Programme overview
Introduction:
Agile project management often stalls at team level: sprints overrun, backlogs grow without order, estimates are guessed and work piles up in progress while stakeholders wait for news. This Core Concept course gives delivery teams the working mechanics of Scrum and Kanban, from backlog refinement and story point estimation to sprint events, WIP limits and flow metrics. Participants run a multi-sprint simulation, measure their own velocity and cycle time, and leave with a Scrum and Kanban Team Operating Plan ready to use with their own team.
Course Objectives:
- Run the Scrum events, accountabilities and artefacts for a delivery team, from Sprint Planning to the Sprint Retrospective
- Refine and order a product backlog of user stories with clear acceptance criteria and a shared Definition of Done
- Estimate backlog items with story points and planning poker and convert team capacity into a realistic sprint commitment
- Design a Kanban board with explicit policies and WIP limits that keeps work flowing through each stage
- Forecast delivery and report progress to stakeholders using velocity, burn-down, burn-up and cumulative flow data
- Produce a Scrum and Kanban Team Operating Plan covering cadence, board design, metrics and reporting for an own team
Target Audience:
- Project and delivery leads responsible for day-to-day progress of iterative team work
- Team facilitators who run planning, stand-up, review and retrospective sessions
- Product and backlog owners who order requirements and accept completed work
- Developers, analysts and testers working inside cross-functional delivery teams
- Service and operations team leads who manage continuous queues of requests
Course Outline:
Day 1: Agile Foundations and Team Readiness
- Agile Manifesto Four Values and Twelve Principles in Team Practice
- Predictive Versus Iterative Delivery: Choosing Sprint Cadence or Continuous Flow
- Empirical Process Control: Transparency, Inspection and Adaptation
- Self-Managing Cross-Functional Team Design and Working Agreements
- Team Agility Baseline Survey and Improvement Backlog
Day 2: The Scrum Framework and the Kanban Method
- Scrum Accountabilities: Product Owner, Scrum Master and Developers
- Scrum Events and Timeboxes: Sprint, Planning, Daily Scrum, Review and Retrospective
- Scrum Artefacts and Commitments: Product Goal, Sprint Goal and Definition of Done
- Kanban Practices: Visualising Workflow, Explicit Policies and Feedback Loops
- Kanban Board Design: Columns, Swimlanes, Card Types and WIP Limits
Day 3: Backlog, Estimation and Sprint Execution
- Product Backlog Refinement and Ordering by Value, Risk and Dependency
- User Story Mapping, Acceptance Criteria and Story Splitting Patterns
- Story Points on a Fibonacci Scale and Planning Poker Sessions
- Sprint Planning: Capacity Calculation, Sprint Backlog and Task Breakdown
- Daily Scrum Facilitation and Impediment Log Management
Day 4: Flow Metrics, Forecasting, Scaling and Agile Contracts
- Flow Metrics: Lead Time, Cycle Time, Throughput and Cumulative Flow Diagram Analysis
- Velocity Trends, Sprint Burn-Down and Release Burn-Up Forecasting
- Scrum of Scrums and Cross-Team Dependency Board Overview
- Agile Contract Models: Time and Materials, Target Cost and Change-for-Free Clauses
- Team Anti-Patterns: Carry-Over Work, Hidden Queues and Estimate Inflation
Day 5: Sprint Simulation and the Team Operating Plan
- Multi-Sprint Simulation: Planning, Building and Reviewing a Product Increment
- Kanban Flow Simulation: Applying WIP Limits to Clear a Service Request Queue
- Retrospective Formats: Start-Stop-Continue, Sailboat and Five Whys
- Stakeholder Progress Dashboard and Sprint Review Demonstration Script
- Scrum and Kanban Team Operating Plan Drafting and Peer Defence
Skills You Will Gain:
- Backlog Refinement
- Relative Estimation
- Sprint Facilitation
- Kanban System Design
- Flow Metrics Analysis
- Release Forecasting
- Retrospective Facilitation
- Agile Progress Reporting
Why Attend This Course:
- Return with a Scrum and Kanban Team Operating Plan that sets your team's cadence, board, metrics and reporting
- Practise every Scrum event and Kanban policy in a timed simulation before applying them to live work
- Replace guessed deadlines with forecasts built from your own velocity, throughput and cycle time data
- Compare team practice with peers from software, operations, marketing and service delivery teams
Conclusion:
Agile delivery succeeds or fails in the daily habits of a team. This course moves from the values and principles behind agile work, through the Scrum framework and the Kanban method, to backlog refinement, estimation, sprint execution, flow metrics, forecasting, scaling and agile contracts. The final day runs sprint and flow simulations and turns the results into a Scrum and Kanban Team Operating Plan, giving participants a practical routine to plan, track and improve their team's work.