Courses

Lean Product Champion Certification by Net Objectives

Summary

Lean Product Champion Certification by Net Objectives blends several technologies together in a breakthrough two-day course that gives the tools the entire development team needs to uncover and manage the story discover/definition process. Software development is most like product development where most of the work is in discovering what the customer needs and how to build it. This course focuses on how to most efficiently discover those features that will return the highest benefit to the customers of a company. This is a very hands on course where participants go through the entire process of creating a product backlog. Students learn to drive story writing from business value.

There have been many success stories of Scrum at the team and small group level.  Many teams trying to expand Scrum beyond the team have hit considerable difficulties, however. At Net Objectives, we've studied both why Scrum works - see Challenging Why (not if) Scrum Works - as well as why Scrum fails - see Challenging Why (not if) Scrum Fails. This has enabled us to help teams go beyond the normal limits of Scrum. This course moves far beyond the typical Scrum Product Owner course to incorporate Lean Thinking as a method for sustainable product development.

Ken Schwaber, co-creator of Scrum, estimates that "75% of those organizations using Scrum will not succeed in getting the benefits that they hope for from it."    Ken alludes to management accommodating the impediments to team productivity instead of removing them as the cause for this high failure rate.  While this is true, it doesn't address the question of what those attempting to use Scrum need to know to solve these impediments instead of accommodating them.  Why do some teams succeed while others fail? What do you need to succeed with Scrum? Our experience with Lean Software Development enables us to extend Scrum with an Enterprise view. This is not scaling Scrum, which is still a bottom-up, with little management approach.  Ours is a top-down, bottom-up approach that includes management as well as team.  It also enables starting Scrum with significantly larger groups.

 

Course Objectives

  • To give managers of agile projects an understanding of the Agile process
  • To prepare analysts, developers and testers for doing Agile projects
  • To emphasize the need for driving agile projects from business needs
  • To create a focus in the development team towards delivering high value, high quality software in a sustainable manner

Description

This course is designed within the context of Lean Software Development.  This solves many problems in other Agile Analysis methods because it enables Agile practitioners to keep the big picture in mind (which focusing on business value requires) while working on the small pieces (which Agility requires).

This course deals with the following questions:

  • How do I create my stories in the first place?
  • How do I manage my analysis over the life of the project?
  • How can I split up stories that are too complex to fit in an iteration?
  • If I have many similar, but different stories, how do I make sure they are implemented in a similar way to avoid getting many special cases in my code?
  • How does Agile analysis affect architecture?
  • How do I coordinate the implementation of similar stories?
  • How do I make sure I have all the stories I need?
  • How can I ensure my stories are consistent with each other?

Agile analysis has brought about new challenges and new opportunities. Old-school techniques of heavy use-cases or significant up-front analysis no longer work effectively. But how can our requirements be managed effectively when many things are so unclear at the start of a project?

Lean Product Champion Certification by Net Objectives focuses on uncovering and managing the customers’ needs of the product being built. It teaches how to discover the stories in an Agile manner. However, it goes beyond the process of merely pulling out stories as they are encountered. It also illustrates how to organize the stories so they can be more easily implemented in a consistent manner. Techniques on how to organize requirements to help insure consistent and complete information from your customers and/or subject matter experts (SMEs) are also presented.

This course also goes beyond the Agile mandate of prioritizing stories merely by customer value. It explains why the issues of risk mitigation and customer feedback opportunities must also be considered. By bringing together project management, analysis, development, and QA issues to the role of requirements management in Agile projects, this course enables your staff to be more effective than standard Product Owner training available from other organizations. At the end of the course, students may sit for a situational based exam.  With a passing grade, the students earn basic certification in Lean Product Champion.

Course Level

Intermediate

Course Outline

  • Lessons from Lean Software Development
    • The Scientific Method
    • Respect People
    • Respect Knowledge
    • Improving Process
    • Wastes in Software Development
      • Building what you don’t need
      • Complexity
      • Non-Maintainability
  • Overview of Agile Methods
  • Five Reasons to Go Agile
    • Add Business Value Quickly
    • Get Clarity on Customer Needs
    • Project Management
    • Help the Team
    • Technical Perspective
  • The Risks of Software Development
  • Starting Analysis
  • Background
  • Use Cases and Why To Use Them
    • Actors, Goals, Scenarios
  • Selecting Stories for the Iteration
    • Prioritization
    • Risk Mitigation
    • Increasing Feedback
    • Stories and Testing
    • The Role of QA in Analysis
    • Refining Our Test Cases
    • Agile Project Estimation
    • Agile Story Estimation
    • Kano Analysis
    • The Changing Role of the Analyst
    • Wastes in Analysis and How To Avoid Them
    • Products Vs Projects

You learn how to

  • build a product backlog to enable a team to develop the most important features
  • scope requirements with Minimum Marketable Features so only the most important features are built
  • how to improve the conversation between the customer and the development team while simultaneously improving the quality of the software developed
  • unfold requirements in a just-in-time manner that both eliminates waste and minimizes risk
  • estimate stories

Target Audience

- Primary: Managers, team leaders, architects, business analysts, product managers, project managers
- Secondary: Any member of the development team

Room Setup and Equipment Needed

Classrooms require students at tables (round or long) as well as several white boards or flip-charts.  A projector with screen is also needed.

Prerequisites

2-day: None

1-day: Implementing Lean-Agile for your Team

 

Course Length:

2 days normally. If taken following Implementing Lean-Agile for your Team, 1 day.

Maximum Number in Class:

24