Agile Portfolio and Program Management (ICP-DAS)

In this Agile Portfolio and Program Management training course you will learn how to get work to flow from ideas to working software fast. IT practitioners have long known the importance of aligning efforts with business strategy but have approached it with an annual cadence of strategic planning and project selection. In today’s fast-changing world this is just too slow.

Agile has brought an approach to doing work that can respond quickly to change, but at the higher levels of the organization we are frequently not aligning with the Agile approach of delivery and we are still focusing on delivering large releases of products rather than moving to the Minimal Viable Product or Minimal Marketable Feature releases advocated by the Agile approach. In this class you will learn how to rethink your Portfolio Management and Program Management approaches to maximize the value produced by your Agile efforts. The class will subsequently look at the subject of scaling and will review at a high level some approaches to scaling Agile within your organization.

This course meets the requirements for the ICP-DAS designation (ICAgile Certified Professional in Delivery at Scale).

Course Outline:

Part 1:

1. Introduction – Agile Mindset preview
2. What is Portfolio and Program Management
3. Strategic Alignment
4. Lean Thinking
   1. Customer Defines Value
5. Ideas/Concepts/Realities that are driving the world
6. Speed of Change
7. Innovation
8. Disruption
9. Lean Startup
10. Adaptive Planning
11. Five Levels of Planning
12. Geodesic Planning – the shortest path to results
13. Map the Value Stream
14. A Process that delivers Value to the Customer
15. Continuous Flow
16. Pull not Push
17. Strive for Perfection
18. Eliminate Waste
19. A System designed to produce the right results
    1. The right paradigms and mental models
    2. Transition into Building a System
20. The Agile Paradigm
21. Manifesto
22. Principles
23. The Agile Team – A System
24. Systems Thinking – Seeing the Whole
25. Creating a System that produces desired results
26. Agile Practices – part of the System
27. Summary of the Paradigm Change
28. The Agile Game – might end up as begin of day 2

Part 2:

1. Agile Program Management – Building a Business Value Generator
2. Vision
3. Time
4. Culture
5. Vision – What is our Value Proposition
6. The Ideation Process
7. Getting Ideas that will produce Value to the Customer
8. Ethnographic Research
9. Effective Communication
10. The User – Roles and Personas
11. Brainstorming
12. The A3 Process of Problem Solving
13. Making Investment Decision
14. Time – Execution
15. Scaling Agile above the Team to the Enterprise
16. Waves of Agile
17. Scaling Methodologies
18. Similar Organizational Structures
19. SAFe – Digging Deeper into Scaling to provide Program Management
20. The Idea Funnel
21. Review Process
22. Analysis Queue
23. Implementation
24. Release Planning (PI Planning)
25. The Iteration Calendar
26. Coordination –
27. Scrum of Scrums
28. PO Sync
29. Release Management
30. Retrospectives
31. Done
32. The Definition of Done
33. Levels
34. Culture
35. Transforming your organization
36. John Kotter path to Change
37. Getting to a re-wiring – Culture is Anchored
38. Wrap-up

Audience/Prerequisite:

• Project Managers
• Analysts
• Developers
• IT Manager/Directors
• Software Engineers
• Software Architects
• Business Customers

In this class you will learn how to:

• Understand Agile Portfolio and Program Management principles and practices that will transform an organizations ability to get ideas to the development engine Just-In-Time to maximize value and efficiency.
• Gain insights into the reasons for a lean process of continuous adaptive planning that responds quickly to the changing market forces.
• Survey the several different approaches to scaling and explore the considerations that change the Agile approach at scale.
• Learn the impact that higher level management can have on the Team Level Agile process and the importance of changing leadership style to maximize the benefits of Agile.
• Using one scaling approach we will examine some specific details of things that can be done at scale to facilitate Agile planning and execution at Scale.
• Discuss the steps to cultivating an Agile Culture within an organization and making decisions related to leadership style and scaling approaches within the context of the organization.