Agile for Product Owners

Part 1: The Necessity for Change

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

1. VUCA: Volatility, Uncertainly, 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 comparision

Part 2: Mindset and Manifesto

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

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. Topics covered:

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. Topics covered:

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. Topics covered:

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. Topics covered:

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. Topics Covered:

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. Topics Covered:

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 approach such as Poker Planning and Affinity Estimation. How story estimation can lead to release planning. Topics Covered:

1. What are 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. Topics Covered:

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. Topics Covered:

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

• Product Owners
• Product Managers
• Team Leadership
• Project Managers