Courses

A day and a half, Just the Essentials

Remote is a fact

 

Remote is a fact, teams can't always get together in the same space. For this situation, we have skinnied down the Heart of Agile Fundamentals course to the absolute minimum. We can't take anything more out. In fact, we tried this as a single-day course, and had to add back one half-day to reach what we consider the minimum. The Essentials.

 

This course sets the standard for people just starting with agile activities. Being taught by one of the authors of the Agile Manifesto, even the most experienced practictioners will gain new insights.

 

Learn and practice tools to enhance the quality of your team's collaboration and improve any aspect of your team situation. Learn why decisions are the inventory of modern work, and how to manage them. Practice splitting initiatives into finer and finer slices. Come face to face with yourself as you experience this unique course.

 

This course is pure agile, for any industry or organization, any initiative, and for all job titles.

 

Course Goal for Attendees:

 

• Why agile works, its central principles
• The “Heart" of agile: Collaborate, Deliver, Reflect, Improve
• The alphabet of collaboration
• Why and how to do incremental, value-based development
• How it fits with Scrum and non-Scrum approaches
• How to improve team habits
• Current topics in the agile world: Leadership, culture, collaboration

Course Description:

This course replaces the ornate and complicated rules of the different agile approaches with an emphasis on the four basic elements of effective team-based work: Collaborating, Delivering, Reflecting, Improving.

The course uses group discussions and small-team exercises to anchor the most important points: You have to come to understand the alphabet of collaboration; you have to learn how to create micro-improvements on any topic; you have to see how decisions have become the unit of collaborative work and pracice how to move those decisions in the smallest batches possible. These are the bare essentials.

Group Discussions: Introducing key concepts needed to make use of modern agile development: Decisions flowing through an organization, Cooperative games of invention and communication, Culture and leadership, Trimming projects into slices to follow changing needs and to meet deadlines.

Collaboration Cards: These cards are a special construction from Dr. Cockburn, following years of research into what improves collaboration. Learn to use these cards to improve your own collaboration, to work in teams and to notice how your colleagues are improving or hurting collaboration.

Carpaccio Exercise: People work in pairs to construct a spreadsheet that will show the price of a product. The difficulty is not in making the spreadsheet, it is in learning to make the tiniest possible delivery stages so that the business earns the most, soonest, and can respond to changing market needs and changing deadlines. Having great significance to financial executives, it shows also how to manage a project for maximum effect.

 

This course differs from the Heart of Agile Fundamentals course only in that we have not found a way to replace certain in-person exercises with a remote-based counterpart. The message, the lectures, and most of the activities are the same.

Course Properties