Business Agility – the Beginner’s Guide
Business agility is best defined as the capacity and willingness of an organisation to adapt to, create, and leverage change for their customer’s benefit. Being agile is not about implementing a specific process or framework – it is about changing the mindset of the business to become more customer centric, more nimble in decision making, and more adaptive to the constant changes of the business environment.
This requires practitioners to develop a new set of skills and a particular view of the world that will enable them to add value and become more productive in what they do – regardless of the job title.
————————————-
This course will enable you to:
-
Understand the anatomy of an agile business
-
Understand how to structure an agile team to deliver an individual project or initiative
-
Become familiar with the concepts of Scrum (probably the most popular framework for running agile projects)
-
Understand what is involved in scaling agile to the whole enterprise
-
Become ready to work in an agile environment as a practitioner or start a consulting journey
-
Try your knowledge against a sample set of Scrum Master certification exam questions.
————————————-
You will get the solid foundation to start a career in an agile business or to continue your education journey into a more specialised path – such as a scrum master, agile coach, consultant etc.
As a part of this course you will get not only theory, but also practical advice from industry experts, practice exercises and quizzes to test your knowledge, supporting materials and articles and ability to get in touch with me personally if you’ve got any questions or concerns.
As an addition, you will get a list of sample scrum master certification exam questions, so if you decide to go down that career path you will know what to expect and can preliminary test your knowledge.
Anatomy of an agile enterprise
-
1
Introduction to business agility. What will you learn?We will discuss what does business agility entail, what are the benefits of being agile, and we'll reiterate on the goals for this course.
-
2
Download: Course materials -
3
The state of play on the markets
We will follow the evolution of markets from a few hundred years ago to nowadays. We'll see how the economies moved from the markets of supply all the way to the markets of experience. In addition, we will explore how the information technology management methods evolved and affected the organisational management.
-
4
Download: Course materials
-
5
Article: Dealing with liquid expectations
An article that explains what liquid expectations are and how to uncover them via designing the target state customer experience as a part of product or service design.
-
6
The state of the marketsA quick series of TRUE/FALSE questions to check own knowledge.
-
7
Reflection: Business agility
Foundations of agile
Run an agile initiative
-
11
Agile manifesto
We will discuss the Manifesto for Agile Software development and how it first changed the way software is developed and then the way businesses operate.
-
12
Download: Course materials
-
13
Agile principles
We will discuss in detail all 12 principles of agile software development and how they can be applied beyond software development.
-
14
Download: Course materials
-
15
Reflection: Foundations of agile
Scrum
-
16
Agility on a project level
We will look at an individual project's scope and discuss what does it mean for a project to be agile. We will talk about predictive and adaptive approaches to project management.
-
17
Download: Course materials
-
18
Approaches to prototyping and early feedback
We will explore different ways to create your first prototype with minimum investment.
-
19
Download: Course materials
-
20
How to run an agile project
We will follow the process of initiating and setting up the direction for an agile project and will discuss key ceremonies that a typical agile team will follow.
-
21
Download: Course materials
-
22
Prototyping
Scaling agile
-
23
Scrum framework
We will learn the most popular agile framework - Scrum.
-
24
Download: Course materials
-
25
Article: The Scrum guide on a single page, by Fabricio Laguna
An article and a video explanation of key concepts of scrum done by an industry expert - Fabricio Laguna.
-
26
Prepare for the practice test
A few notes about the practice test.
-
27
Scrum master practice exam
A set of practice questions for a Scrum Master exam.
-
28
Article: How to structure the backlog to make it work?
An article explaining a practical approach to structuring a complex backlog of work items.
Final words
-
29
Scaling agile
We will look at what happens next after a few agile teams are established. We will cover the three elements of scaling: strategising, mobilising, and organising; and will discuss topics like scaling factors, budgeting, and general management imperatives.
-
30
Download: Course materials
-
31
Interview with an agile coach
"Nail before you scale!" An interview with a practicing agile coach about the career as an agile practitioner, tips&tricks to introducing agile, practical insights.
-
32
The three horizons of agile analysis
We will explore how the business function to analyse itself changes in an agile setting and how it is performed on strategic, initiative and delivery horizons.
-
33
Article: How to write a good user story
The previous lecture talked about user stories as one of the methods to capture requirements in the backlog. This article explains the method in more details and adds some tips of how to make your user stories better.
-
34
Download: Course materials
-
35
Agile culture
We will talk about the importance of building an agile culture and discuss elements of it.
-
36
Download: Course materials
-
37
Eliminating waste
We will look at some of the elements of Lean Six Sigma, specifically with regards to eliminating organisational waste in the processes.
-
38
Download: Course materials
-
39
Reflection: Scaled agile
