Agile Fundamentals for Project Managers and Business Analysts
Keep your career and projects on track using the Agile framework to successfully manage an endless variety of complex projects. Go beyond theory into the practical application of Agile in your business.
This 3-day course introduces you to the core values, principles and practices of Agile – today's #1 project approach. Many project management and business analyst professionals are finding themselves leading, managing and analyzing on Agile development teams. This popular new workshop shows you how to integrate Agile with traditional project management approaches.
Are your project team members Agile ready? Fast track your career and effectively lead your teams to deliver outstanding results using the #1 project planning tool.
The Best Part:
Apply Agile to current projects: explore how your projects can easily and successfully make the transition to an effective Agile environment.
About This Seminar
Agile is a powerful iterative framework for project management, business and software projects – where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing, cross-functional teams. Participants will master this disciplined project methodology involving:
- A leadership philosophy that encourages teamwork, self-organization and accountability
- A set of best practices allowing for rapid delivery of high-quality software and services
- A business approach that aligns projects with customer needs and company goals
Who Should Attend
This program is ideal for both novice and experienced managers, executives, project managers, business analysts, business and IT stakeholders working with analysts, quality and process engineers, technicians, managers, supervisors, team leaders, and process operators.
No prerequisites are required, but having an understanding of project management and business processes is helpful and recommended.
What You Will Learn
- The direct project benefits of Agile – why organizations are shifting to this approach
- How to integrate Agile with current project methodologies in your organization and create high levels of visibility and trust with stakeholders
- How to implement Agile – what it takes to make it work
- Assign individual roles and responsibilities: professionally plan, manage and close requirements in less time
- Ensure your project delivers required functionality and adds value to the business
- How to set-up self-organizing and cross-functional teams
- Harness changing requirements and communicate these to key players
- Satisfy your client's needs through clear and continuous delivery of high value products and services
- Promote processes that promote sustainable development
- Manage the 'learning curve' of introducing any new type of project improvement approach
- Measure project success often and accurately!
- Helps prepare you for the PMI Agile Certified Professional Certification (PMI - ACPSM Certification)
Program Content
Introduction, History and Mindset of Agile
- Origins, the manifesto and the declaration of interdependence
- Agile as values and culture
- The Agile lifecycle
Agile and Your Current Methodologies
- Integrating Agile with your current methodologies
- Introducing Agile to the organization
Roles and Responsibilities on an Agile Project Team
- Moving ideas between minds
- Shifting of power and new roles
- Implications of distance, face-to-face, tacit vs. documented, and culture
- Increasing team cohesion, visibility displays, and collaborative requirements/planning applications
- Establishing core hours
Planning and Managing Communication and Performance
- Agile and CMMI
- How to build end-to-end systems in early iterations
Value Driven Delivery
- Incremental/iterative/risk development, and the importance of retaining design quality
- Work-in-Progress (WIP), shorter iterations, and continuous flow
- Value-based work breakdown, spikes or walking skeleton, tracking progress, risk or
incremental-based planning and tools to help track
Setting Expectations with Stakeholders
- Including customers and users, costs/benefits to frequent delivery
- Up-front user studies vs. on-the-fly usage design
- Contracts
- Prototypes, demos and feedback
Tools and Techniques
- Communications
- Planning, monitoring and adapting
- Agile estimating, analysis and design
- Product quality
- Soft skills negotiation
Initiate an Agile Project
- Envision product and project outcomes
- Project chartering
- Assemble the Agile project team
- Compile the product backlog
- Plan sprints and releases
- Managing different types of personas
- Identifying and managing "information radiators"
- Tracking and monitoring activities
Planning Releases and Managing
Expectations
- Project-level and adaptive planning
- Estimating
- Different processes/methodologies for different situations
- Chartering, release and iteration planning
- Establishing decision and acceptance criteria for user stories
- Planning poker
- Prioritize themes and releases
- Preparing for change
- Create a release plan
Boosting Team Performance
- Team formation, empowerment, collaboration and commitment
- Coaching the team
- Communicate status
- Assist the team to detect and resolve problems
Plan the Iteration (Sprint)
- Elements of a successful Sprint planning meeting
- Create a Sprint backlog
- Establishing Sprint success metrics
- Define vision and iteration requirements
- Estimating the level of effort (LOE)
- The art of slicing user stories
- How to create a task board
- Managing the solution scope
- Finalize the iteration plan
Running the Sprint from Planning to Review and Retrospective
- Managing your Scrums
- Using burndown charts to track progress
- Prepare for the Sprint review
- Obtain customer acceptance of the product increment
- Hold a Sprint retrospective
- Update the product backlog
- Create an environment for continuous improvement
Also Included
- A full student guide and Agile templates as well as references to useful books and links
Instructors
 Patrick van Abbema
Patrick has more than 20 years of progressive accomplishments in competitive digital media, Web collaboration and Enterprise/SaaS software markets. Patrick is the Senior Project Advisor and Chief Business Analyst for AltNexus Corp. and provides consulting expertise on enterprise service strategies for various public and private sector clients across the USA, Canada and Europe. He is responsible for analyzing the business needs of his clients and acts as a liaison among stakeholders to elicit, analyze, communicate and validate requirements for changes to business processes, policies and information systems.
Patrick is a Certified Business Analysis Professional (CBAP®), Certified Scrum Professional (CSP), and Certified Project Management Professional (PMP®). Patrick has a Bachelor of Arts and a Master’s Certificate in Business Analysis, from the Sprott School of Business, Carleton University. Patrick's experience and credentials allows him to bring the unique skills and knowledge areas required for both PM and BA disciplines to the table - ensuring that the product will be on time, on budget and most importantly, on requirements.
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