Duration: 2 Days
Course Overview
A two-day course aimed at introducing attendees to the key ideas of agile planning. The course gives the attendees a fundamental understanding of key agile planning concepts such as just in time planning, high flexibility and dynamic scheduling. Covering the most widely used approaches such as Scrum and Kanban the course will guide attendees on how to practically apply these ideas to plan and track their own projects and operations. The course will consist of a range of talks describing agile ideas, group exercises and case studies for the participants to practice the approaches and facilitated discussions and action planning on how to apply agile ideas to their work
KEY BENEFITS OF AGILE
The key benefits of agile are:
• Helps you become more responsive to stakeholder and customer needs.
• Helps you to manage your work in a more adaptable and flexible way.
• Helps you to focus on what is valuable and delivers this early to your “customers”.
• Cuts back on unnecessary paperwork and process whilst still maintaining control.
Course Content
Introduction to the Agile Landscape
• The key principles of agile
• Comparing the agile approach to the waterfall approach
• Introducing common agile frameworks such as Scrum and Kanban
The Key Principles of Agile Planning
• The benefits of iterative, incremental, just in time planning
• Creating highly visual, responsive plans to improve co-ordination and communication
• Improving the integrity of plans by collaborative co-creation
• Using agile plans to engage with stakeholders throughout the project
Exercise: challenges of applying the agile principles
Overview of Scrum Planning
• Understanding the key roles of Scrum such as the Product Owner and the Scrum Master
• Understanding the key events of Scrum such as Sprint Planning, Scrum Stand ups, Sprint Reviews and Spring
Retrospectives
• Creating a Product and Sprint Backlog to plan both long term and short term
• Planning what to deliver using User Stories
• Estimating in Scrum using a Planning Poker approach
• Exercise: Planning and tracking the delivery of an app using Scrum
High Level Planning – Creating an Agile Vision
• The key benefits of creating a vision: inspiring stakeholders, keeping focused, building consensus
• Common examples of project visions
Exercise: Creating a vision for a case study project
Overview of Scrum Planning
• Understanding the key roles of Scrum such as the Product Owner and the Scrum Master
• Understanding the key events of Scrum such as Sprint Planning, Scrum Stand ups, Sprint Reviews and Spring Retrospectives
• Creating a Product and Sprint Backlog to plan both long term and short term
• Planning what to deliver using User Stories
• Estimating in Scrum using a Planning Poker approach
Exercise: Planning and tracking the delivery of an app using Scrum
Overview of Kanban Planning
Exercise: Learning Kanban Planning and Tracking Using FeatureBan
• Overview of a Kanban board
• Learning the six key planning practices of Kanban: visualizing the workflow, limit work in progress, manage the flow, making policies explicit, implement feedback loops and improve collaboratively and evolve experimentally
Improving the Performance of Planning
• Using Retrospectives to improve planning on an on-going basis
• Measuring key metrics of agile planning such as velocity, workflow speed and user points
Exercise: setting up planning measures in your organization
Course Retrospective
• Creating an agile action plan for your work
• In course coaching by the agile facilitator
COURSE PREREQUISITES
No background in project management is needed – nor do attendees necessarily need to be called project managers.