Workshop: Create Your Successful Agile (& Lean) Project Workshop
Workshop Objective: Learn how to deliver value as a collaborative team. You'll use agile and lean principles, and experiment with various practices to help you find your agile approach.
Workshop Overview: As you practice with your project, you’ll learn how to create your collaborative team. Then, you’ll learn how to set project and goals and meet them. As you experiment with boards, you’ll learn how to make your stories smaller and reduce your overall WIP (work in progress).
You'll learn:
- Why a customer focus is necessary and how to maintain the customer focus as the team creates and refines stories.
- How to see all the work (WIP) and make all the “other” work transparent so you can say yes or no to other work.
- How to use rolling wave planning to create an initial plan and replan frequently.
- Why the flow metrics work and why velocity and burnups/burndowns do not. What to measure instead. Include cycle time, aging, and how to make the work smaller.
- Why double-loop learning works and how to create a more continuous improvement culture.
Each participant will receive an electronic copy of Create Your Successful Agile Project: Collaborate, Measure, Estimate, Deliver.
Target Audience: Teams who want to work in a more agile way.
Prerequisites: Pre-work: measure some recent cycle time and read the principles chapter in the book.
Workshop Duration: Virtual workshops: 10 2-hour meetings. If you want more coaching as you practice, we can add additional practice sessions. In-person workshops: 2-3 days.
Workshop Outline:
Note: At the start of each of our meetings, we will do a short retrospective or debrief to support your double-loop learning.
- Session 1: Collaboration: Why agility requires teamwork and how you can create your team. How leaders facilitate the team and what they can avoid.
- Session 2: Project charter. Project vision and how that might differ from a product vision. Constraints, drivers, floats. Release criteria for the project.
- Session 3: Features and how to make them smaller. Why technical excellence makes the work go faster. All the possible minimums. How collaboration can help.
- Session 4: Rank the work. Create your board. Start to discuss rolling wave planning. More on how to reduce cycle time.
- Session 5: Cycle time, forecasting, and what your data tells you now. More about rolling wave planning.
- Session 6: Done. More about technical excellence, your tests, automation and how to see the signals from insufficient automation. What does that do to your cycle time?
- Session 7: Team measurements and what your team can learn from your measures.
- Session 8: “Meetings” and how to optimize for each kind of collaboration time.
- Session 9: Measurements to report outside the team.
- Session 10: How to start. The manager’s role. Wrapup and summary.
Optional addition: Agility for workgroups. (Requires additional time.)