Agile Fundamentals

In this Agile fundamentals training course, you will gain the necessary knowledge to become an ICAgile Certified Professional (ICP). You will learn about the key aspects of value-driven development, adaptive planning techniques, self-organizing teams and why they are critical to success in a world of accelerating change while referencing popular Agile approaches such as Scrum and Kanban.

Agile Fundamentals Training Course Benefits

• Apply the values and principles of the Agile model for product development
• Recognize the cultural and mindset challenges of being fully successful with Agile
• Create a strong focus on the delivery of customer value
• Grow self-organizing teams that frequently deliver valuable, high-quality products
• Choose from blended on-demand and instructor-led learning options 
• Continue learning and face new challenges with after-course one-on-one instructor coaching 

Agile Fundamentals Training Outline

• Module 1: Complexity, Agile Values and Principles
• Embracing complexity in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world
• Recognizing how Business Agility enables organizations to continuously innovate in the face of change
• Articulating the values of the Agile Manifesto and the principles behind them
• Understanding that Agile product development is disruptive to traditional ways of working
• Locating the current drive to Agile in the history of development practice and theory
• Module 2: Growing self-Organizing Teams
• Rooting the concept of self-organizing teams in complex thinking
• Delivering 'early and often' for Return on Investment and feedback
• Exploring the characteristics of a 'real team'
• Shifting roles and responsibilities toward a self-managing team
• Navigating conflict so that it drives team behaviors in a positive direction
• Developing genuinely collaborative behaviors
• Establishing environments that facilitate collaboration
• Module 3: Value-Driven Delivery
  
• Delivering business-valued functionality as a priority
• Resolving the efficiency paradox: resource efficiency vs. flow-of-value efficiency
• Explicitly focusing on outcomes rather than outputs
• Limiting Work In Progress (WIP)
• Understanding the importance of 'pull' systems for product quality
• Module 4: Planning, Monitoring and Adapting with Agile
  
• Exploiting the 'Chain of Goals' to efficiently deliver customer value
• Understanding the need for continuous product discovery
• Envisioning products to establish the 'big picture'
• Planning to achieve product, business, and user goals and iteration goals
• Regarding customers as individuals or groups who extract or generate business value
• Viewing other stakeholders as people or groups who exert oversight or impose constraints
• Prioritizing customers as the most important and relevant stakeholders
• Writing user stories to drive conversations with different classes of customer
• Splitting user stories so that they fit into inspect-and-adapt cycles
• Coordinating work through information radiators
• Estimating effort with relative sizing units (e.g., story points)
• Tracking progress by measuring velocity and/or cycle time
• Holding reviews and retrospectives to adapt product and process
• Module 5: The Agile Mindset
  
• Reflecting on Agile adoption as a paradigm shift
• Thinking about 'being Agile' in order to 'do Agile'
• Transforming leadership styles to accommodate Agile
• Comparing the 'growth' mindset to the 'fixed' mindset
• Enumerating aspects of the 'professional' Agile mindset
• Contrasting the professional Agile mindset with  the 'bureaucratic' mindset
• Recognizing the key indicators of the mindset in teams
• Observing the Agile mindset in individuals
• Comparing the Agile Fluency ® Model with traditional maturity models for growing the Agile mindset
• Using business goals to select fluency levels needed
• Changing muscle memory to improve fluency