Agile PM 401 - Advanced Agile Project Management

Explore how agile leadership differs from plan-driven management. Apply leadership grid, adaptive and situational leadership, servant leadership, emotional intelligence, and soft skills negotiation through a real-world case study.

Examine Blake and Mouton’s leadership grid, identifying four styles—authoritarian, country club, impoverished, and team leader—and how task and people concerns drive adaptive, servant leadership in agile teams.

Explore adaptive leadership in agile projects, contrasting technical and adaptive problems and building emotional intelligence, organizational justice, character, and development through an empirical, adaptive problem-solving approach.

Develop leadership skills by mastering emotional intelligence, including self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management, to improve decision making, team performance, and stress management.

Master soft skills negotiation by contrasting hard versus soft approaches, applying reciprocity, scarcity, authority, liking, and commitment to collaborative discussions, and focusing on presenting benefits—not manipulation.

Learn how self-organizing agile teams differ from traditional project teams, embracing servant leadership, adaptive roles, and shared decision making to drive high performance in dynamic environments.

Maslow's hierarchy of needs places physiological and safety before belonging, esteem, and self-actualization, showing how deficiency needs drive motivation and how people move up or down the hierarchy.

Explore Herzberg's motivation theory by distinguishing hygiene factors and motivational factors that influence job dissatisfaction and job satisfaction.

Apply the interest-based relational approach to conflict in agile teams, focusing on listening first, setting out facts, exploring options, and building mutual respect for higher performance.

Discover how Agile team performance differs from traditional projects, emphasizing value delivery and sustainable pace. Explore productivity and environmental factors like leadership, trust, and communication that drive high-performing, self-organizing teams.

Navigate distributed teams by addressing time zone and cultural differences, establish rich communication channels, frequent deliverables, clear objectives, and a shared understanding of agile through inspect and adapt.

Apply the Tuckman team mastery model to cross-functional agile teams, covering forming, storming, norming, and performing. Foster healthy conflict and collaboration to develop cohesive, high performance team dynamics.

Explore why agile team training matters, emphasizing adaptive practice, cross functional collaboration, broad role knowledge, and coaching with retrospectives to drive continuous improvement.

Explore how agile certifications signal job capability, compare Scrum-focused tracks like CSM, PSM, and CSP with the PMI ACP's agile and lean focus, and discuss credibility, costs, and on-the-job mastery.

Master agile coaching through observation and addressing roadblocks, while understanding coach roles from technical and process coaches to enterprise coaches, and certifications like Scrum Alliance's CSC and certified team coach.

Explore how knowledge sharing drives high-performance agile teams by leveraging tacit and explicit knowledge, cross-functional collaboration, and practices like pair programming, code reviews, standups, and sprint ceremonies.

Explore continuous improvement in agile environments, covering Kaizen, TQM, Six Sigma, and business process reengineering, and learn how to balance flexibility with efficiency while empowering employees.

Kaizen is a continuous improvement philosophy that targets muda, mura, and muri, driving small, incremental changes via plan do check act to boost efficiency and quality in agile work.

Explore total quality management (TQM) as a Deming-influenced approach integrated with agile practice, emphasizing quality built in, continuous improvement, leadership, and cross-functional collaboration through 14 points.

Learn about Six Sigma, a Motorola-originated quality program that reduces defects to 3.4 per million and emphasizes variation control, cycle-time improvement, and customer-focused business improvement.

Reengineer core business processes through radical redesign to achieve dramatic improvements in productivity, cycle times, and quality by rethinking processes, emphasizing customer value, cross-functional, end-to-end responsibility, and just-in-time collaboration.

Learn brainstorming as a core process-improvement tool that generates ideas rapidly. In agile teams, use affinity diagrams and other tools with nonjudgmental, inclusive participation.

Discover how affinity diagrams transform chaotic ideas into organized patterns by grouping brainstormed notes on sticky notes or cards, generating insights and well-defined group headings within agile teams.

Explore cause and effect diagrams, also called Ishikawa or fishbone diagrams, to identify root causes by mapping outcomes to factors. Apply them in agile retrospectives for process improvement.

Use a control chart to distinguish common and special causes of variation and visualize process stability, with control limits based on three sigma, illustrated by Agile velocity.

Explore histograms and Pareto charts to visualize data distribution, compare results to specification limits, and focus agile teams on the most important contributors using the 80/20 rule.

Learn problem detection and resolution within agile teams, including creating safe environments, identifying threats, maintaining a visible risk list, and applying root cause analysis in daily standups and sprint retrospectives.

Learn sprint retrospective techniques to run structured, engaging sessions with start-stop-continue guidance, data gathering, and concrete actions that improve team performance and the definition of done.

Explore sprint retrospective activities that focus the conversation, foster participation, and generate insights, including check-in, four Ls, emotional seismograph, brainstorming, five whys, and smart goals.

Explore design thinking as a human-centered, disciplined approach to problem solving that blends desirability, feasibility and viability across the product life cycle, and see its relation to agile.

Explore the five stages of design thinking—empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test—and how their non-linear, user-centered approach connects to Agile.

This lesson showcases design thinking in action through Apple, PepsiCo, GE Healthcare, and hospital trauma teams, highlighting empathy, user experience, and iterative, agile innovation.