Course Overview

Today, global businesses want and need to be able to deliver products to the market faster. As new projects are selected by the organization or management, it is important to determine whether a traditional or Agile project management approach is appropriate. For a project to succeed, the organization needs to support the process, customers need to be involved daily, teams need to be creative and self-disciplined, and project managers need to be able to facilitate and lead the team. Working in an Agile environment means being able to quickly deliver the customers’ features on time and be able to respond to their needs by balancing flexibility and stability in this ever-changing world. This engagement will help you:

• Decide if your organization is ready to accept estimates and status reports that are different from previous projects
• Determine whether your customer will be an active participant on a daily basis
• Identify any shortcomings your global team may have
• Determine if your project managers have the skills and characteristics needed to lead an Agile project

Replete with a case study and exercises this engagement ensures that the participants understand the concept well and retain learning such that they can apply them in real world projects.

 

Who should attend?

• Developers interested in learning Agile concepts and practices
• IT managers
• Those involved in the Agile approach who want to refine their techniques or learn some new practices
• Project managers interested in leading their software projects with more agility

 

Performance Focus

• Understanding concept of Agile
• Components of Agile
• Organizational requirements for Agile
• Changes and Agile
• Planning and execution in Agile

 

What You Will Learn

• Select which projects are suitable for an Agile environment
• Determine the readiness of an organization, team, customer and project manager
• Define user stories and how to elaborate and define test cases to assure the customer’s requirement
• Plan releases, estimate iterations by providing story point estimates for each feature and determine the team’s velocity
• Provide status reports to management through burndown charts, iteration tables, Agile earned value management and so on
• Adapt changes based on the customer’s request and effectively enhance the process to manage those changes
• Determine when a project should be terminated

 

Training Content and Basic Outline of the course

Introduction to Agile Project Management

• History of Agile movement
• Agile manifesto
• Principles behind the Agile manifesto
• Common myths about Agile project management
• Characteristics of an Agile project
• When not to use Agile development
• Strengths and challenges of Agile development

Traditional Approach Versus Agile Approach

• Traditional project management
• Agile project management
• Traditional vs. Agile methods
• Phases of an Agile project
• Agile project skills
• PMBOK® Guide knowledge areas
• PMBOK® Guide process groups

Developing the Agile Environment

• Agile culture
• Management challenges to Agile adoption
• Transition process for management
• Team challenges to Agile adoption
• Distributed team challenges
• Stakeholder/customer challenges to Agile adoption
• Agile approach to hybrid environments

Envisioning the Agile Project

• Agile approach to the requirement process
• The envisioning process
• User story development
• Release planning
• Prioritizing feature for a release
• Iterations in releases

Building an Iteration

• Iteration planning
• Allocating work
• How far in advance do you plan?
• Estimating for an iteration
• Rough order of magnitude
• Velocity

Managing Iteration Changes

• Introducing change to an iterative process
• Integrating change into the product
• Balancing change
• Closing out an Agile project
• Early termination of an Agile project
• Project closeout retrospective

Agile and your organization

• Trailblazing an Agile path: introduction to alternative approaches to implementing Agile and four major phases involved in getting there, regardless of approach
• To be or not to be Agile?
• Implementing Agile practices starting from the bottom-up approach
• Processes and Agile practices
• Strategy and Agile practices

Recap and engagement closure