Learning Resources
Free Downloads
- Burn Up Chart Template (Excel)
- Sprint Capacity Calculator (Excel)
- Daily Scrum Notes Template (MS Word)
- Product Owner Financial Justification (Excel)
- Scrum Team Kickoff Planner (PDF)
Recommended Reading
- Turn the Ship Around (David Marquet)
- Leading Change (John Cotter)
- Succeeding with Agile Software Development Using Scrum (Mike Cohn)
- User Stories Applied (Mike Cohn)
- Agile Product Management with Scrum (Roman Pichler)
- The 6 Enablers of Business Agility (Karim Harbott)
- The Lean Startup (Eric Ries)
- Conflict Communication (Rory Miller)
- Agile Retrospectives Making Good Teams Great (Diana Larsen, Esther Derby)
- Coaching Agile Teams (Lyssa Adkins)
- Stop Starting Start Finishing (Arne Roock, Claudia Leschik)
- Emotional Intelligence (Travis Bradberry)
- Training From the Back of the Room (Sharon Bowman)
- Scrum The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time (Jeff Sutherland)
Videos
- Product Owner in a Nutshell (Henrik Kniberg)
- The Rong Way to do Agile (Chet Rong)
- What Motivates Us (Dan Pink)
- Cultivating Collaboration (Jim Tamm)
- The Backwards Brain Bicycle (Destin Sandler)
- Sh*t Bad Scrum Masters Say (Adam Weisbart)
- Greatness (David Marquet)
- Multitasking at M.I.T.
- Nordstrom Innovation Lab
- The Resource Utilization Trap (Henrik Kniberg)
- What Are Story Points? (Mike Cohn)
- Planning Poker (Mike Cohn)
Articles, Web Content & Whitepapers
Frequently Asked Questions
- What is Scrum?
Scrum is an Agile framework that enhances team collaboration on complex products. Its iterative approach ensures that a project's direction can be adjusted based on completed work, not on speculation or predictions. - What is Agile methodology?
Agile methodology is an approach to project management that values customer collaboration, team interactions, and responding to change. It allows for flexibility and continual revision of a project throughout its lifecycle. - How can Scrum and Agile benefit my business?
Implementing Scrum and Agile methodologies can enhance your team's communication and efficiency, help manage changing priorities, speed up product delivery, and reduce waste. - What will I gain from your courses?
Our courses are designed to equip you with the necessary knowledge and skills to implement Scrum and Agile methodologies in your own work environment. You will learn practical strategies to enhance efficiency, eliminate waste, and save costs. - Can I take a course even if I don’t have any experience in project management?
Absolutely. The courses cater to all experience levels. Whether you're a project management novice or a seasoned professional looking to improve your skills, you'll find value in our courses. - What is the format of your courses?
We offer both live instructor-led training and self-paced online courses. This flexibility allows you to learn at your own pace and convenience.
Glossary of Terms
- Agile: A project management approach that emphasizes flexibility, collaboration, and customer satisfaction. It allows for continual revision of a project throughout its lifecycle.
- Scrum: An Agile framework for managing complex projects. Scrum emphasizes an iterative process, collaboration, and the ability to adapt to change.
- Iteration: In the context of Agile and Scrum, an iteration is a single development cycle in a project. Typically, an iteration lasts one to four weeks.
- Lean: A systematic method for waste minimization and efficiency within a manufacturing system without sacrificing productivity.
- Backlog: In Scrum, a backlog is a list of tasks or goals that a team needs to achieve. The tasks are prioritized based on their importance or relevance to the project.
- Sprint: A set time period in which specific work has to be completed and made ready for review (commonly 2-4 weeks).
- Product Owner: In Scrum, the Product Owner is the person responsible for maximizing the value of the product resulting from the work of the Development Team.
- Scrum Master: A facilitator for the Agile development team. The Scrum Master ensures the team adheres to Scrum theory, practices, and rules.
- User Story: In Agile development, a user story is a simplified description of a software feature from an end user's perspective.
- Epic: A large user story that is broken down into smaller stories. It often requires more than one iteration to complete.
- Burndown Chart: A visual representation of work left to do versus time. It helps track progress and manage work throughout the duration of a Sprint.
- Standup: Also known as a daily Scrum meeting, a short meeting where the team coordinates activities for the day.
- Velocity: A measure of the amount of work a team can tackle during a single Sprint, calculated by the total number of points (estimated size) of user stories completed in the Sprint.
- Retrospective: A meeting held at the end of each Sprint where the team discusses what went well, what can be improved, and how they can implement the improvements in the next Sprint.
- Kanban: A visual workflow management method derived from Agile methodologies. It uses a board and cards to represent work items and their flow through the process.
- Continuous Integration (CI): A development practice where developers integrate code into a shared repository frequently, usually multiple times per day.
- Continuous Deployment (CD): A software development practice where code changes are automatically tested and deployed to a production environment.
- DevOps: A set of practices that combines software development and IT operations. It aims to shorten the systems development life cycle and provide continuous delivery with high software quality.
- Timeboxing: Allocating a fixed time period, called a timebox, to each planned activity. Sprints are an example of timeboxing.
- Increment: The sum of all the product backlog items completed during a Sprint combined with the value of the increments of all previous Sprints.
- Story Points: A measure of effort required to implement a story. They allow teams to express the difficulty of a story in an abstract way.
- Acceptance Criteria: The conditions that a software product must satisfy to be accepted by a user, customer, or in the case of system level functionality, the consuming system.
- Test-Driven Development (TDD): A software development practice where test cases are developed before the functional code. It encourages simple designs and inspires confidence.
- Pair Programming: An Agile software development technique in which two programmers work together at one workstation, sharing the same screen, keyboard and mouse.
- Refactoring: The process of restructuring existing computer code without changing its external behavior for the sake of improving the nonfunctional attributes of the software.
- Spike: A user story that cannot be estimated until a development team runs a time-boxed investigation. It's taken on when there is a need to answer questions or reduce uncertainty in a story or epic.
- Product Backlog Refinement (PBR): The process through which product backlog items are reviewed by the team and revised. The goal is to keep the backlog up-to-date and ensure that backlog items are prepared for upcoming sprints.
- Definition of Done (DoD): A shared understanding within the Scrum Team on what it takes to make a Product Backlog Item (PBI) or an Increment "Done."
- Sprint Review: A meeting at the end of each sprint where the team and stakeholders inspect what was done during the sprint and adapt the backlog if needed.
- Scrum of Scrums: A technique to scale Scrum up to large groups, where several Scrum teams work together. The Scrum of Scrums meeting helps coordinate their work.
