Agile Fundamentals Training

Course Overview

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

Course Comments

Certification Information

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