Course Schedule

Week 1: Why Agile Matters
Agile is not the only way to manage work – traditional, plan-driven approaches have long-established practices and benefits. As a leader, you need to convince yourself of the best approach for your context. In this section you will have the opportunity to identify and develop some key themes and challenges faced by your organisation, decide whether agile techniques can help, and then lead others to buy-in to it.

Week 1 Assignment: Complexity and Empiricism
Facilitate a discussion within your organization about how your organization could benefit from Agile and what would be a potential hindrance to tapping the full potential in the current environment. Focus on creating a shared understanding about the “Why” within a group of relevant stakeholders. Share results and insights from this discussion with the class.

Week 2: Developing People
Learn how to create an environment where people can thrive, and develop confidence in your decision-making in an agile environment. Specific topics in this section include:

• Understanding levels of team maturity, and how to adapt your leadership style to the situation
• Levels of delegation and how they should change as a team matures
• Leading people in a way that they take ownership
• Case studies and pitfalls to watch out for
• How to respond to requests or disagreements from scrum masters and product owners on how decisions should be made
• The impact that leadership style has on long-term team maturity

Week 2 Assignment: Enabling Agile Maturity
Facilitate a discussion within your team to identify the current maturity level, define a goal where you want to grow and how this helps more to benefit from Agile. Then define the first steps of how you can support this growth.

Week 3: Measuring Agility
Measurement is a powerful tool: if you measure something, it is likely to improve, especially if it is done so prominently or in a way that is incentivised. It’s critical therefore to measure the right things and to use the information in the right way. In this section, we’ll review the evidence-based management approach as a way of focusing the mind on the real competitive advantage you want to achieve for your organisation.

Week 3 Assignment: Metrics that help with goals
Apply at least one change (removing or adding) to the metrics that are currently used in your team(s) / organisation and compare the desired impact with real observations.

Week 4: Leaders Grow Agility
This section takes a comprehensive look at the potential of agile leaders to cause a long-lasting change in their departments and organisations. This will include:

• Servant leadership in practice
• Knowing how and when to intervene
• Hiring effectively to build high-performing teams
• The leader’s role in the scrum principles and values
• Causing organisational impediments to be removed

Week 4 Assignment: Creating an Agile Organisation
Create a vision about the future of your organisation and what needs to be changed to create an environment that helps to grow Agility. Then identify the first steps towards this vision and the major risks that would endanger this initiative.

Week 5: Challenges of an Agile Leader
An agile leader relies heavily on the roles within the scrum team – the developers, product owners and scrum masters that make things happen. There are many challenges the leader might face in creating an environment to enable them to succeed and reach high performance. This final section allows delegates to explore real examples arising from the shift from traditional to agile; fears of losing control of risk and rigour; how people respond to change; and more.

Week 5 Assignment: Mindset Shift of an Agile Leader
Reconsider your current role and your contribution as an agile leader towards helping teams and your organisation.

Week 6: Making the change and preparing for the assessment
We’ll review the ideas discovered over the programme, with participants collaborating to make plans for making changes to their practice.

There will also be an opportunity to review the PAL-I assessment topics, with resources and recommendations for taking this exam.

Professional Agile Leadership Essentials – Outcomes
By the end of the class, agile leaders will have new insights into their current challenges, and an actionable set of tools and techniques to put into practice. Participating in the exercises is intended to stimulate attendees to develop their own leadership style based on organisational objectives. Once these objectives are established, leaders will come to realised that the most effective way to deliver them is by establishing happy, motivated, high-performing teams.