The Art of Managing in an Agile World

Course Information: December 8-9, 2010 – 9:00am – 5:00pm Lloyd Center DoubleTree Executive Meeting Center 1000 NE Multnomah Street, Portland, OR 97232 Price: $795 Register Now

Instructors Sharon Buckmaster & Diana Larsen Sharon coaches and consults with organization leaders wanting to energize their workplace to achieve excellence… Learn More About Sharon >> Diana is a specialist in the human side of software development. Diana consults with leaders and teams to create work processes where innovation, inspiration, and imagination flourish… Learn More About Diana >>

Overview

Managers have a unique role to fulfill in an Agile world. Whether leading a shift to Agile methods or guiding a newly Agile organization, effective managers join their current skills with strategic tools learned in this course to keep people and teams on track.

Prerequisites

No prior Agile experience is required, and even experienced Agile practitioners will expand their leadership and management capabilities.

Intended Audience

This course benefits CIOs, CTO, VP’s and Directors of Quality, Engineering, IT, Applications Development, and other software managers/executives; as well as Program, Product and Project managers. HR, Facilities, Marketing, Sales and other managers working in an Agile enterprise will also gain valuable insight into their role in supporting software product development. Agile team coaches, XP coaches, Scrum Masters will learn about how to help their teams fit into the larger organization.

Course Outline

Why you need this course:

This course gives you the hands-on experience and builds the skill set you will require to thoroughly understand and utilize the real-world fundamentals of managing in an agile environment. The instructors bring their expertise in agile management, planning and development to help managers utilize their knowledge and skills to harness the power of an Agile organization.

Training Objectives: What you Will Learn

• Learn how Agile organizations work from a systemic perspective.
• Create strategic alignment between project teams and the rest of the organization.
• Explore practices for identifying and resolving business issues, setting goals and measuring progress, assessing organization culture, and using organization structure to effectively address the challenges facing you and your team.
• Examine the implications of Agile environments for managing human capabilities and handling human resources functions, such as, hiring, retention, reviews, and compensation.
• Learn how effective leaders manage the boundary between their Agile teams and the rest of the organization.
• Discover the latest brain research showing male/female differences and translate these findings into more effective strategies for coaching and mentoring within and across gender on high performing teams.

Agenda:
We emphasize practical applications in our classes. In this course, we’ll share many of the tools and techniques we use, including:

• “Issue Diagnosis Wheel” to sort and characterize the type of issue and the most appropriate analysis to apply “Chartering Template” to for developing a strategic vision, business case, and business success criteria for Agile projects  
• “Checklist for When to Intervene” in team issues  
• “Lessons from the Wild” for tracking and fanning what works and
• Collaboration techniques to motivate and vitalize teamwork