Sprint Planning for Faster Agile Team Delivery

Drive speed into any project with prioritized backlogs, limiting work-in-process, and engaging the entire agile team in effective sprint planning.

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What You Will Learn

  • Kanban boards to limit work-in-progress (WIP) in a timebox
  • Time boxing activities to eliminate delays and gain schedule advances and ensure team capacity
  • Application and iteration of the Pareto Principle for product backlog refinement
  • Rolling Wave Planning and to ensure you deliver on the big picture

About This Course

The follow-on to this course series on “Advanced Scrum” is expected by the end of Summer 2020.

Speed is by far the most sought-after benefit of Agile.

First mover advantages, the economic cost of delays, and the enabling effect on innovation drive the search for speed. Agile offers the fastest means of attaining speed: managing scope. But beyond the hype over scope management, there are key principles of non-traditional task management that ensure the scope chosen is delivered as efficiently as possible.

In this course, you'll learn how to drive speed into any project by selecting and limiting work-in-progress through agile planning and task management. There are two principle roles involved, the scrum master and the product owner. However, the entire scrum team needs to understand the principles behind backlog refinement, sprint planning, and execution throughout the sprint cycle.

In this course we'll show you how to run effective sprint planning meetings that produce a sprint backlog ready to deliver on your sprint goals and release objectives. You'll learn the power of prioritizing backlog items, and why we agile planning and sprint planning isn't just a managed list you work top-down in priority order. Instead, scrum teams commit to achieving goals and work together to ensure the user stories that are highest priority get delivered in this sprint, so the upcoming sprint isn't delayed. This also means understanding your team capacity and how to ensure safe and on-time delivery of the highest items on the product backlog that actually matter to your customer.

While this course will not make you an agile certified practitioner (PMI-ACP), or certified scrum master (CSM), it offers a more fundamental agile certification based on agile principles and how sprint planning enables hyper productivity in industry today. You'll finish this course more than ready to continue your agile journey, which we hope takes you to the next course in the series on “Agile Innovation and Problem Solving Skills.”

Upon successful completion of this course, learners can earn 10 Professional Development Unit (PDU) credits, which are recognized by the Project Management Institute (PMI). PDU credits are essential to those looking to maintain certification as a Project Management Professional (PMP).

At A Glance

  • Expert Instruction Build Skills
  • Self-Paced Progress at your own speed
  • 4 Weeks 2-3 hours per week
  • Free or $199.00 For the full program experience Discounted to $179.10 when you purchase the full Agile Project Management Professional Certificate Program.
  • 10 Professional Development Units (PDUs) Earn PDUs toward your Project Management Institute (PMI) Project Mangement Professional (PMP) certification
Your Instructor

John Johnson

I'm passionate about what works as both scientific principles and best practices in project and product management. Teaching is leading leaders, so my first goal is to engage with compelling reasons to change their thinking. Our shared goal is to empower their teams to delight customers while also serving the organization and society that supports them.

What Our Students Are Saying

  • This was a really great course with interesting examples on how to plan for faster agile team delivery. It was great to see building from the previous course. The examples given along with the external links were very useful. Serena Bonini
  • The course described main aspects of Sprint planning and explains how this way of planning speeds up the product/value delivery. The presented information was well structured and includes references to the concerned publications, i.e. it's guiding further self-studies. As a beginner in this area, I have received the necessary basic knowledge, as expected. Beata Wilczynsk
  • I loved the way the course was instructed. The balance between the lecture and the videos makes the course dynamic and easy to follow. The instructor provides a set of examples that not only make a lot of sense, but also fit really well into the narrative. Overall it was a great course to improve Agile capabilities. Jesus Toledo Romero
  • The course is a nice balance of video instruction and notes. Interactivity is limited to Q&A and video watching, but still engaging enough as the content was right-sized for the course. It was a great refresher for other project management courses I had taken previously. Rebecca Shallow
  • The course is good and goes through details regarding the agile planning process and ceremonies. Very good if you have only basic knowledge on agile planning and scrum. This course will enrich your information! Salah Mahmoud

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Syllabus

Week 1
Week 1

The first week focuses the discussion on Agile to its primary benefit, Speed, and how to easily calculate and prove its supremacy in benefits of any project management method because of timing impacts and market changes outside a project manager’s control.

Week 2
Week 2

The second week explores why and how varying scope is the most powerful method to achieve speed; introducing the Exponential Pareto Principle and how to apply it effectively. Perhaps the most important lesson is that not all product backlog items are equal, and in fact, most don't matter at all!

Week 3
Week 3

The third week dives into second tier methods for achieving speed through sizing, simplicity, and sprints with real-world examples ranging from air and space craft to software. Team members work together to ensure a smooth glide on the burndown chart by actively managing work in process during daily scrum sessions.

Week 4
Week 4

The last week teaches ground-level techniques to avoid delays, increase speed, and apply a full range of planning, execution, and control techniques that will guarantee 2x or better improvement on traditional projects. This week is essential to producing a winning product backlog and release plan.

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