Course Taxonomy: Enterprise & Product Agility

Agile for Product Owners

Posted on October 17, 2020 by -

Part 1: The Necessity for Change

Gain an overall understanding of why effective focus on dealing with change is important.

  1. VUCA: Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity
  2. Leading Change – Your role as a change agent
  3. The Cynefin Model of Complexity – Urgency for change
  4. Deming's 14 Points
  5. Agile and Waterfall comparison

Part 2: Mindset and Manifesto

Learn why mindset change is needed and how the Agile Manifesto is the shift needed.

  1. How an Agile transformation starts with a mindset change
  2. Explaining the Agile Values
  3. The 3 focus areas represented by the Agile Principles

Part 3: Agile Frameworks

Where Lean and Kanban fit in the Agile spectrum which leads to the Scrum framework and XP practices.

  1. Principles of Lean and the 8 wastes of software development
  2. Mapping your Value Stream
  3. Key ideas in Kanban

Part 4: Team Concepts

Identifying high performance in teams and different kinds of organizational teams, including distributed ones.

  1. What are the characteristics of high performance?
  2. Five kinds of organizational teams
  3. Distributed teams and challenges with distribution

Part 5: Scrum and Its Roles

Learn where Scrum came from and the key roles on a Scrum team.

  1. Agile/Scrum history and the essence of Scrum
  2. The Scrum framework
  3. The Stakeholder/Customer
  4. Scrum Master’s key responsibilities
  5. The Development team’s responsibilities
  6. The role of QA
  7. The Management role
  8. What is a Product Owner and the PO Role/Challenges?
  9. Agile Leadership

Part 6: Agile Project Planning

Understanding the Agile planning approach, key ways to convey project vision, and the use of user roles and personas.

  1. The Levels of Agile Planning
  2. Elevator Pitches, Project Charters, Themes, and Roadmaps
  3. User Roles and Personas

Part 7: Agile Backlog and Stories

Understanding the use of stories and approaches to defining story maps and story splitting.

  1. Critical documentation concepts
  2. Product and Sprint Backlogs
  3. User Stories and Story Patterns
  4. Epics and their breakdown
  5. Story “Smells”
  6. Story Mapping and Splitting

Part 8: Acceptance Criteria and Prioritization

Writing good acceptance criteria and using them for story decomposition. Understanding technical stories and technical debt in support of Development teams. Using various prioritization approaches and risk management approaches.

  1. Why Acceptance Criteria are important and writing them.
  2. Technical Stories and Technical Debt
  3. Prioritization approaches and Cost of Delay considerations
  4. Why projects go beyond their reasonable end
  5. Risk Management techniques

Part 9: Estimation

How traditional estimation can go wrong and the relative estimation approach used in Agile, including estimation approaches such as Poker Planning and Affinity Estimation. How story estimation can lead to release planning.

  1. What are the challenges with traditional estimation?
  2. Agile’s relative estimation approach
  3. Poker Planning
  4. Affinity Estimation
  5. Agile Release Planning

Part 10: Sprint Execution

The Product Owner roles in Sprint Planning, Daily Meetings, Sprint Reviews, and the Sprint Retrospective.

  1. Sprint planning and story refinement
  2. Sprint execution: the daily meeting and XP practices
  3. Basic Sprint metrics tools
  4. Metrics implementation advice
  5. Sprint Review for product improvement and evolution
  6. Sprint Retrospective for team/process improvement and evolution

Part 11: Agile Scaling Methods

A look at three key scaling approaches: Scrum of Scrums, SAFe, and LeSS.

  1. Basic Scrum scaling with Scrum of Scrums
  2. Comprehensive scaling using the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)
  3. Large Scale Scrum as a scaling approach

ICAgile Coaching (ICP-ACC)

Posted on October 17, 2020 by -

Part 1: The Agile Coach

An Agile Coach is an advanced facilitator of business practice who has achieved an expert level in lean/Agile practices and one or more knowledge domains. Agile Coaches have developed professional coaching, mentoring, and/or training skills and realize that their skill as a coach is developed through working with others and continuously learning about and improving their coaching skill set. To assist you in becoming more proficient in your coaching, you will learn about:

  1. "Your" definition of Agile coaching
  2. The Agile coaching mindset
  3. Defining Agile team facilitation
  4. Agile team facilitator behaviors
  5. Assessing one's ability to serve the team
  6. Responsibilities and skills of the coach
  7. Achieving self-awareness/self-management in the coach
  8. Developing more advanced Agile coaching skill
  9. Setting boundaries for coaching
  10. Internal vs. external coaches
  11. Defining the coaching "contract"
  12. Designing a coaching alliance

Part 2: The Coach as Facilitator

A facilitator is someone who helps a group identify common objectives and then offers group processes to achieve that defined outcome while maintaining neutrality. A skilled facilitator consciously embodies self-awareness, self-management, bias management, while conveying openness and enthusiasm. An Agile Coach facilitates more than meetings. An Agile Coach facilitates participation, collaboration, and engagement from the team and organization. We will discuss and practice:

  1. Facilitation and the facilitator stance
  2. Definition of facilitation
  3. The facilitation of meetings
  4. Designing meetings for collaboration
  5. Facilitating full participation and engagement
  6. Facilitating collaboration
  7. Facilitating team decision-making

Part 3: The Coach as Professional Coach

Effective Agile coaches know the parameters of their job. They avidly take up their responsibilities and help others take up theirs. They are able to clearly articulate the differences between their role and that of others in the organization such as product owner, project manager, program manager, and functional manager. Agile Coaches are able to communicate their roles and set agreements with their clients to identify what this looks like. Exploring these concepts we will cover:

  1. The coaching stance
  2. Maintaining neutrality in coaching
  3. Self-awareness and self-management
  4. Holding the client's agenda
  5. Issue identification and exploration
  6. Action commitment and achievement
  7. Professional coaching skills

Part 4: The Coach as Mentor

Successful Agile coaches have learned to not go it alone. They have acquired their skills by calling on the skills and knowledge of mentors. Through being mentored, they learn to mentor others. As a group, we will explore mentorship – the process of formally and informal sharing knowledge via social contracts. Specifically, we will look into:

  1. Mentoring and coaching the Agile roles
  2. Mentoring and coaching transitions and practices
  3. Understanding the individual change cycle
  4. Identifying and handling resistance from individuals
  5. Mentoring vs. coaching

Part 5: The Coach as Teacher

The terms coaching and teaching are often used interchangeably referring to the transfer of knowledge or experience and the education of an individual to another. However, a knowledgeable Agile Coach knows that this definition does not always hold true. We will explore the differences between mentoring and coaching versus teaching. You will explore different modes and methods of teaching and when you should switch "modes." We will cover:

  1. Mentoring and coaching versus teaching
  2. Teaching the Agile basics and mindset shift
  3. Modes and methods of teaching
  4. Distinguishing and articulating Agile frameworks

Part 6: The Team Coach

Successful Agile Coaches are able to diagnose and assess healthy team functioning, including the ability to identify dysfunctional behaviors or circumstances. We will review these patterns and indicators and learn practices and techniques to coach the team through their learning curves toward steadily improved performance. You will learn to coach performance by:

  1. Understanding team development
  2. Understanding a model of team development
  3. Detecting a team's stage of development
  4. Helping a team move up the development curve
  5. Setting up the team environment
  6. Creating team trust
  7. Learning shared leadership and self-organization
  8. Continuously seeking to improve
  9. Defining and identifying high performance
  10. Knowing and establishing team vs. group mindset/behaviors
  11. Understanding strategies for dealing with different types of teams
  12. Understanding your role in the self-organizing team
  13. Handling conflict and dysfunction within the team
  14. Identifying and managing 'Group Think'
  15. Handling organizational impediments
  16. Promoting leadership engagement

Agile Boot Camp: ICAgile Fundamentals Certification (ICP)

Posted on October 17, 2020 by -

Module 1: Why Agile? 

In today’s rapidly changing business environment, traditional methods of product development cannot always match the business needs. Businesses often experience delivery issues such as long delivery times and failure to adapt to the changing customer demands. We start by making the case for shifting to an Agile approach to solve problems and to gain an overall understanding of the principles and benefits of Agile approaches. 

  • Business turbulence
  • Agile Compared to Traditional Delivery
  • Benefits of Adopting Agile

Team Exercises: We will discuss the various challenges that drives business turbulence and how agility helps companies to adapt to changing circumstances. These challenges are tied back to the attendees’ own experiences in a changing environment. 

Module 2: Becoming Agile 

To learn more about Agile we review the Agile Manifesto, Principles, and the Agile Mindset. We start with Lean, which is a foundational component and influences all Agile methodologies. We will visit different agile approaches for both iterative development and continuous flow work and identify different types of work in their own context.

  • Agile Mental Models
  • Agile Manifesto and Principles
  • Types of Work
  • Agile Methods

Team Exercises: Teams will engage in a fun exercise that will improve understanding, and reinforce the importance of, the agile principles. We will also discuss the various types of work that they encounter in their own context.

Module 3: Agile Teams 

Agile focuses on creating a team that can deliver outstanding results on a consistent basis. In this section we will discuss what makes a high-performing team and how to build that team. The section will also cover the team roles associated with an Agile approach.

  • Attributes of Successful Teams
  • Agile Team Roles
  • Team as a System
  • Collaborative Team Environments

Team Exercises: As a class, we will discuss the attributes of a great team based on the attendees’ own experiences. The class will also identify components needed for collaborative environments – physical and virtual.

Module 4: Agile Product Planning 

A common myth is that Agile does not involve planning. In actually, there are five levels of planning on an Agile project including the Product Vision, Roadmap, Release Planning, Sprint Planning, and the Daily Standup. Utilizing team projects, we will take a hands-on look at the different levels of planning and how it applies to the team’s work. 

  • 5 Levels of Planning
  • Product Visions
  • Product Roadmaps
  • User Roles and Personas

Team Exercises: Teams will identify a team project and use that project for many upcoming exercises. They will practice creating a Product Vision, identifying Roadmap components, and turn User Roles into full-fleshed personas.

Module 5: Product Backlog 

The Product Backlog contents represent all the work of the Agile Team. We will investigate the different types of items represented in the Product Backlog including how those items are refined over time.

  • Product Backlog Items
  • Writing User Stories
  • Acceptance Criteria
  • Story Reviews

Team Exercises: The class will discuss Product Backlog components and how to break Epics into smaller User Stories. Teams will conduct a User Story Writing Workshop to create initial User Stories for their team project. Each team will present examples of their user stories and the Instructor will lead a discussion about where teams hit the mark and areas for improvement (Instructor will not have all of the ideas, this is a great opportunity for team dynamics).

Module 6: Prioritization and Estimation

The Product Backlog contains the work but the way the Backlog is prioritized and estimated is key to building a successful product. We will look at agile practices for prioritization and team estimation. In addition, we will better understand how we deliver product increments through Releases.

  • Prioritization
  • Estimating
  • Story Points
  • Release Planning

Team Exercises: We will review a retailer case study and their approach to prioritization key system features. Team will practice Story Point estimation. Project teams will identify needs for their first product release.

Module 7: Sprint Planning and Execution

In iterative development, the team works in a series of time-boxed events to deliver incremental value. These timeboxes are called “Sprints”. We will look inside the Sprint to understand the way the team works to produce value.

  • Sprint Planning
  • Product Increment
  • The Daily Standup
  • Agile Metrics

Team Exercises: Teams for define a Definition of Done for their team project. Teams will also identify key learnings and critical points about sprint execution. 

Module 8: Inspect and Adapt

The power of Agile comes from the fact that continuous improvement is built into the Agile system. In this section, we will review how People, Product and Process improve through a frequent inspect and adapt process. We will discuss the main Agile ceremonies that help us accomplish this: Sprint Review, Demo and the Retrospective.

  • Sprint Review
  • Demo
  • Retrospective

Team Exercises: The class will engage in an exercise to summarize the key events and artifacts within the Scrum framework. Teams will discuss how they could apply what they have learned to their current work and what they can start doing now so they do not lose what they have learned.

Module 9: Kanban Systems

Not all work fits well into a Scrum framework. Kanban is an Agile method that helps us to improve a delivery process with a focus on continuous improvement. We will cover the foundation of Kanban concepts, properties, and terminology. We will also understand the philosophy behind the Kanban framework and how it originated. The best way to understand Kanban is to go through the process of implementing it. This section goes through the various techniques and ceremonies associated with Kanban.

  • Kanban's Core Practices
  • Kanban Concepts, Principles, and Terminology
  • Visualization of Work
  • Managing Work-in-Progress

Team Exercises: We will use new team projects based on continuous flow types of work. Teams will engage in several exercises to build their own Kanban board that clearly communicates their commitments, encourages collaboration, and enables continuous improvement. We will also engage in discussions on key Kanban concepts and how Kanban may apply to their types of work.

Module 10: Adoption and Scaling

Agile Adoption can be accomplished with different approaches and at different speeds. We will review the best practices of Organizational Change Management as it applies to an Agile adoption and consider some of the primary reasons for adoption failure.  

  • Organizational Change Models
  • Scaling Methods
  • Delivery Self-Assessment

Team Exercises: We will wrap-up the course and attendees will identify concepts they can apply to improve their own product delivery.

Chef Foundations – Official Chef Training

Posted on October 17, 2020 by -

Part 1: Using Chef resources – the building blocks

Part 2 : Building Chef recipes and cookbooks

Part 3: Introduction to testing cookbooks with Test Kitchen

Part 4: Collecting details about the system via Ohai

Part 5: Attributes – writing dynamic code

Part 6: Managing data with templates

Part 7: Advanced templating – passing in variables

Part 8: Storing your code in a repo – an introduction to Git

Part 9: Workstation setup

Part 10: Centralizing management with Chef Server

Part 11: Using Community Cookbooks

Part 12: Automating chef-client runs

Part 13: Managing a multi-node infrastructure

Part 14: Simplification and scalability through Roles

Part 15: Power automation – invoking Chef Search

Part 16: Staging versus Production – Environments

Part 17: Using Databags to create user accounts on servers

PMI-PBA Boot Camp

Posted on October 17, 2020 by -

Part 1: Introduction and Foundation of the Certification

The field of business analysis is rich with terms, concepts, tools, techniques, and processes. This beginning section sets the foundation of key terms to know in order to prepare you for the five domain areas and forty knowledge and skills areas that are part of the exam:

  1. The value of business analysis
  2. Common vocabulary
  3. Foundational elements
  4. Business Analysis Processes
  5. Business Analysis Process Groups
  6. Business Analysis Knowledge Areas
  7. Business Analysis Tailoring 

Practice sessions:

Participants will define key terms in order to understand the foundations of the business analysis profession and practice answering questions similar to the exam. 

Part 2: Business Analysis Environment

The profession of business analysis is influenced by the environment and organization in which it is performed. This section focuses on the two major categories of influence, both internally and externally.

  1. Enterprise environmental factors (EEFs)
  2. Organizational process assets (OPAs)

Practice sessions:

Participants will review their understanding of EEFs and OPAs with concept review questions.

Part 3: Role of the Business Analyst

Even though business analysis has been performed for decades, there is much confusion about the role and who performs the work of business analysis. This section provides context for the role of the business analyst, background and support of the role, and the essential competencies to succeed in business analysis.  

  1. Definition of a Business Analyst
  2. The business analysts’ influence
  3. Key competencies for business analysts

Practice sessions:

Participants will review their understanding of the role of the business analyst with concept review questions. Participants will reflect on the evolution of the business analyst role and the relationship between the business analyst and project manager.

Part 4: Needs Assessment

The first Business Analysis Knowledge Area of the exam is where people begin their requirements process and the activities that lead to project success. Emphasis is placed on the business analysis processes used to define the business problem or opportunity and perform needs assessment. Needs assessment encompasses 18 percent of the exam. In this section we review how to effectively perform these seven business analysis processes:

  1. Identify problem or opportunity
  2. Assess current state
  3. Determine future state
  4. Determine viable options and provide recommendation
  5. Facilitate product roadmap development
  6. Assemble business case
  7. Support charter development

Practice sessions:

Participants will review their understanding of the Needs Assessment Knowledge Area with concept review questions. Participants will reflect on the seven Needs Assessment business analysis processes and discuss why Needs Assessment is important.

Part 5: Stakeholder Engagement

This Business Analysis Knowledge area focuses on the identification and analysis of people who have an interest in the solution outcome. Emphasis is placed on how to collaborate and communicate with stakeholders to keep them engaged in the project, program, and/or portfolio. In this section we review how to effectively perform these seven business analysis processes:

  1. Identify stakeholders
  2. Conduct stakeholder analysis
  3. Determine stakeholder engagement and communication approach
  4. Conduct business analysis planning
  5. Prepare for transition to future state
  6. Manage stakeholder engagement and communication
  7. Assess business analysis performance

Practice sessions:

Participants will review their understanding of the Stakeholder Engagement Knowledge Area with concept review questions. Participants will reflect on the seven Stakeholder Engagement business analysis processes and discuss why Stakeholder Engagement is important.

Part 6: Elicitation

This section emphasizes how a business analysis professional plans and prepares for elicitation, conducts elicitation and confirms elicitation results from the sources used to obtain information for the project, program, and/or portfolio.  In this section we review how to effectively perform these four business analysis processes:

  1. Determine the elicitation approach
  2. Prepare for elicitation
  3. Conduct elicitation
  4. Confirm elicitation results

Practice sessions:

Participants will review their understanding of the Elicitation Knowledge Area with concept review questions. Participants will reflect on the four Elicitation business analysis processes and discuss why Elicitation is important.

Part 7: Analysis

Analysis of the requirements involves making sense of what has been revealed during Elicitation. This Knowledge Area includes performing the following requirements activities: analyzing, decomposing, accepting, verifying, validating, prioritizing, and assessing product design options. The Analysis domain contains 35 percent of the exam (which also includes the Elicitation Knowledge Area – Section VI). In this section we'll cover the following nine business analysis processes:

  1. Determine analysis approach
  2. Create and analyze models
  3. Define and elaborate requirements
  4. Define acceptance criteria
  5. Verify requirements
  6. Validate requirements
  7. Prioritize requirements and other product information
  8. Identify and analyze product risks
  9. Assess product design options

Practice sessions:

Participants will review their understanding of the Analysis Knowledge Area with concept review questions. Participants will reflect on the nine Analysis business analysis processes and discuss why Analysis is important.

Part 8: Traceability and Monitoring

Identifying the status of requirements throughout the lifecycle of the project and communicating critical information related to requirements is an important factor for project success. This Knowledge Area is concerned with managing, examining, and sharing requirements information with the project stakeholders. Traceability and Monitoring comprise 15 percent of the exam. This Knowledge Area includes the following four business analysis processes:

  1. Determine the traceability and monitoring approach
  2. Establish relationships and dependencies
  3. Select and approve requirements
  4. Manage changes to requirements and other product information

Practice sessions:

Participants will review their understanding of the Traceability and Monitoring Knowledge Area with concept review questions. Participants will reflect on the four Traceability and Monitoring business analysis processes and discuss why Traceability and Monitoring are important.

Part 9: Solution Evaluation

The final Knowledge Area examines if the delivered solution achieves the business need and satisfies the requirements. These activities could include evaluating solution performance, acceptance results, defects, and solution acceptance. Solution Evaluation comprises 10 percent of the exam. In this section we will explore the following four business analysis processes:

  1. Evaluate solution performance
  2. Determine the solution evaluation approach
  3. Evaluate acceptance results and address defects
  4. Obtain solution acceptance for release

Practice sessions:

Participants will review their understanding of the Solution Evaluation Knowledge Area with concept review questions. Participants will reflect on the four Solution Evaluation business analysis processes and discuss why Solution Evaluation is important.

Part 10: Business Analyst Competencies

To effectively perform business analysis, it is critical to possess specific skills, knowledge, and abilities. In this section we will examine the following six major categories of competencies:

  1. Analytical skills
  2. Expert judgment
  3. Communication skills
  4. Personal skills
  5. Leadership skills
  6. Tool knowledge

Practice sessions:

Participants will review their understanding of the six major categories of competencies with concept review questions. Participants will reflect on why competencies are critical when performing business analysis.

Part 11: What to Expect on the Exam

Now that you know the content expectations for the exam it's important to realize how to prepare for the exam and what to expect as you go through the application process. To ensure you successfully pass the first time, this section will cover:

  1. The PMI Professional in Business Analysis (PMI-PBA®) Application
  2. Exam requirements
  3. Exam overview
  4. Preparing for the exam
  5. Understanding the questions
  6. Taking the exam
  7. General tips to help you through the process

Business Agility Foundation (ICP-BAF)

Posted on October 17, 2020 by -

Part 1: Welcome and Introductions

  • Summary: Opening and general logistics for the class.
    • We start with the basics to get to know each other and understand the objectives of the course. We will model the creation of Working Agreements that contribute to building trust on a team.
    • Topics covered:
      • Opening and Introductions
      • Agenda and Learning Objectives
      • ICAgile Certification Overview
      • Working Agreements

Part 2: The Need for Business Agility

  • Summary: Today’s environment is one of perpetual change at a rapid pace. A VUCA world best describes our current times – one of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. Our traditional tried and proven methods do not let us respond to these conditions at the required pace. To meet these demands, successful companies adopt the practices of Business Agility. To achieve agility organizations have to change the way they think about the workforce, customer value, and product development. We will also cover the following: What is Business Agility? In this section, we will look at what it means for an organization to be “Agile.” Topics include the foundational components of Business Agility such as principles, teamwork, customer value, and continuous improvement. 
  • Topics covered:
    • Business Agility: Drivers, Criticality, Values, Principles, and Dimensions
    • VUCA
    • Case for Change: Empowering Teams
    • Case for Change: Customer Value and Continuous Learning
    • Measures of Success

Part 3: Compelling Vision and Clarity of Purpose

  • Summary: Painting a vision of the future with a strong sense of purpose is an essential component to enabling high-performance. It brings alignment to teams and stakeholders. Operating in an Agile fashion challenges our learned organizational behaviors and outdated thoughts about management. In this section, we will look at how building a vision of the future guides our teams and ways that our individual behaviors must change so that our organizational behaviors can change. Gaining new skills and abilities is essential but we also have new ways of thinking about work and the customer experience. As a change agent for shifting how the organization works, we first have to recognize our own blind spots and pre-conceptions. 
    • Topics covered:
      • Compelling Vision and Clarity of Purpose
      • Focusing on the Big Picture and Emerging Future
      • Blindspots, Mental Models, Patterns, and Sensemaking
      • Complex Dynamics of Change
      • Understanding of Customers, Stakeholders, and Emerging Markets

Part 4: New Ways of Thinking

  • Summary: Creating and managing value is the essence of Business Agility. To do so requires an understanding of value. This includes defining value, making value visible, managing the cost of value, and the time to achieve value. In this section, we will look at new ways of thinking to help us manage and produce value. This includes adopting a growth mindset, recognizing marginal value and negative value, and using Polarity Management to manage problems. We will look at different ways of thinking such as the Lean systems perspective for linking goals and actions and Design Thinking to help us accelerate effectiveness and agility.
    • Topics Covered:
      • Developing a Growth Mindset
      • Breaking Paradigms and Making Value Visible
      • Relationship Between Complexity and Business Agility
      • Recognizing and Managing Dilemmas, Paradoxes, and Polarities
      • Lean Systems Thinking
      • Design Thinking Approaches

Part 5: New and Differentiating Behaviors

  • Summary: To drive new approaches to working requires that we leverage new behaviors. In this section, we look at ways of working that will help enable business agility. We will start with one of our most effective tools, high performance questions, to motivate fresh thinking and challenge assumptions. Business Agilists demonstrate a bias for action and look to empirical measures for our results so we can make proper decisions, such as to pivot or persevere. This section includes a sampling of the Lean Startup framework, Kanban systems, and iterative frameworks.
    • Topics covered:
      • High-Performance Questions: Ask vs. Tell
      • Experimenting and Hypothesis Testing
      • Lean Startup and Canvases
      • Kanban Values and Systems
      • Iterative Framework and Sampling of Practices

Part 6: Designing the Future

  • Summary: Enabling agility in an organization requires changes how each person works and an environment that nurtures agility. An environment that focuses on what is important, practices continuous improvement, and embraces emergent learning. As individuals, we have to break free from our traditional ways of thinking and move towards an Agile mindset. In this section, we reflect on Business Agility capabilities and practices, synthesize workshop learnings into actionable workbooks, action plans, and personal development plans.   
    • Topics Covered:
      • Creating Space for Optimal Engagement and Value Creation
      • Business Playbook
      • Action Plans for Accelerating Business Agility
      • Personal Development Plan
      • Review ICAgile Learning Objectives and Video

SAFe® AI-Empowered Product Owner/Product Manager (SAFe POPM)

Posted on October 17, 2020 by -

  • Lesson 1: Exploring Product Roles and Responsibilities
    • Introducing SAFe for product roles
    • The Lean-Agile mindset
    • Value streams
    • Responsibilities of product roles
  • Lesson 2: Preparing for PI Planning
    • PI Planning
    • The solution vision
    • Solution and PI roadmaps
    • Customer-centric features
    • ART backlog and Kanban
  • Lesson 3: Leading PI Planning
    • Communicate the vision
    • Establish PI objectives
    • Manage dependencies
    • Manage risks
  • Lesson 4: Executing Iterations
    • Stories and story maps
    • Iteration planning
    • The team Kanban and team sync
    • Backlog refinement
    • Iteration review and iteration retrospective
    • Continuous delivery pipeline
  • Lesson 5: Executing the PI
    • Aligning delivery with sync events
    • The system demo
    • The innovation and planning iteration
    • Inspect and adapt
  • Lesson 6: AI for Product Roles
    • An overview of AI
    • Responsible AI
    • Building an AI-augmented workforce

Introduction to DevOps

Posted on October 17, 2020 by -

Part 1: Introduction        

  1. DevOps Defined
  2. High-Performance IT Organizations
  3. Core Chronic Conflict
  4. Exercise: Pain Points
  5. Business Value of DevOps
  6. Where DevOps Came From
    1. W Edwards Deming & Total Quality Management
    2. The Lean Movement & Toyota Production System
    3. The Agile Development & Infrastructure Movements
    4. Exercise: Agile Infrastructure
    5. The Continuous Delivery Movement
  7. IT Service management & DevOps
  8. End Goals of DevOps & CALMS

Part 2: Maturing a DevOps Practice in the Enterprise       

  1. DevOps & Organizational Culture
  2. Two Patterns You Can Follow
  3. The Involvement Principle
    1. Information Security Principles
  4. Exercise: The Involvement Principle
  5. Scaling DevOps in the Enterprise

Part 3: The DevOps Journey – The Three Ways

The First Way: Optimize Flow

  1. Principles of Flow
  2. Infrastructure As Code
  3. Infrastructure Configuration Mgmt & Tools
  4. Deployment Pipeline & Tools
  5. Shared Version Control & Tools
  6. Build Quality In
  7. Containerization
  8. SOA and Microservices
  9. Exercise: Optimizing Flow

The Second Way: Amplify Feedback

  1. Principles of Feedback
  2. Telemetry Principles
  3. System Monitoring Tools
  4. Log Aggregation & Tools
  5. Use Telemetry to Anticipate Problems
  6. Feedback For Safe Deployment of Code
  7. Hypothesis-Driven Development
  8. Exercise: Amplifying Feedback

The Third Way: Continual Learning & Experimentation

  1. Learning Culture
  2. Innovation Culture
  3. Exercise: Learning & Innovation Culture

Part 4: Course Conclusion   

  1. Q & A

Ansible Configuration Management Boot Camp

Posted on October 17, 2020 by -

Part 1: Introduction

  1. Why configuration management is a critical part of any DevOps team
  2. Strengths and weaknesses of Ansible
  3. Web-scale
    1. How Ansible is different from other CM tools like Chef and Puppet
    2. Getting started with Ansible terminology
    3. Ansible and YML for describing your environments

Part 2: Getting set up

  1. Some prerequisites
  2. Getting set up on a Mac
  3. Getting set up on Linux
  4. Getting set up on Windows
  5. Testing with Vagrant
  6. Using SSH keys to connect to your target nodes
  7. Hands-on Practice Lab: Install Ansible and test connectivity to your test nodes.

Part 3: Inventory

  1. Basic inventory example
  2. Hosts and groups
  3. Hands-on Practice Lab: Create an inventory file that defines four hosts, two web servers and two database servers, and assign these hosts to groups that describe their function.

Part 4: Ansible Playbooks

  1. A useful directory structure to keep your Ansible code organized
  2. Using git to manage your Ansible code
  3. A first look at a playbook to install and configure NTP time synchronization
  4. Hands-on Practice Lab: Create a playbook to install and configure OpenSSH-server on all nodes and make sure it is running.

Part 5: Provisioners

  1. Connecting Ansible to your preferred cloud provider (we'll use DigitalOcean)
  2. Creating a new server instance
  3. Dynamic inventory
  4. Dynamic inventory on Amazon AWS
  5. Mixing static and dynamic inventory
  6. Hands-on Practice Lab: Refactor your inventory so that your staging environment is local using Vagrant, and your production environment is built on DigitalOcean.

Part 6: Highly available infrastructure with Ansible

  1. Spec up our inventory and host groups
  2. Using roles
  3. Configure our database backend
  4. Configure our web server front-end
  5. Configure a replicated filesystem
  6. Configure centralized logging
  7. Hands-on Practice Lab: Build the sample infrastructure on your local Vagrant environment.

Part 7: Application deployments with Ansible

  1. Deploying our app from SCM to our local Vagrant environment
  2. How we would deploy that code to production once tested by QA
  3. Updating our application
  4. How Ansible compares to alternatives such as Capistrano
  5. Hands-on Practice Lab: Proceed with deploying our application on your local Vagrant environment.

Part 8: Docker containers with Ansible

  1. A brief intro to Docker
  2. The synergy of containerization and automation
  3. Using Ansible to build Docker containers
  4. MySQL containers
  5. Web application containers
  6. Data storage containers
  7. Hands-on Practice Lab: Adapt your infrastructure to deploy our sample app using Docker.

Part 9: Testing and continuous integration

  1. Unit, integration, and functional testing
  2. Automating your testing using GitHub and Travis CI
  3. Hands-on Practice Lab: Create some tests for our SSH playbook to make sure there are no syntax errors and that Ansible is configuring nodes as expected.

Part 10: Preparing for Ansible back at work

  1. Real-world use case: Using Ansible to automate CM and application pipelines through continuous integration, release, deployment, and operations
  2. We'll review your own environments and processes and evaluate how to best integrate Ansible's configuration management for your own needs
  3. Exercise: Your to-do list