Agile Executive Workshop

A Workshop – Not just training

The Agile for Executive Workshop is tailored to the needs of the participants.  For private onsite workshops, the agenda is defined based on the organization’s specific needs.  Public workshops begin with a collaborative agenda-setting activity.  Examples of Workshop objectives:

Making a Case for Change – Why Agile?

Why change things?  What’s wrong with the status quo? 

The ways you’ve been developing software has met the needs of different stakeholders to different degrees.  This Workshop topic includes highlighting the pain points in your current approach, looking at the benefits many organizations have gained from their Agile adoption, and exploring the ways in which Agile practices can capitalize on the good and address the issues on your projects.

Why go through the trouble of changing directions?.  Because Agile is built for the complexity typically found in software development.  While traditional Best Practices are not well suited for complexity, we’ll see that Agile practices help solve the problems associated with doing software development with a traditional approach.

What is Agile?

It seems that everyone has a different idea about what Agile means.  You can’t move forward until you achieve a common vision.  Then you can choose how to make Agile work for your teams. 

Agile is not a single methodology.  Agile is an umbrella heading that defines a philosophy with foundational principles to follow that help us solve the problems faced in the complexity of software development.  We will explore the core principles and introduce some of the methodologies that are based on these principles.  We will connect the ‘Why of Agile’ to the ‘What of Agile’ showing how the ‘What’ helps you accomplish the ‘Why’ and providing the basis for tailoring Agile practices to your specific needs.

Adopting Agile – What is the Path to Adoption?

Why is it so hard to do Agile?  Because Agile is fundamentally different than a traditional SDLC.  Your management team is probably used to the traditional approach: Big Requirements Definition upfront – Create the Plan – and then develop the software according to these pre-defined requirements, following the Plan.  Agile follows a path of Progressive Elaboration of requirements.  This requires major mindset shifts. 

We will discuss the impact of this non-traditional Agile approach on your organization.  We will introduce the pre-project discovery steps that lead up to investing budget in an Agile project, and discuss how progress and status tracking is different.  Based on all of this, we will define the path to Agile Adoption in your organization.

A Flexible Workshop

The Agile Executive Workshop is Agile in approach.  We focus on meeting the needs of the group of executives and leaders taking the class.  The base material of this class could be covered in as little as ½ day but offer a wide curriculum covering many aspects of Agile.  Within the standard 1-day allocated for this class, other Agile topics can be explored according to the needs and desires of the participants.  Your Agile instructor will have deep knowledge of the subject and be able to go down paths of interest as determined by the class participants or determined prior to the class running.

Pre-Requisites