Agile Essentials

For Teams, Managers & Leaders

Course Objective

Agile, the ability to operate in environments of critical uncertainty, is an essential capability needed at all levels in organizations today. Propagating Agile as a holistic, organization wide endeavor requires a significantly different approach beyond the traditional limited scope of Agile for software development teams.

As First Step of Agile Transformation

Agile Essentials for Teams, Managers & Leaders is a concentrated training program designed as the initiating stage of an organization’s holistic Agile transformation effort.

For Aspiring Agile Change Agents

The training program is also purposed for aspiring Agile change agents to acquire the essential Agile skillset and mindset for bringing back the seeds of Agile into their organizations.

Course Syllabus

Course contents may vary subject to participants’ needs.

Focus: Agile Teamwork

Morning Program

  • Introduction to Agile
  • Scrum in a nutshell
  • Activity 1: Sprint game

Afternoon Program

  • Design Thinking in a nutshell
  • Activity 2: Lego city building game with Design Thinking + Scrum
  • Wrap-up: Spirit of Agile

Focus: Agile Communication

Morning Program

  • Day 1 retrospective
  • Scrum Training: The role of Scrum Master

Afternoon Program

  • How to build an Agile team (1): Creating an emotionally safe work environment
  • How to build an Agile team (2): Role playing training for handling critical situations
  • Wrap-up: Managers as Coaches, Leaders as Facilitators

Focus: Agile Organization Building

Morning Program

  • Day 2 retrospective
  • Organization Design: Review of traditional and alternative organizational structures
  • Introduction to Systems Thinking: Gaining a holistic view of organization dynamics

Afternoon Program

  • Workshop – Facilitative Leadership and Mental Models: How to build a depository of Mental Models as tools for helping your people dynamically solve organizational challenges
  • Exercise – Vision Hierarchy: How to create an organization vision that is genuinely shared and practiced by your people
  • Wrap-up: Learning Organizations

Course Structure

The training course is structured as a one day program for Teams, two day program for Managers, and three day program for Leaders.

Managers will participate in the first day with Team members and Leaders, and likewise Leaders will participate in the first and second day with the Team members and Managers. Respective first and second day participation for the Managers and Leaders are mandatory as the course is structured as a continuation from the previous days’ contents.

Day 1 will be activity based training in a large group setting with a cap of 42 participants, Day 2 will be a medium-sized group session with a cap set at 18 participants, and Day 3 will be in a small group workshop setting with a cap of 6 participants.

Course Trainer

Takeshi Yoshida

Chief Coach, agile-od.com | Founder, Lifecycle (operating company of agile-od.com)

Takeshi is a veteran banker and seasoned startup entrepreneur turned Organization Development professional with 25 years of industry experience. Takeshi specializes in Lean & Agile and is an ardent advocate of Learning Organizations. You can read Takeshi’s teachings on https://agile-od.com/insight and view his full profile at https://linkedin.com/in/takeshiyoshida.

Course Inquiry

Agile Essentials for Teams, Managers and Leaders is offered as corporate and institutional training sessions, as well as open courses for individual and mixed group participation. Contact us for course schedule, availability, cost and other details.

Agile Essentials for Teams, Managers & Leaders | Corporate & Institutional Training Sessions | agile-od.com | Lifecycle

Agile Essentials for Teams, Managers & Leaders, Open Course | agile-od.com | Lifecycle

About Us

Lifecycle is a Singapore based learning & development and consulting company founded in 2011. agile-od.com is our portal for Lean & Agile Organization Development. Our objective is to help organizations become more creative and resilient by developing a work environment that harnesses the incredible learning power of people.

Our Approach (Click to open)

Human-Centered & Dialogical

In its simplest form, organizations are made of relationships and conversations. And collective learning is achieved through shared understanding.

Conversations build relationships, and shared understandings are the building blocks of organizations. We help our clients with organization building, one conversation at a time.

After two and a half millenniums, the Socratic Method still holds.

Non-Prescriptive & Multi-Disciplinary

If the only tool that you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Clearly, we shouldn’t try fixing everything with a limited set of tools just because we are familiar with them. Likewise for example, going Agile does not mean you have to start running Scrum Sprints.

We value choice and experimentation. We help our clients gain a broad scope of the many tools and concepts available with Lean & Agile and beyond, and we assist in selecting and experimenting the appropriate approach for each unique situation and environment.

Systems Thinking

A piecemeal approach to Organization Development will render it ineffective. For example, Organizational training should not be considered in isolation from organization design, process management and strategy etc.

Organizations are living, breathing, complex systems; input (intervention) into one part of the system may have a leveraged or regressing impact to another part (reinforcing and balancing feedback loops).

We help our clients develop a holistic systems perspective to their organizations and become cognizant of organizational dynamics; a key organizational risk management skill.

Mental Models

We make heavy use of mental models in teaching the various concepts that go into Lean & Agile. Many of these thinkings come from disciplines beyond Lean & Agile.

Mental models are extremely helpful because they allow compartmentalization of knowledge and provide the opportunity to map one’s own and “vicarious” experiences, making them realistic learning and pragmatic tools that become mentally immediately available when the situation arises.

Our Insight

▶ See more articles