Courses

Course Description

This three-day continuing education course trains leaders and team members to use analysis effectively in an agile environment. Successful agile teams need great analysis, yet the best way to analyze a company is often undefined and can even vary from team to team. This course will help you work through concepts and techniques that allow for great analysis of agile projects. In addition, your classroom experience is followed up with 6 months of cohort coaching sessions that occur every three weeks. This allows students to bring work-related hands-on examples, questions, and challenges in agile topics.

During a 3-day classroom experience, participants will use a case study to look at and practice concepts and techniques for great analysis on agile projects, including;

• Defining Vision, Problems, and Results Needed
• Identifying good and poorly written user stories
• Writing user stories
• Using the Gherkin Method for User Story Acceptance Criteria
• Splitting user stories
• Creating a Story Map and using it to:
  • Analyze the user experience
  • Analyze for gaps
  • Define MVP
  • Organize releases
• Analyzing the backlog
• Prioritizing the backlog
• Relating Analysis Models to user stories
• Identifying what stories from the case study need models
• Facilitating for better conversations and rich dialog
• Facilitation techniques for innovation

The classroom experience is followed up with cohort coaching sessions.  Every three weeks, participants join a 1-hour virtual session and bring work-related examples, questions, and challenges that match these topics:

1. Product Owner and Analyst Collaboration
2. A Healthy Backlog
3. User Stories
4. Acceptance Criteria
5. Story Splitting
6. Prioritization
7. Analysis Models
8. Collaborating for better dialog

Participants in the course will:

1. Discuss and identify how agile analysis adds value to teams delivering high-quality products
2. Distinguish what activities are part of agile analysis
3. Practice the key techniques for great agile analysis:
   • User Stories
   • User Story Splitting
   • Acceptance Criteria
   • User Story Mapping
   • Analysis Models to go with your stories
4. Understand the role of the Product Owner and who does the analysis
5. Understand how to link a product vision and roadmap to the details of your everyday work
6. Know where analysis fits into agile ceremonies
7. Describe what a healthy backlog looks like and how to prioritize it

Length:  This program consists of 3 days in the classroom and 6 months of virtual follow-up sessions with cohort coaching for a total of 30 contact hours.

Participants who attend all classroom and virtual sessions and fully engage in the cohort will earn a certificate for Maximizing Agile Outcomes with Analysis.

Credit(s): 3.6 CEUs

Audience:

This course is valuable to:

• Agile teams or team members (Product Owners, Scrum Masters, Business Analysts, System Analysts) who need to increase their level of business analysis
• Experienced business analysts who want to add value to an agile team
• Those new to business analysis and work, or desire to work, in an agile environment
• Anyone involved in transitioning an organization from a traditional to agile environment

Instructor: Angela Wick