The Agile Project Management Workshop

Agile Projects are generally operated with a certain set of expectations and techniques to assure customer satisfaction, value creation, and product stability. This workshop helps project leaders keep their teams focused, build collaborative relationships, and deliver innovative and profitable results. It offers proven management practices, behaviors, and organizational strategies that participants can apply to meet the ever-changing customer/end-user needs.

The Agile Project Management Workshop is focused on competencies that agile project managers, team leaders, executive sponsors, and others need to develop collaborative and productive work environments. Participants are also offered an opportunity to develop their personal leadership development plan to improve their agile leadership abilities. This workshop is taught by expert coaches who have applied these comptencies with real project teams. You will see a difference in how your team members work together, the team leads focus on the work environment, and how your organization can improve its process of portfolio prioritization and resource allocation needed by these teams.

Target Audience:

• Primary: those who will act in a leadership role such as team leads, project managers, technical leads, executive sponsors
• Secondary: other team members and stakeholders, especially from the customer/end-user community
• Tertiary: anyone interested in managing a project with agile techniques, strategies and behaviors

Level: Intermediate / Beginner

Objectives: Participants will...

1. Understand the basic agile principles and methodologies
2. Gain respect for creative conflict resolution focused on purposeful intent
3. Understand the impact of personal leadership behaviors
4. Develop multiple approaches to decision making
5. Connect the release plan with the iteration plan and the daily stand-up meetings

Deliverables: Participants will have...

• Role Definitions for an Agile Team
• Kickoff Planning (traditionally a charter) examples and template
• Iteration (Timebox) Planning examples and template
• Portfolio prioritization process
• Strategies for Customer/End-User Involvement
• Techniques for "managing up" in the organization
• Rules for Consensus and Decision Making
• Facilitation techniques for designing a productive workshop meeting
• Professional Development plan

Workshop Outline:

Introduction & Overview
Understanding foundational Agile principles

• Agile Manifesto
• Declaration of Inter-dependence
• Methodology Specific (e.g. XP, Scrum, etc.)
• Beliefs about people and organizations
Setting up the Collaborative Game (the Kickoff)
• Business Case & organizational priority
• Customer/End-User Needs Analysis & Requirements Definition
• Stakeholder Analysis
• Technical Capacity: product architecture, testing practices and environment, configuration management, version control, etc.
• Risk Assessment & Mitigation
• Release Planning
• Role Definitions
• Defining the team's beliefs, expected behaviors and working agreements
• Communication Plan
• Sponsor Buy-in
Playing the Collaborative Game
• Understanding Key Agile Leadership Behaviors
• Iteration Planning
• Facilitating Work Sessions & Tough Conversations
• Customer/End-User/Stakeholder involvement
• Communication, Reporting & Documentation
• Teambuilding
• Daily stand-up sessions
• Incremental, Emergent and Convergent solutions
• Collaborative Development Practices
• Testing Practices: customer acceptance, developer microtesting, system testing
• Iteration Retrospectives
Closing and Setting Up the Next Collaborative Game
• Product Launch or Release
• Reflective Improvements suggested
• Executive review
Participating in the Agile Community and Professional Development
• How can you be involved
• What are you doing to make self-improvements