Agile Project Management & Leadership (5-Days Course)

Introduction:

Massive advances in technology combined with political uncertainty and associated market volatility mean that today’s work environment is required to embrace change. If you, your team or your organization is resistant to new demands, processes or opportunities, you may lose competitive advantage. So how do we identify the need for change and respond effectively without throwing our work and the work of our teams into chaos?

As the Digital Transformation age gathers pace, some organizations have embraced a new management thinking and are enjoying a sustained competitive advantage; faster speed to market, increased customer satisfaction and superior profits. This training course is designed to equip delegates with the knowledge, tools and techniques that they may apply to develop an agile leadership culture within their working environment.

• This training course will feature:
• Governance of teams and work approaches
• Agility and why agile approaches work
• Team leadership through self-organisation
• Dominant agile approaches – SCRUM and KANBAN
• How agility drives continuous improvement

Objectives:

By the end of this training course, participants will be able to:

• Identify the situations in their organization where traditional portfolio governance and project approaches are underperforming versus the new management practices
• Understand why facilitating the emergence of new ideas and requirements can lead to greater employee motivation and superior delivery of value to the organization
• Analyze their own work situation to determine where agile tools and techniques will be of benefit
• Appreciate the power of teamwork and the necessity to support teams with effective structures
• Lead a team in the implementation of a continuous improvement culture

Course Content:

Day 1: Traditional Governance Approaches

• The nature of projects and project management
• Line management versus project management
• The project manager as a leader – knowledge capability
• The project manager as a leader – performance deliveries
• The project manager as a leader – interpersonal skills
• Governance of work – portfolio management

Day 2: Agile Leadership

• The challenges with traditional approaches
• Make People Awesome
• Deliver Value Continuously
• Make safety a prerequisite
• Experiment and learn rapidly
• Guiding principles of agile leadership

Day 3: Applying Agile

• Explaining agile approaches
• Agile application exercise– multiple iterations
• Applying retrospectives – leading continuous improvement
• Applying team decision-making – planning poker
• Applying agile estimation – learning by doing
• Reflection on team behaviours

Day 4: SCRUM

• Where did Scrum come from
• The Scrum framework
• Scrum roles and responsibilities
• Scrum project management
• Scrum applied to operational work
• Challenges to adoption

Day 5: Kanban

• The Kanban approach to work
• Delivering a continuous flow of value
• Kanban and the Senior Leadership Team
• Kanban or Scrum
• Challenges to Adoption
• Course review

Impact:

Organizational Impact:

Your organisation will benefit from team managers and supervisors who return with a knowledge of how to build and develop teams that fulfill their potential and improve their motivation and productivity. They will be able to:

• Reduced Risks, Agile teams can better react to business changes
• Higher chances of meeting the customers expectations. This happens with constant customer collaboration through the frequent feedback loops in an Agile process.
• Improved Performance Visibility & Transparency. This allows you to spot issues inside your workflow, put everybody from your team on the same page, and respond to changes more effectively.
• Better Team Collaboration and Continuous Improvement. In Agile, open communication is central to successful project delivery.

Methodology:

This training course will utilize a variety of proven adult learning techniques to ensure maximum understanding, comprehension and retention of the information presented. The course is highly interactive and is designed with briefings and exploration of different scenarios. A central feature of this training course is an in-depth game that reveals the power of agile application and exposes gaps in our ability to work and lead in an agile manner

Target Audience:

This training course is targeted at both management and employees. The course is designed to clearly explain formal management approaches and enable delegates to recognize “warning signals” that indicate when work such as various projects are about to encounter issues. Traditionally, work is organized around logical operating procedures and plan-based projects. Delegates engaged in such work explore other mechanisms to support emergence of work and evolution of work procedures to reflect their own work situation.

This training course is suitable to a wide range of professionals but will greatly benefit:

• Directors and senior decision-makers
• Line managers
• Project managers
• Various specialist roles engaged in teamwork to deliver value
• Stakeholders in organizations who influence work (e.g. Quality department)