiment with different value stream/organization designs for different kinds of stresses. We will develop your strategy and mission if you don't already have one. Then, we'll look at the organizational goals and discuss your options for organization. Then, we'll try some organizational structures and see what happens with the people, the product, and the strategy with each structure. You'll have some data about how to design your agile organization.

Workshop Outline:

  • Introduction
    • Goals of organizational design
    • The role managers fill
    • Activity (well-designed vs. not well-designed organizations)
  • What’s your strategy?
    • If you don’t have one, a first cut at a strategic plan. Otherwise explain the strategic plan.
    • Activity
  • Define your mission
    • Starting at the top, define the mission for each level
    • Activities for mission definition.
  • Review the project portfolio in light of the strategy and mission
    • Organizational goals
    • Personal goals
    • Activities
  • How managers leverage the work of others
    • What do managers do in an agile organization: Hiring, Compensation practices, Performance reviews, Feedback, Coaching, Career development
    • Discussion and several activities
  • Does integrating teams mean integrating managers?
    • Implications of Product-oriented managers vs. People-oriented managers
    • Discussion and several activities
       

Lean Portfolio Management

In this workshop you will learn the principles of lean portfolio management, understand the leadership organization through the levels of your organization, and use exercises to define your lean portfolio management teams.
Lean Portfolio Management is applying lean thinking to managing enterprise, program and product portfolios to provide a fast and flexible flow of high-value work. This approach focuses on delivering the most valuable work first while limiting work-in-process, limiting interruptions and aligning the work to the organization’s intended outcomes and team capacity.
Lean Portfolio Management prioritizes alignment and achievement of business outcomes over focusing on work and deliverables.  It is a results-based approach incorporating adaptive planning in quarterly or less increments, high visibility and alignment and inspection and validation of real results.

Principles of Lean Portfolio Management:

  • Focus on fast and frequent delivery of customer value
  • Shift from tactical to strategic
  • Push decision-making down to the appropriate level
  • Measure & align funding and efforts based on outcomes
  • Plan face-to-face with meaningful visual artifacts
  • Plan on a cadence appropriate to the level of planning
  • Limit work in progress and align to capacity
  • Keep batches small and deliver incrementally
  • Inspect and adapt at regular intervals 
     

Agile-Driven DevOps Workshop

Successful DevOps transformation starts with top-to-bottom agility throughout your entire organization.
Despite the widespread success of agile development practices, success is limited if agile practices do not reach beyond development teams to deploy products delivering measurable value. Scalability, continuous integration, and ongoing maintenance in the production environment are just as critical to organizational success as the development effort itself.
In the quest for end-to-end value, DevOps has arisen as a professional movement which is both a reaction to and an expansion of Agile success. As agility increases speed and quality with which development teams produce features and products, it creates challenges for other departments tasked with deploying and maintaining them.  DevOps transformation is the key to bridging these organizational gaps and resolving bottlenecks and handoff challenges in the value chain. 
Learn to apply Agile practices which enable organizational DevOps transformation.
Before new engineering or automation tools can be effective, DevOps success starts with agile culture and practices — applied in development teams and beyond. This two-day class teaches agile skills which can be applied to both development and every other role in the value chain of a product or feature. This class will increase the agility and effectiveness of anyone who plays a part in delivering, deploying or maintaining agile projects.  
 

Agile Planning and Estimation


Delve deeper into Agile estimating and planning at the Release and Program Management levels. This course is designed to give students a more complete and in-depth understanding of Agile project planning and estimating topics that are commonly a source of struggle and frustration within project teams.
Specifically, this course addresses what constitutes "just enough" when it comes to upfront requirements, upfront sizing and design, and planning. By incorporating real-world examples and approaches into the curriculum students are able to think practically about these issues.
Participants will learn the six levels of planning which include: Strategic, Portfolio, Roadmap, Release, Iteration, and Daily.

To take this course you should have basic Agile knowledge and experience, this is not a beginner level course. 

  • Address challenges with traditional planning and estimating
  • Define what Agile is and why it is used
  • Implement Agile estimating and planning principles
  • Implement the six levels of planning
  • Use the Agile Lifecycle Diagram and know what happens when
  • Write stories and break down EPICs
  • Implement Agile sizing methods and know when to use what
  • Implement Affinity Sizing, Poker Planning, Complexity Buckets, and Ideal days
  • Explain velocity and capacity and estimate initial velocity
  • Implement planning and release
  • Plan for fixed date and fixed scope
  • Implement multi-team program release planning
  • Use EPIC sizing buckets and re-estimation and calibration
  • Implement distributed teams release planning
  • Describe Agile metrics- what is measured