Agile Management

Leader: David Spann, Senior Consultant, Cutter Consortium

Length of Workshop: 3 days

General Overview:

This 3-day Agile Management course is designed for teams that will be working together on a project/initiative and that want to increase customer satisfaction, technical quality, and business value. To that end, the team will work collaboratively, through periods of instruction/learning, and then immediately apply the lessons learned using their project/initiative's actual data. For example, during the business case section of the course, the team will define its project's objectives, business value and elevator speech to assure everyone understands and agrees with why it is important.

Workshop Goals:

The objectives for this course include:

• understanding what it means to be agile and adaptive
• attending what amounts to an Agile Kickoff session
• creating a reasonable plan of work
• establishing the organizational and team structure
• developing team ownership and executive support

When the course is completed the team will have created a:

• Business Case
• Release Plan
• 1st Iteration Plan
• Set of Team Working Agreements

Course Agenda

What does it mean to be Agile and Adaptive?

• Agile Manifesto
• Agile Declaration of Interdependence
• Typical Process Flow
• Agile Methods compared
• Business Benefits
• Basic Principles

How much planning is needed upfront?

• Business case
• High-level capabilities defined and graphically illustrated
• The elevator test
• Executive concurrence

What makes the team's community successful?

• Integrating customer, technical and business representatives
• Establishing appropriate roles
• Establishing team values and working agreements
• Balancing each person's work load

What does a Release Plan include?

• Minimal technical and business architecture
• Protocol for unit, integration and acceptance testing
• High level stories (decomposing the project/initiative's capabilities)
• Release dates and non-technical tasks leading up to those dates
• Time estimations
• Risk analysis
• Stakeholder analysis
• Communications planning
• Resource planning

What should be included in an Iteration Plan and daily debrief sessions?

• Prioritized stories
• Tasks and estimated completion dates within the iteration
• Testing protocol
• Daily debrief sessions
• Risk assessment and communication plan
• Reflection/retrospective workshops

What are the leadership expectations for an Agile initiative?

• Facilitative behaviors
• Collaborative skills/competencies (link to graphic below)
• Inter-departmental relationships

Do we have sufficient executive support to proceed?

• Executive review
• Discussion and improvement