The Full Agile Master Course, Scrum, Kanban - 10 PDUs

A project is a temporary endeavor that delivers a unique product, service, or result, with a start and end date. Through progressive elaboration, estimates become more precise as details emerge.

Define project management as the application of knowledge, skills, tools and techniques to satisfy project requirements, guiding the temporary endeavor to create a unique product service or result.

Break down large projects into smaller sub projects, assign each to a project manager, and coordinate them as a program to gain benefits, interdependence among work, and control.

Define a portfolio as a collection of projects, programs, and operations aligned to strategic goals. Portfolio managers oversee these initiatives at the highest level to achieve long-term 3-5 year objectives.

Explore operations management as the ongoing production of goods and services, distinct from temporary projects. Learn how acquiring, developing, and utilizing resources keeps day-to-day operations running.

Projects enable changes by moving an organization from its current state to a desired state, driving product updates, revenue growth, and personal career shifts through deliberate initiatives.

Define stakeholders as individuals, groups, or organizations affected or perceived to be affected by a project, and identify roles like project manager, customer, project team, project sponsor, and functional manager.

Identify and manage the core areas of a project: scope, schedule, budget, quality, resources, communications, engagements, risk, and procurement—to integrate them into a cohesive plan delivering the project deliverable.

Compare product management with project management and trace the product lifecycle from idea to retirement, including requirements gathering, design, build, launch, and ongoing updates.

Learn to distinguish risk, issues, assumptions, and constraints, identify and document them using risk registers and issue logs, and understand how risks become issues in project management.

Compare predictive (waterfall) and adaptive (agile) project management, explain when to define scope upfront versus adapt through continuous feedback, and note Scrum and Kanban as iterative and incremental approaches.

Explore emotional intelligence as the key to effective people management in projects, covering self-awareness, empathy, de-escalation, conflict resolution, relationship building, and stakeholder communication.

Discover how leadership and management differ, and learn when to inspire and empower people versus direct tasks and processes for evolving versus fixed projects.

Define Agile as an umbrella for adaptive project management used across software and non-software projects, with Scrum as a core method and other variants like extreme programming, Lean, and Kanban.

Compare iterative and incremental development within agile methods; iterative builds the whole product for feedback, while incremental delivers small, frequent increments for refinement.

Increase customer involvement and stakeholder engagement by applying agile methods, gathering requirements through ongoing feedback, delivering value upfront in increments, and welcoming change via a product backlog.

Explore the agile declaration of interdependence, emphasizing flow of value, return on investment, customer collaboration, uncertainty management, servant leadership, and a no-prosecution culture that boosts innovation, accountability, and team effectiveness.

Adopt an agile mindset by welcoming changes, delivering value in small increments, and embracing fast feedback to learn through discovery, fail fast, and continuously improve with retrospectives.

Explore why agile methods, including scrum, deliver software in increments with early value and ongoing customer feedback, unlike traditional waterfall that plans once and often lags, except in regulated contexts.

Explore the inverted triangle by comparing traditional projects with fixed scope to agile projects that redefine and refine scope while keeping time and cost fixed.

Discover the Agile Manifesto's four values—individuals and interactions over processes and tools, working software over comprehensive documentation, customer collaboration over contract, and responding to change over following a plan.

Explore the 12 agile guiding principles, emphasizing customer value, continuous delivery of working software, welcoming changes, collaboration, motivated teams, servant leadership, sustainable pace, technical excellence, simplicity, self-organizing teams, and retrospectives.

Explore agile methodologies from Scrum and Kanban to hybrids like Scrum ban and lean software development, with emphasis on popular methods and delivering value sooner.

Explore the scrum process and agile practices, from product backlog and sprint planning to daily stand-ups, reviews, and retrospectives, guided by the product owner.

Learn the three Scrum roles—Product Owner, Scrum Master, and Development Team—and how they own the backlog, prioritize features, facilitate, shield from interruptions, and self-manage to deliver value.

Explore the four scrum ceremonies: sprint planning, daily stand-up, sprint review, and retrospective, and how they shape the sprint backlog, timeboxed sprints, and stakeholder feedback.

Learn scrum artifacts—the product backlog, sprint backlog, and product increment. See how the product owner prioritizes value and how grooming and definition of done guide the team.

Explore extreme programming, a software-focused agile method similar to Scrum, and learn XP core values like simplicity, feedback, courage, and accountability, plus roles such as coach, customer, programmers, and testers.

Explore XP practices, including release and iteration planning, small releases, customer tests, continuous integration, and collective code ownership to ensure rapid, testable, and sustainable pace.

contrast scrum and xp by outlining sprint lengths of 1 to 4 weeks, releases and planning games, product owner versus customer, retrospectives versus reflections, and the daily stand up.

Lean software development adapts Toyota's lean production to reduce waste and maximize customer value. Empower the team, deliver fast through iterations, build quality in, and eliminate waste.

Learn Kanban development, using a signboard to visualize work, limit work in progress, and manage flow with a low-tech, high-touch board.

Explore other agile methods beyond Scrum and Kanban, including feature driven development, Crystal variants, and SAFe, aligning with Lean thinking and the Agile Manifesto through servant leadership and rapid feedback.

Explore agile leadership through servant leadership, empowering self-organizing teams to decide how to work while shielding them from interruptions, removing impediments, and sustaining the project vision with needed resources.

Learn the 12 principles of servant leadership to empower agile teams, balancing team welfare with project vision, ethical integrity, and constructive conflict through facilitation rather than dictation.

Harness servant leadership tools and soft skills to manage people, inspire teams, and communicate the agile project vision, while creating a safe, inclusive environment for experimentation and knowledge sharing.

Prioritize the product backlog using value-based methods guided by customer input, business value, risk, and dependencies, including simple scheme, Moscow, dot voting, 100-point voting, monopoly money, and Keno analysis.

Deliver value incrementally by prioritizing the backlog and delivering in 2–4 week iterations, testing first in environments before production to reduce rework and costly fixes.

Define and apply minimum viable product concepts (MVP) to deliver a usable, value-bearing component quickly, collect customer feedback, and guide iterative Agile development.

Apply value based analysis and decomposition to prioritize work items and shape the agile backlog around the customer’s main value, using product box design to reveal key value propositions.

Define a shared definition of done at project start to set global completion criteria. The team collaborates with the product owner to meet tests, documentation, and code requirements.

Engage stakeholders with low tech, high touch tools such as sticky notes and whiteboards, visualize the backlog with Kanban, and use short iterations to gather feedback.

Face-to-face communication proves most effective for stakeholder engagement, enabling two-way knowledge sharing. Use information radiators, whiteboards, and low-tech, high-touch Agile tools such as Kanban and XP, even virtually.

Explore the five levels of conflict, from simple disagreements to world-war scenarios, and apply root-cause problem solving with team voting methods like simple voting, thumbs up/down, and fist of five.

Learn the three key agile roles: delivery team, product owner, and agile project manager, and how they use standups, backlog grooming, planning, reviews, and retrospectives to drive value.

Learn how to build a high performance, self-organizing team by embracing generalizing specialists, shared vision, and a safe space for constructive disagreement and experimentation.

Explore Shoe Harry model of skill mastery and the Dreyfus growth from novice to expert, and review Tuckman's five stages forming, storming, norming, performing, and adjourning.

Design agile team spaces that promote face-to-face interaction, board-based work, and low tech, high touch collaboration. Explore co-location concepts, osmotic communication, tacit knowledge, and strategies for virtual and distributed teams.

Adopt adaptive, incremental planning with ongoing replanning, product backlog updates, and sprint reviews to deliver value amid high uncertainty.

Learn how timeboxing creates fixed durations for agile activities, from daily standups to sprints, and why Parkinson's law warns that work expands to fill the time allotted.

Learn to decompose high-level requirements into user stories, convert the product backlog into the story backlog, and capture value through 'as a user' scenarios in agile projects.

Explore how teams use relative sizing with the Fibonacci sequence to assign story points from the product backlog, then forecast sprints and project timelines with velocity and planning poker.

Learn the three agile iterations—iteration zero, development iteration, and hardening sprint—and two spike types, architectural spike and risk-based spike, to test concepts and reduce risk before release.

Explore burn up and burn down charts to track points completed and remaining in agile projects, and learn how velocity charts reveal team throughput across iterations.

Apply a value stream map to continuously improve processes by identifying waste and streamlining steps, using the PDCA cycle and an agile cycle of plan, do, check, and act.

Master sprint retrospectives by guiding five phases—set the stage, gather data, generate insights, decide actions, and close—using tools like mad/sad/glad, fishbone diagram, five whys, and smart goals.