Agile Fundamentals Training

This Agile Fundamentals Training course provides a comprehensive overview of the essential concepts, processes and tools of lean project management and lean methodology.

You will learn how to apply these methodologies to improve the product strategy, eliminate waste and streamline the product management process.

The course also covers extreme programming (XP) practices, including feedback loops and how to manage product backlog items to help deliver work efficiently.

This training is designed to help product team members understand the product vision and how to continuously improve their processes for maximum impact.

Agile Fundamentals Training Course Information

In this Agile Fundamentals training, you will:

• Apply the values and principles of the Agile model for product development.

• Recognize the cultural and mindset challenges of being entirely successful with Agile.

• Create a strong focus on the delivery of customer value.

• Grow self-organizing teams that frequently deliver valuable, high-quality products.

• Choose from blended on-demand and instructor-led learning options.

• Continue learning and face new challenges with after-course one-on-one instructor coaching.

• Have the option to earn ICAgile's ICP (ICAgile Certified Professional) certification.

• Access exclusive LinkedIn group membership for peer and SME community support.

Prerequisites

None.

Certification Information

Pass the end-of-class exam to obtain ICAgile Certified Professional certification.

Agile Fundamentals Training Outline

Module 1: Complexity, Agile Values and Principles

• Embracing complexity in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world

• Recognizing how Business Agility enables organizations 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-Organizing Teams

• Rooting the concept of self-organizing 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 behaviors in a positive direction

• Developing genuinely collaborative behaviors

• 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

• Prioritizing 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

• Recognizing 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