The agile mind
Agile, Scrum, Lean and experimentation.
Three and a half hours on the agile mind: what agile really is, how to diagnose the problem in front of you, and how Scrum, Lean, Kanban and experiments help services learn sooner.
- Level
- Focus
- Learning time
- 3 hours 30 minutes
- Where
- Agile and New Ways of Working
- Price
- £69
When you step up to a higher level, what you paid in the last 12 months for lower-level courses inside the bigger course comes off its price, in proportion to how much of each is inside it, whichever topic it's from. Courses at the same or a lower level don't give credit against each other. A Focus course or above always costs at least £15. Read the full terms
Certificate of Completion, or Certificate of Completion and Assessment with a short assessment
Overview and Outcomes.
Who It's For
Managers and team leaders in councils, the NHS, housing, police, fire and charities facing uncertain work and new delivery methods.
Overview
This Focus brings together the ideas that sit beneath agile working. It begins with where agile came from, from Winston Royce and Takeuchi and Nonaka to the Agile Manifesto and the Government Digital Service, with lessons from Birmingham City Council's Oracle system. It then turns to mindset, using Cynefin, the Stacey matrix and Denning's three laws to separate being agile from agile theatre. The core methods follow: Scrum and the FBI's Sentinel system, Lean, Kanban and Seddon's failure demand with Virginia Mason, and experiments built to learn, drawing on Eric Ries and Humphrey Consult.
Aims
This Focus aims to develop leaders who can diagnose the kind of problem they face before choosing a method, use Scrum, Lean and Kanban with discipline rather than ritual, and design experiments that are safe to fail, so that their services learn early and protect the people who depend on them.
In summary, you will be able to:
- Diagnose whether a piece of work calls for a predictive or an adaptive approach before committing to a method.
- Recognise the difference between agile practice with substance and agile theatre in your own organisation.
- Design a small, safe experiment that tests a risky assumption in your service and learns from the result.
What you'll develop
Through this Focus course, you will build the ability to:
- Judge where a piece of your own work sits on the spectrum from predictive to adaptive delivery, based on how much uncertainty it contains.
- Diagnose the kind of problem in front of you using Cynefin and the Stacey matrix before choosing a method.
- Identify common failures in public service Scrum, such as a status report stand-up or a Product Owner without authority, and judge what leaders must change.
- Identify waste and failure demand in your own service, using Ohno's seven wastes and Seddon's distinction between value demand and failure demand.
- Design experiments in public services that are safe to fail, protecting safeguarding, legal duties, consent and a route back to the existing service.
Built from 2 parts.
3 hours 30 minutes of learning.
- 01Being agile, not doing agileAgile principles, mindset and ScrumBitesize3 modules
- 02Flow and the freedom to testLean, Kanban and test-and-learnBitesize2 modules
Keep going.
Part of the Agile and New Ways of Working topic, also sold whole as Lighter, faster, more human.
Go deeper, and pay only the difference
- You are hereFocus, 3 hours 30 minutes, £69
- Next stepExplore, Agile from the ground up, 6 hours, £129. Already own the Focus? You pay £60.
- The whole topicImmerse, Lighter, faster, more human, 11 hours 30 minutes, £249. Already own the Focus? You pay £180.
When you step up to a higher level, what you paid in the last 12 months for lower-level courses inside the bigger course comes off its price, in proportion to how much of each is inside it, whichever topic it's from. Courses at the same or a lower level don't give credit against each other. A Focus course or above always costs at least £15. Prices per person. Read the full terms
Also part of: Leading with data and digital, Digital with people in charge, Built to adapt