Description

To gain the benefits desired when implementing agile practices, an enterprise must embrace end-to-end business and development processes that focus fully on customers and the products that service them. To accomplish this, the needed conceptual shift is from a “project” orientation to a full “customer and product-driven” perspective.

This enterprise-wide change requires a new awareness as well as re-engineered governance, development, delivery, and operational practices. This is a complex and far-reaching change — organizational challenges and resistance can arise when “old” thinking impedes the implementation of best practices and achievement of new goals.

What is required is a well-defined view of how to integrate strategic planning with product planning and then flow that information seamlessly into agile development and deployment practices into the operational environment. This creates a product pipeline that efficiently anticipates and meets customer needs and wants and is supported by an end-to-end process.

The objective of courseware is to present key concepts and implementable practices that enable your organization to create an end-to-end strategy and a roadmap. Combined, these two courses provide a practical approach to understanding the changes that need to be made across product and development teams, and how to plan and implement those changes in a controlled manner.

Our focus is on assuring that practitioners have the knowledge and skills to achieve the following:

• Understanding what business agility and agile development are meant to accomplish, and the techniques and practices that support those goals,
• Define, embrace, and sustain a customer and product focus,
• Create end-to-end business agility and agile development processes that integrate business unit, development, and operational staffs with common practices and goals, and
• Gain efficiencies and reduce costs through improved processes and, most importantly, doing the right work at the right time with the right people and right tools.

This course presents the following materials.

Day 1: Business Agility Principles

Business Agility drives an organization to embrace continuous improvement while maintaining high levels of quality, coordination, and communication. Business Change Agility, a major component in this endeavor, requires the commitment of knowledgeable and effective Agile Leadership combined with a clearly defined and effectively managed Agile Strategy. Operational Agility, the other major component, involves the development of a mature Agile Culture employing the ongoing commitment of Agile People.

Tying these components together is the establishment of Agile Governance – a top-down set of policies and practices which help the organization identify strategic objectives and to develop business-unit roadmaps to achieve those goals. Key roles (such as Senior Management, Product Executive, Product Owner, Stakeholder) will be defined.

Relying on industry best practices, guidance from the Agile Business Consortium, and personal experience, this day of training presents key concepts of Business Agility and provides a foundational understanding to approach implementation with confidence.

Day 2: Implementing Business Agility

Business Agility, although conceptually easy to understand, is challenging to deploy in any industry or business. Although every organization is unique and has different needs, this day of training focuses on the key components that must be in place to succeed.

A management framework, often administered by a Business Transition Office (BTO) or Enterprise Program Management Office (EPMO), consists of three major business activities which must be integrated for business agility to succeed. These components are Strategic Planning, Portfolio (or Business Unit) Management, and Agile Governance. These enabling activities (Vision Statements and Product Roadmaps) are the cornerstones of a successful Business Agility program.

Contained within the Agile Governance component are key management practices – Initiative Identification, Initiative Alignment (within Strategic Objectives), Prioritization (Demand-and-Resource-driven Planning), and Investment Approval. Each will be examined in detail with examples and sample process flows provided. Lastly, the course will examine Agile Measurement – how does Senior Management know they are receiving value for their investment in agile initiatives? The course will present how initiatives are proposed, assessed, estimated, evaluated, prioritized, and tracked throughout the Business Agility and Agile Development and Deployment life cycles.

Relying on industry best practices, guidance from the Agile Business Consortium, and personal experience, this day of training presents key concepts of Business Agility and provides a foundational understanding to approach implementation with confidence. A business agility vision and roadmap will be developed.

This course can be customized or tailored to your organizations training requirements as a private session.