Understanding Agile | Complete guide for beginners
- Description
- Curriculum
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Agile is not just a buzzword. It is a new approach to product development, project management and structuring organizations that is adopted by more and more companies across the globe. Average salaries for common Agile roles range between $133,000 (Product Owner) and $183,000 (Enterprise Agile Coach)* in the US.
Agile principles and values help teams around the world to be more efficient, more productive, deliver customer and business value and feel great as a team. Long gone are times when Agile was “something from software development” – nowadays it’s everywhere! Companies in banking, retail, telecommunications, pharma and many other industry sectors are shifting to Agile.
If you want to open a new page in your career, adapt to Agile transformation your employer is undergoing, or impress the interviewer in your dream company, but words like “user stories”, “Scrum”, “story points”, “user persona” and “backlog” make you feel uncomfortable, this course is for you!
After taking this course, you will build a very solid foundation of Agile knowledge which would allow you to feel comfortable in any Agile organization. Starting from the very basic concepts, you will gradually expand your knowledge and learn about Agile frameworks, product development and customer research techniques, processes and tools. You will also understand in depth how Agile organizations function, and what are the roles unique to Agile companies.
Here’s something you need to know.
Agile is a set of values, principles and mindsets which are brought to life through a number of frameworks, tools and processes. Agile is not a framework or tool on its own – consider it a philosophy, or a paradigm if you want. Once you are familiar with the foundation – with Agile, everything built on top of it starts making a lot of sense and becomes intuitive.
Please make sure to develop a deep understanding of Agile before you jump into learning different frameworks and tools.
Besides…
Agile is all about adaptability and responding to change, so each company has their own version of Agile (and that’s okay). Learning one framework will not cut it. Understanding Agile principles and values on the other hand will enable you to easily get any kind of framework right away.
Don’t wait a minute – sign up for the course and let’s dive into the world of Agile together!
*as of January 2022
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1
IntroductionFrom this lecture your will learn why we are here, what you should expect after completing this course and how to get the most out of it
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2
What is Agile?
From this lecture you will learn what Agile is and what we usually mean when we say "Agile" (along with some common misconceptions).
If you're wondering how long it took me to get this course done (vs. the initial estimate that I mention in this lecture), it was ~3 months! About 600% more time than planned :) I my defense, I was moving houses and a lot of things happened, but I think it is yet another way to confirm that we tend to overestimate our resources and are terrible at planning.
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3
What is Lean and how is it related to Agile?
From this lecture you will learn everything you need to know at this point about Lean - what are Lean principles, how they relate to Agile principles and how you Lean is different from Agile
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4
Agile mindsets, principles and values
In this lecture we will discuss the classical definition of Agile based on 4 values and 12 principles listed on Agile Manifesto
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5
Agile frameworks, tools, roles
This lecture will provide you with a high level overview of the Agile building blocks - various Agile frameworks, tools and roles
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6
Know your customer
Understanding the customers and their needs in order to deliver them value is the most critical skill for any Agile practitioner. In this lecture we will discuss why it's important, how we learn about customers and what is the difference between customer and user.
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7
ACTIVITY: Build a customer persona and journey
In this lesson you will develop a customer persona and a customer journey map using Miro.
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Variety of products and approaches
For different types of product you would need to apply different customer research approaches. In this lecture we will discuss how to chose the right approach for your product, why it's important to understand principles of statistics and what is Net Promoter Score.
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9
Experimentation and usability testing
In this lecture we will focus on what happens after the product is launched - how do you do ongoing experimentation and user testing to continue learning about customers and making your product better, why it's important to understand principles of statistics and what is Net Promoter Score.
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10
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
From this lecture you will learn how to make customers your partners and involve them in the product development process
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11
Scrum
In this lecture we will deep dive into one of the most popular Agile frameworks - Scrum and understand its key elements.
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12
Kanban
From this lecture you will learn about another popular framework in Agile which often gets combined with Scrum - Kanban. You will understand the key principles of Kanban and its pros and cons.
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13
Many faces of scaled Agile
From this lecture you will learn about the concept of Scaled Agile and get initial understanding of a few popular frameworks used to implement Agile at scale
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14
Software or not software
A lot of people tend to think that Agile is only applicable to software teams. In this lecture we will discuss whether it can work outside of software industry or not and what are the important considerations you need to be aware of.
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15
User stories
From this lecture you will learn how to define your work items in the form of user stories, focusing on the customer goals and customer value.
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16
Backlog
From this lecture you will learn how we create, manage and prioritize the product backlog - one of the most tools every Agile team has.
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17
Estimation and story points
Here you will learn about different approaches to estimation of work and understand the concept of story points. You will also learn how to introduce story points to the team and what are the common pitfalls to avoid.
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18
Software: Jira, Trello, DevOps, Monday, Asana and more
In this lecture we will look into a few popular tools often used by Agile teams for backlog management - Trello, Monday, Asana and Jira. I will share my opinions about each tools and summarize some pros and cons.
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19
Can big companies be Agile?
Agile has a reputation to be a something suitable for small software startups, but what about large corporations? In this lecture we will explore the specifics of Agile in big companies.
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20
Agile teams
From this lecture you will learn the characteristics of Agile team and best practices to set up a team for success.
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21
Product Owner or Product Manager?
Let's dig in into differences between Product Managers and Product Owners - are they the same thing? Which role is more important? Let's find out!
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22
Agile Coach or Scrum Master?
From this lecture you will learn the key differences between Scrum Master and Agile Coach.
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23
Generalists or specialists?
Would you rather have a team of generalists or would you rather gather specialists from different fields? What would an Agile organization do? Let's find out.
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24
Matrix structure and Spotify model
From this lecture you will learn how successful Agile organizations approach the organizational structure.
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25
Leadership in Agile organizations
In this lecture I will clarify for you the difference between managers and leaders and explain what the leadership in Agile organizations look like.
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26
"Agile is only for software development teams"
Let's discuss why it's not true
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27
"Agile is just another trend and it will soon be forgotten"
Busting another common myth about Agile
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28
"Agile means no structure, no planning and it's absolute chaos!"
And another myth
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29
"We're doing sprints, so we're Agile"
Probably one of the most frequent misconceptions about Agile!
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30
"In a cross-functional team there is no accountability"
Discussing how accountability works in cross-functional teams
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31
"Agile will make us a super team and increase our efficiency and productivity"
Busting one more myth about Agile
