AGILE DELIVERY
A breakdown of the offerings from TPI
Workshops & Services
Agile Leadership
Duration: 1 day
Workshop Size: 5 to 30 attendees
Audience: Executives, Directors, Line Managers, Key Leaders
Location Options: Online | At GSSG Provided Facility | At customer’s location
Moving to Agile starts with leadership. Leaders need to understand the principles of Agile, and how to move to Agile with minimal impact on productivity.
In this one-day workshop, we will help you define what Agile means within your organization and help you create your own Agile transformation roadmap. We will walk you through best practices for organizational change management and getting your teams to buy into Agile.
At the end of this workshop, you will leave with:
- A deep understanding of the Agile principles
- An understanding of leadership’s role in a transformation
- Clarity on the best practices and approaches for moving to Agile
- A draft road map for your transformation
- A list of KPIs and Metrics to measure your success with
- An understanding of how Agile is unique for each organization, and how to tailor Agile
- A base understanding of the Scrum process
- Understand the key reasons why Agile transformations fail, and how to avoid the common impediments
- Steps you can take today to improve your agility.
Agile Project Team
Duration: 2 days
Workshop Size: 1 to 3 teams | 5 to 30 attendees
Audience: All project team members, line managers, project managers, program managers
Location Option: In person | At GSSG Provided Facility | At customer’s location
Scrum is easy to explain but difficult to implement. This is due to the uniqueness of work mix, company culture, and the dynamics within a team. In addition, Scrum does not provide a framework for the up-front planning that is required for major initiative and projects.
In our two-day workshop, we will train your team on the foundational work that is done to support an Agile project, and how to perform Scrum in a manner that quickly delivers the features your customer’s desire.
After participating in this workshop, you will be able to:
- Establish clear roles for team members and leaders
- Identify key goals and KPIs for Agile projects
- Create a strong foundation for your Agile projects, before coding begins
- Estimate your cost and schedule on Agile projects
- Acquire skills that allow your team to deliver value iteratively and continuously
- Create a custom sprint structure that supports your work mix and team dynamics
- Learn how to prevent the 7 most common reasons for sprint failure
- Become effective in performing retrospectives that keep your development process running efficiently
Lean/Kanban
Duration: 1 day
Workshop Size: 1 to 3 teams | 5 to 30 attendees
Audience: All project team members, line managers, project managers, program managers
Location Options: Online | At GSSG Provided Facility | At customer’s location
For many organizations and teams, Kanban is a more logical fit for delivering value daily than sprints. Support teams, help desks, and teams that support urgent requests may not find value in the iterative batch process prescribed by Scrum, and may get more value from the single piece Kanban method.
In this one-day workshop, we will cover the fundamentals of Lean and the key practices of Kanban.
After participating in this workshop, you will be able to:
- Identify key audiences for your product, idea, service, or project
- Create an Elevator Statement to succinctly define your value hypothesis
- Be able to create personas for your key audiences and users, identifying the specific needs of their roles
- Determine the simplest method for value how to best allocate your team to prevent bottlenecks
- Remove waste from your current process and increase efficiency
- Establish work in progress limits that maximize throughput
- Measure lead time and cycle time, to allow accurate forecasting
- Learn the Pareto method and how to identify and remove issue root causes
- Learn the value stream mapping technique, to quickly identify process waste
Product Initiation
Duration: 1 day
Workshop Size: 1 to 3 teams | 5 to 30 attendees
Audience: Product Owners, Marketing Managers, All project team members, line managers, project managers
Location Options: Online | At GSSG Provided Facility | At customer’s location
Many teams struggle to clearly define the value of a new product or service, and how to validate the value with low risk and low cost.
In this one-day workshop, we will walk through rapid methods for defining an audience, defining the needs of an audience, and then validating your value hypothesis using the Lean Startup evaluation technique.
After participating in this workshop, you will be able to:
- Identify key audience for your product, idea, service or projects
- Create an Elevator Statement to succinctly define your value hypothesis
- Be able to create personas for your key audiences and users, identifying the specific needs of their roles
- Determine how to identify the Minimum Valuable Product to validate your idea
- Learn how to glean data from your experiments to either continue or pivot
Team Building
Duration: 1 day
Workshop Size: 1 to 3 teams | 5 to 25 attendees
Audience: All project team members, line managers, project managers
Location Options: Online | At GSSG Provided Facility | At customer’s location
Many teams have effective processes, but they are limited by their ability to work together collaboratively and constructively. Individuals often struggle to bond and learn how to deliver as a team.
This one-day workshop teaches teams how to celebrate and leverage the uniqueness of each team member and develop skills that allow for passionate and productive interactions.
After participating in this workshop, you will be able to:
- Harness the knowledge of the complete team
- Improve individual relationships within your team
- Learn how to manage conflict positively
- Acquire key soft skills that lead to better team collaboration
- Learn which problems a team should solve, and which problems managers should own
Agile Transformation Leadership
Duration: 10 to 25 days (time required for observation)
Size: Assessment can be for individual teams or enterprise wide
Audience: Product Managers, Business Analysts, User Experience and Design, Marketing Leaders
Location Options: Observations are typically on site or at customer’s location
Many organizations are attempting to use Agile and receiving marginal results. Our Agile Assessment will identify your issues and help you implement an improvement backlog to take your organization to a more effective level of Agile. We will interview your team members and leaders, and provide a prioritized list of improvements, and how to implement the improvements.
The deliverables from our assessments include:
- An executive summary of the current state
- An executive summary of the suggested changes and root causes identified
- A prioritized improvement backlog
- A prioritized improvement plan that starts with high value improvements that should be easier to implement, then progressing to changes that require more effort and life to achieve
- A review of your organization structure and how well it meets your business goals
- A review of your sprint structure, and whether it can be adjusted to allow for better flow and more delivery of value
Product Owner
Duration: 1 day
Workshop Size: 3 to 25 attendees
Audience: Product Managers, Business Analysts, User Experience and Design, Marketing Leaders
Location Options: Online | At GSSG Provided Facility | At customer’s location
The Product Owner position is the most important role on an Agile team. Product owners ensure the team is building functionality that users need, and product owners also manage effective releases to the user community.
Our 1-day Product Owner workshop focuses on training your Product Owners to be effective within your company. The content is customized to synchronize with the work you deliver today
Attendees will learn:
- How to create a road map for your product vision
- How to prioritize and manage a product backlog
- How to create themes and goals for sprints
- How to establish an effective User Acceptance Testing process
- How to adapt when feedback indicates a pivot is needed
- How to use the Lean Startup approach to verify a hypothesis or product idea
- How to use Alpha and Beta testing to reduce go to market risk
Agile Portfolio Management
Duration: 1 day
Workshop Size: 5 – 30 attendees
Audience: Project Managers, Program Managers, Portfolio Managers, Senior Leadership and Management
Location: Online | At GSSG Provided Facility | At customer’s location
Most of us are implementing Agile teams, but we are not applying Agile and Lean principles to the work being performed at the portfolio and program levels of our organization.
This one-day workshop provides the principles and practices that will allow you to convert from being a Project Management Office to a Value Management Office. You and your team will learn how to identify the most valuable strategic initiatives, and how to help the organization rapidly deliver value to customers and the business.
After this one-day workshop, you will be able to:
- Understand how to optimize your organization structure for value delivery
- Recognize and reduce the handoffs that are slowing your ability to deliver to your customers
- Understand how to quickly move from vision to strategy to initiatives your teams deliver
- Create an effective intake process for internal requests
- Learn how to expedite the project prioritization process using Weighted Shortest Job First
SAFe Certification
Duration: 2 days
Workshop Size: 6 to 35 attendees
Audience: All Project Team Members, Managers, Scrum Masters, Product Owners, Project Managers, Change Leaders
Location Options: Online | At GSSG Provided Facility| At customer’s location (preferred)
Leading SAFe® offers an introduction to the foundations of SAFe and provides the principles and practices to confidently drive your Lean-Agile transformation.
This 2-day course and resulting certification equip you with the guidance and tools to build a culture of resiliency and a shared language that engages employees and focuses on customers so that organizations can work with agility at scale.
After this workshop you will be able to:
- Apply and test to become a Certified SAFe Practitioner
- Learn how to align large organizations around clear, common objectives
- Learn how to plan and facilitate critical SAFe events, such as Program Increment Planning (similar to quarterly planning)
- Know how to lead your organization in adopting a customer-centric mindset
Specialized Agile
Duration: 2 to 8 hours
Workshop Size: 1 to 20 attendees
Audience: Varies
Location Options: Online | At GSSG Provided Facility | At customer’s location
We provide numerous types of smaller workshops to address specific needs. These are often delivered after team Agile training, when the team identifies additional skills needed to support their work.
A sample of specialized workshop options:
- Initiative Prioritization with Weighted Shortest Job First
- Effective Retrospectives
- Estimating with Story Points
- User Story Fundamentals
- Sprint Planning
- Quarterly Planning
Agile Transformation
Duration: 2 to 6 months
Audience: Enterprise wide
Location Options: Transformations are usually on site and supported with remote training/meetings
Technology Partners specializes in enterprise-wide Agile transformations. We help companies define their transformation goals, then move to create a roadmap that follows a low-risk approach for the transformation. We also focus on making the move to Agile organic, allowing an organization to slowly takeover the transformation and not be dependent on consultants.
Our 3-step approach: Creating a Foundation for the transformation, Piloting the process to make sure it is effective on real work, and lastly scaling Agile across the organization after pilot validation.
Assessments
Duration: 10 to 25 days (time required for observation)
Size: Assessment can be for individual teams or enterprise wide
Audience: Product Managers, Business Analysts, User Experience and Design, Marketing Leaders
Location Options: Observations are typically on site or at customer’s location
Many organizations are attempting to use Agile and receiving marginal results. Our Agile Assessment will identify your issues and help you implement an improvement backlog to take your organization to a more effective level of Agile. We will interview your team members and leaders, and provide a prioritized list of improvements, and how to implement the improvements.
The deliverables from our assessments include:
- An executive summary of the current state
- An executive summary of the suggested changes and root causes identified
- A prioritized improvement backlog
- A prioritized improvement plan that starts with high value improvements that should be easier to implement, then progressing to changes that require more effort and life to achieve
- A review of your organization structure and how well it meets your business goals
- A review of your sprint structure, and whether it can be adjusted to allow for better flow and more delivery of value
Accelerated Agile Workshop
You and your team will train for 1.5 days, then apply Agile on your real project for 1/2 of a day.
Team Training
One of the best ways to move to Agile is to have the entire project team attend training together. In this 2 day workshop, your team will partake in a case study and work together to deliver an online auction system.
Product Owner Training
In this one day course, you will play the role of the product owner and prioritize the work for the Acme Media project team
Agile Essentials
Only have time for one day of Agile training? In this accelerated workshop you will learn the essential principle and practices of Agile software development.
Certified Project Manager Training (CAPM)
You and your team will train for 1.5 days, then apply Agile on your real project for 1/2 of a day.
Agile for Executives
In this interactive course, executives will learn the fundamentals of Agile and how to set project teams up for success.
PMI ACP Exam Preparation
New PMI has a new Agile Practitioner Certification, and this workshop will provide you with all of the tools you need to pass the certification exam.
Custom Courses
GS Solutions Group can take any of the courses above and customize it for your organization and deliver it at your location.
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