After a recent session we asked the participants what their overall impression of the workshop was. On a scale from one to ten they gave it straight nines and tens!

The course is based on our experiences over more than ten years of using agile and helping teams and organizations getting started and refining their agile practices.

After the workshop the participants will have an understanding of a toolbox of proven principles and techniques. When they return to their everyday work they can use this to make it even more fun and effective.

One of the things we cover is the most popular agile framework, Scrum. Scrum is a very small framework that solves a few problems that most companies are having. In addition to that, Scrum contributes by making other problems clearly visible. Teams and organizations can then choose to fix these problems. To help people do this, we have included a broader set of topics in the course than just Scrum. These topics have been selected to cover techniques and skills that many teams have found useful as they keep optimizing the way they work.

This course is suitable for anyone that in some way is involved with developing software:

• Developers
• Project managers and line managers
• Customers or product owners

The workshop is designed as a highly participatory event with a mix of discussions, short lectures and exercises.

On the next pages you can see a list of topics that we cover in the course. For courses held at companies we adapt the emphasis put on different areas as appropriate.

Principles and values

Through exercises and theory we examine what the basic fundamental problems of software product development are. We also suggest that there are some basic principles that must be adhered to by all effective approaches to handling complex development projects.

Agile methods

In this section we cover what the agile methods are and what they have in common.

Scrum

A quick overview of what this popular framework really is. In the rest of the workshop we use Scrum as the example when we cover the various aspects of agile product development.

Scrum

How do we traditionally work with requirements and how is this different from agile requirements handling? Through exercises and discussion we examine what the consequences of various approaches are. We also discuss how to work with customers and product vision to maximize the value created. How do we formulate and break down requirements to optimize ROI? We also start to prepare for a simulated Scrum project by estimating requirements using two different approaches.

Long term planning and tracking

A common misunderstanding is that agile projects only use short term planning. This is not correct. Instead, by using agile techniques we can get very good visibility and control when it comes to long term plans. This section covers how to do that.

Short term planning and tracking

How do we plan each iteration/sprint? How do we know if we spent the right amount of time preparing for this?

The work during the sprint

How is re-planning, status tracking and assigning work to individuals handled during the sprint. We cover various events that can happen and how to handle them.

Sprint review, reviewing the product increment

n that every sprint should produce a potentially shippable product increment? What are the consequences of not having a clearly defined “definition of done” Why is it a mistake to see the sprint review as a demo and what is a better way of doing it?

SPRINT RETROSPECTIVE, LOOKING BACK AND REFLECTING

In this section we talk about how the team reviews the development and events from the last sprint and find things to appreciate, celebrate and reinforce as well as things to improve.

WHO DOES WHAT IN SCRUM?

A disussion on how scrum roles differ from roles traditionally found in development organizations.

SIMULATED SCRUM PROJECT

The group is split in several teams that compete over three sprints of product development using the project that we estimated in a previous exercise. After the simulation we usually have a lot of interesting things to discuss that are as applicable to scrum projects that has been running for years as to this simple exercise.

SCALING, USING SCRUM FOR MORE THAN ONE TEAM

Scrum works very well in development projects involving more than 1000 persons. This sections covers basic principles for scaling scrum and shows some applications.

TEAMS

The self organizing team is a basic idea of Scrum. This section covers what advantages one can get from using a team based approach to software development. We also discuss how this is probably quite different from the way your organization works with projects/individuals/teams today. We also cover what leaders and team members can do to create the conditions necessary for enabling really effective teamwork.

HOW TO OBTAIN SUSTAINABLE CHANGE

One of the most important parts of the workshop. In this section we share our experiences from ten year of being involved with agile transitions. The goal is to help participants avoid two problems frequently seen at companies today. The problems are that only moderate improvements are obtained as a result of the agile initiative and that after a few years the new ideas fade away and the organization revert back to the previous way of working. The techniques we teach in this section has to do with basic psychological insights such as what happens in your brain when problems occur, how do you react to other people’s ideas and what different categories of the population need to be willing to consider new ideas.

THE TECHNICAL PIECE OF THE AGILE PUZZLE

Starting to use Scrum to manage your development organization/projects will only give you the best possible results if you also start improving the technical ways of working. In this section we cover agile approaches to design, coding, test and integration. We also cover what to do with systems that are getting old and expensive to maintain.

order this workshop

To run this workshop at your company, just contact us, and we will get back to you with a proposal according to your request!