On Date TBD, Jim York and Joe Little will teach an Agile 202 class: Starting and Planning Your Next Agile Project. In Charlotte.

This is a 2 day course, and covers mainly User Stories, Product Backlog, and Agile Estimating and Planning. This course will assume some extended experience with Scrum and/or XP.

Jim York and Joe Little are very experienced coaches, with in-depth practical experience in helping teams become very productive with Scrum and Agile.
See below to register for this course.

Location
Hotel to be determined. In Charlotte.

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Contact: Joe Little if you have questions. More details and a link to register are also below.

Description

Get your next Agile project off on the right track. Through a simulation of the team on-boarding and initial project discovery phases, the Starting an Agile Project workshop generates insight into the critical steps necessary to prepare your project team and organization to successfully launch your next Agile project. This part of the workshop provides tools and techniques to help project leaders put Agile into action, or to take Agile to the next level in a later project.

Agile projects start delivering business value fast if you have laid the right groundwork. Optimizing the effectiveness of a dedicated Agile team depends on a few critical success factors. This class provides a checklist and framework to help ensure that you get your Agile project off on the right foot.

Audience

The focus will be on Product Owners. As indicated, ScrumMasters, Stakeholders, managers, and Team Members will also want to attend. (The Product Owner never takes action in isolation.)

The first day will focus on building the Product Backlog. There are other key things, but that will get the most attention. In simple terms, the second day's focus is on Agile estimating and planning.

PMPs: This course counts for 16 Professional Development Units (PDUs).

Starting Your Agile Project

Participants engage in a highly interactive approach that simulates the startup activities for your Agile project. Designed to simulate the on-boarding and initial project discovery phases, the Starting an Agile Project workshop generates insight into the critical steps necessary to prepare your project team and organization to successfully launch your agile project. The instructor uses discussion, exercises, and role-playing to guide the participants through a rapid startup process designed to get Agile project teams up and running quickly. It is ideal if each team works on a real project (although completing all the start-up activities of a real project is not realistic in this timeframe).

Topics the first day include:

• Is this project right for Agile?
• Getting the Project Sponsor you need
• Educating Stakeholders in Agile and securing their commitment
• Preparing the Product Owner
• Orienting the Team to Agile
• Conducting a Project Discovery Workshop
• Writing Better User Stories
• Creating a Full Product Backlog
• Managing the Product Backlog
• Managing Change
• What to do with bugs

 Learning Objectives

At the end of this segment you should be able to:

• Determine if a project is a good fit for an Agile approach
• Engage project stakeholders and secure the commitment needed to help ensure a successful Agile projects
• Build a better Product Backlog and manage it better

Agile Estimating & Planning

This will be largely the material covered in Mike Cohn's book, Agile Estimating & Planning. With practical examples.

Description

Planning is important for all projects, even agile ones. Plans themselves leave a lot to be desired, but we always get the questions: When will it be done and how much will it cost?

It is possible to create a project plan that looks forward six to nine months yet is accurate and useful enough. This section of the course will give you insight into why traditional planning approaches fail and introduce you to some Agile planning practices that really do work.

Too many teams view planning as something to be avoided and too many organizations view plans as something to hold against their development teams. In this seminar, you will learn how to break that cycle by acquiring new skills that will help you to create reliable plans for improved decision-making.

You will leave with a solid understanding of and experience in agile release planning and iteration planning. We will learn various approaches to estimating, including unit-less points and ideal time. You will discover several techniques for deriving estimates, including the popular Planning Poker technique. Together, we will explore planning techniques that dramatically increase a project's chances for delivering high business value in the time allotted. And we will change the conversation from "how low can we get the cost?" to "how do we deliver more business value faster?"

Topics covered

• The importance of estimating size and deriving duration
• The differences between story points and ideal time
• The advantages of an abstract measure of size
• Techniques for estimating
• When and how to re-estimate
• How and when to perform release and iteration planning
• Tips for communicating about estimates and plans

Agenda

The Purpose of Planning Estimation Units
__Desirable attributes
__Estimate size, derive duration
__Estimating in story points
__Estimating in ideal time
__Debating the merits

Techniques for Estimating
__Triangulation
__Effort vs. accuracy
__Planning poker

Re-estimating
__Three re-estimation scenarios

Tracking Progress
__Advanced burndown charts

Sprint Planning
__Velocity-driven
__Commitment-driven

Release Planning
__How to estimate velocity
__Velocity as a range
__Predicting project completion
__Rolling lookahead planning
__Fixed-date projects
__Fixed-scope projects
__Fixed-everything projects

Some Final Guidelines

Additional Information

The course will run from 9am-5pm each day. A continental breakfast, breaks and lunch will be provided.

Course Material

Participants will receive course materials (not books; mainly a copy of the slides used) at the course.

There will be updated material and training exercises in the course which you cannot get from books.

Registration and Fees

The course fee is $1,295. There is a discount for groups of 3 or more.

Once you pay, you become registered. You can pay via Google checkout. If your firm needs an invoice, we can generate those as well. You are not fully registered until we receive payment. Contact us if you have a group. Please contact Joe Little for details or with questions.

Refund policy
80% if before 6 weeks before the course start date.
50% if before 2 weeks.
No refund after that.
Substitutions are free.