Courses

Lean Online Training

Description

This course is ideal for an organization with several remote teams. It can be delivered in its entirety or can be shortened to provide the equivalent of a one-day Lean overview course.

Lean-Thinking provides a framework from which to improve virtually any organization's software development process. While not a panacea, Lean provides clarity on what to look at and how to solve the problems that are often beyond other methods. For software development organizations, Lean provides several principles that provide guidance to Agile methods, particularly Scrum.



Get a Lean course on a disk. All the sessions of last year’s course for $99 + S&H.

Lean will assist those organizations which have either had problems adopting Agile methods or those who have been successful at the team level and are now attempting to scale it to the Enterprise. See Alan Shalloway's blog Is Scrum Failing Us? for some examples of the challenges Lean can give guidance to.

This online training is true training, including lectures, readings, exercises and question & answer periods. The intent of this training is:

  • Provide the equivalent of a two-day Lean Software Development Overview course
  • Promote Lean Software Development to many in the industry
  • To improve the ability of participants to explain to their associates why Lean Software Development is useful
  • Provide insights on how to scale Agile/Scrum to the enterprise

All participants are expected to:

  • Read learning assignments requested. Readings will be given prior to each class. These will not exceed one hour in duration.
  • Attend live on-line lectures when possible, listen to the recordings of them when not. Q&A will be part of the live sessions. Each session will be approximately 90 minutes, with Q&A comprising 30 minutes of that amount.
  • Do exercises assigned between on-line lectures. These exercises will include directed discussions/exercises with participant's associates. This will help participants learn how Lean Principles work in their own environment as well as help enroll others in their companies understand the value of Lean.

Questions by participants will be handled (asked and answered) in a discussion group provided for the class in our Learning Management Site (LMS).

Registration

The first step will be to enroll via a registration form created for the course. You will receive an email with further instructions before the course begins.

Course Level

Intermediate

Course Outline

The course is broken down into 6 sessions on Lean and one or two sessions on tangential subjects such as how to manage an Agile project and how to do architecture in a Lean-Agile project.

Session 1:

Introduction to Lean Software Development

  • Lean as fast-flexible-flow
  • Lean principles of software development
  • The importance of value stream mapping

Session 2:

Flow and Quality Assurance

  • Just-in-Time
  • Quality and Dealsy
  • Quality Assurance as Process Improvement 

Session 3:

Five Reasons for Agility

  • Add business value quickly
  • Clarify needs of the customer
  • Better project management
  • Quick wins, quick learning
  • Better for development

Complexity

Value Stream Mapping Exercise 

Session 4:

Product Portfolio Management

  • Driving from business value
  • Limiting Work in Process to capacity
  • Smaller projects add more value faster

Session 5:

Lean as a Guide for Agile Methods

  • Contrasting Waterfall with Agility
  • An overview of Kanban Software Development

Session 6:

Improving Scrum witih Lean

Lean Anti-Patterns

Summary

 

Maximum Number in Class:

1,000