Instructor: Scott Duncan

ICAgile Team Facilitation (ICP-ATF)

Posted on October 17, 2020 by -

Part 1: Welcome, Introductions, and Course Logistics

A Team Facilitator is someone who helps a group identify common objectives and then offers group processes to achieve defined outcomes. A skilled facilitator consciously embodies self-awareness, self-management, and bias management, while conveying openness and enthusiasm. An Agile Team Facilitator (ATF) is about more than just meetings. An ATF facilitates participation, collaboration, engagement, and team growth.

  1. Introductions and Housekeeping
  2. Course Objectives and Agenda
  3. ICAgile Certification Overview

Part 2: Development Path for Agile Coaching

The Agile Team Facilitator is on the development path to becoming an Agile Coach. To be effective, the Agile Coaching path requires that we take our development one step at a time, obtaining competence at each step along the way. We will review the development path and transition from Agile Team Facilitator to Agile Coach.

  1. Development Path for Agile Team Facilitators
  2. Competencies of an Agile Coach
  3. Your Extended Team
  4. Knowing When to Call on Help

Part 3: The Agile Team Facilitator Mindset

Becoming an Agile Team Facilitator requires a certain mindset to lead and serve the team. Learn the mindset required for the Agile Team Facilitator and gain an understanding of the paradigm shift that must occur to be successful in this collaborative environment. Understand how the Agile Team Facilitator is a role model for the team by exemplifying the Agile principles. Review the strategies required to be a servant leader and models for achieving self-awareness.

  1. What is an Agile Team Facilitator
  2. Team Facilitator Guiding Principles
  3. Agile Team Facilitator Mindset
  4. Self-Awareness/Self-Management
  5. Servant Leadership

Part 4: Foundational Facilitation Skills

One of the essential skills for the Agile Team Facilitator is helping teams identify and achieve common objectives. The ATF facilitates the team events to ensure they are productive and move the team forward. This starts with understanding the purpose and expected outcomes of the various team events. A flow must be created to achieve those goals and ensure participation.

  1. Arc of Facilitation
  2. Understanding Purpose
  3. Gather Planning and Design Information
  4. Designing Meeting Flow for Collaboration

Part 5: Conducting a Facilitated Session

When facilitating a session, the facilitator is the holder of the process and the team holds the content. The facilitator must maintain neutrality to not unduly influence team decisions. They must make sure that the event is organized to encourage collaboration. This includes the physical setup, meeting organization tools, and driving collaborative conversations.

  1. Maintaining Neutrality
  2. Using Meeting Organization Tools and Interactive Facilitation Techniques
  3. Facilitating Collaborative Conversations and Team Decision-Making
  4. Managing Dysfunctional Behaviors
  5. Reading the Room and Capturing Information

Part 6: Facilitating Collaborative Meetings

Facilitating typical Agile framework meetings is a requirement for the Agile Team Facilitator. We must plan these events and keep them engaging. To do so, the ATF must understand the purpose and underlying principles and values of the ceremonies. In this section, we will go through the ceremonies for an agile framework and design meetings to facilitate achievement of the desired outcomes. We will specifically design common sessions such as Retrospectives and Daily Stand-Ups. We will also look at the design of other key ceremonies.

  1. Agile Framework Meetings
  2. Facilitating Retrospectives and Daily Stand-Ups
  3. Facilitating Other Agile Meetings

Part 7: Skillfully Facilitating Agile Practices

Teams will move in and out of patterns of behavior. The ATF needs to recognize team patterns and know when a team may need more, or less, intervention. We will look at how our styles need to change based on the team current state of knowledge and self-sufficiency.

  1. Team Levels of Maturity
  2. Changing Style Based on Team Phase
  3. Levels of Team Intervention

Part 8: Active Facilitation

This section is devoted to putting our training into action! The ability to neutrally facilitate a session must be practiced. Attendees will have an opportunity to design and facilitate a team session based on scenarios from agile framework meetings.

  1. Design an Agile Meeting
  2. Facilitate an Agile Practice
  3. Give and Receive Feedback

Part 9: Summary

Summarize key takeaways from the course and pull it all together.

  1. Review Facilitation Tools
  2. Review ICAgile Learning Objectives and Video
  3. Survey Information

Introduction to Agile

Posted on October 17, 2020 by -

Part 1: Why Agile

  • What are the factors driving business turbulence and need for agility.
  • Understanding the changing mindset
  • What a Burning Platform is and how it ties to the need for change.
  • Why change may be needed.
  • The difference between traditional delivery and Agile delivery.
  • Why implementing Agile provides benefits beyond traditional delivery.
  • Benefits of adopting Agile.

Part 2: Agile Foundations

  • The 4 Agile Values in the Agile Manifesto.
  • The 12 Agile Principles that guide how we do our work.
  • The Agile Mindset.

Part 3: Agile Teams

  • That an Agile team is a system.
  • Scrum Team Roles.
  • Levels of Team Maturity

Part 4: Agile Methodologies

  • The value of Lean and the relationship to Agile.
  • Differences between iterative and continuous flow work.
  • The work drives the method.
  • How Agile teams embrace Continuous Planning.
  • Products, Product visions and users
  • Key Scrum events for planning and execution.
  • Review User Stories
  • Understanding Minimum Viable Product
  • The 3 core Scrum artifacts: Product Backlog, Sprint Backlog, Product Increment.
  • The importance of adapting and continuous improvement.
  • The benefits of conducting a Review at the end of each Sprint.
  • The Retrospective, your most powerful agile tool.
  • Differences between Scrum and Kanban, and complimentary capabilities.
  • The benefits of limiting the Work in Progress.
  • Stop starting and start finishing!

Part 5: Agile Adoption

  • Barriers to agile adoption.
  • Thinking about knowledge growth using Shu Ha Ri.
  • Realizing a suitable agile culture
  • Kotter Framework for organization change.
  • Ways to scale agile across large projects and portfolios.

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.