Synopsis

Today, global businesses want and need to be able to deliver products to the market faster. As new projects are selected, it is important to determine whether a traditional or Agile project management approach is appropriate. For a project to succeed, the organization needs to support the process, customers need to be involved daily, teams need to be creative and self-disciplined, and project managers need to be able to facilitate and lead the team. Working in an Agile environment means being able to quickly deliver the customers’ features on time and be able to respond to their needs by balancing flexibility and stability in this ever-changing world.

This Agile for beginners course will help you:

• Decide if your organization is ready to accept estimates and status reports that are different from those of previous projects
• Determine whether your customer will be an active participant on a daily basis
• Identify any shortcomings your global team may have
• Determine if the project manager has the skills and characteristics needed to lead an Agile project
• Through an integrated case study, participants will have the opportunity to select a project for Agile development and work through the life cycle of an Agile project.

Note: This may apply toward PMI's Agile Certification hours.

Learn

• Identify traditional project management
• Describe the Agile movement
• Describe the characteristics of an Agile project
• Recognize the variant Agile methodologies
• Categorize the phases of project management
• Describe the basic skills needed for project management
• Select which projects are suitable for an Agile environment
• Determine the readiness of an organization, team, customer and project manager
• Define user stories and how to elaborate and define test cases to assure the customer’s requirement
• Plan releases, estimate iterations by providing story point estimates for each feature and determine the team’s velocity
• Plan for risks
• Provide status reports to management through burn down charts, iteration tables, agile earned value management and so on
• Adapt changes based on the customer’s request and effectively enhance the process to manage those changes
• Determine when a project should be terminated

This course uses digital materials.

Topics

• Introduction to Agile Project Management
  • History of agile movement
  • Agile manifesto
  • Principles behind the Agile manifesto
  • Common myths about Agile project management
  • Characteristics of an Agile project
  • When not to use Agile development
  • Strengths and challenges of Agile development
  • Variants of Agile methods
• Traditional Approach Versus Agile Approach
  • Traditional project management
  • Agile project management
  • Traditional vs. Agile methods
  • Phases of an Agile project
  • Agile project skills
  • PMBOK® Guide knowledge areas
  • PMBOK® Guide process groups
• Developing the Agile Environment
  • Agile culture
  • Management challenges to Agile adoption
  • Transition process for management
  • Team challenges to Agile adoption
  • Distributed team challenges
  • Stakeholder/customer challenges to Agile adoption
  • Agile approach to hybrid environments
  • The Agile project manager
  • Characteristics of an Agile project manager
  • Skills required to lead an Agile project
• Envisioning the Agile Project
  • Agile approach to the requirement process
  • The envisioning process
  • User story development
  • Release planning
  • Prioritizing feature for a release
  • Iterations in releases
• Building an Iteration
  • Iteration planning
  • Allocating work
  • How far in advance do you plan?
• Estimating for an Iteration
  • Rough order of magnitude
  • Velocity
  • Story points
  • Time box
  • Delivery schedule
  • Planning poker
• Managing Risks
  • Tracking iteration progress
  • Daily standup meeting
  • Iteration delta tables
  • Burndown charts
  • Reading a Burndown chart
  • Release Burndown chart
  • Iteration Burndown chart
  • Progress reports
  • Running test procedures
  • Agile EVM
• Managing Iteration Changes
  • Introducing change to an iterative process
  • Integrating change into the product
  • Balancing change
  • Closing out an Agile project
  • Early termination of an Agile project
  • Project closeout retrospective