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Agile Management

 

Annotation and Learning Objectives 

Agile movement originates from ICT industry, where it significantly increased the success rates of project and services. The Standish Group 2018 Chaos Report found out that “the results for all projects show that agile projects enjoy a 60% greater chance of success than non-agile projects. Looking deeper, we find that “waterfall” projects are three times more likely to fail than agile projects.” Having into account the critical role of ICT for the modern business, leading players in other industries such as banking, insurance, and manufacturing have recognized that they need different specialist and teams effectively working together with ICT geeks to deliver value to the end client. They are transforming their operations from traditional to agile way of working. In the transformed organizational units, self-organized multidisciplinary teams are working on small batches of work items in fast learning the agile transformation. As an example, well-established banks such as J.P. Morgan , ING  and BBVA  are among the pioneers in the agile transformation in financial industry. 
The primary goal of this course is to foster students’ curiosity and to facilitate active learning about Agile Management. The key learning outcome is that the students will be able to explain essential Lean Agile concepts and how to make them work for the organization. On an application level, students will be able to apply the most popular agile frameworks and methods such as Scrum, Kanban, and Lean Startup as well as to utilize practical approaches to align agile implementations and practices with the organizational strategy and vice versa.

Topics included in the course

  • Lean Agile Principles
  • Iterated self-organization around Goals – Scrum framework 
  • Explicit attention to flow: Kanban method
  • Hypothesis-driven business experimentation: Lean Start-up
  • Outcome oriented Lean-Agile transformation: Agendashift (tm)  

Knowledge

  • Agile management
  • Main elements of the Scrum framework
  • Scrum theory and practice
  • Key characteristics of Kanban method for knowledge work
  • Lean Start-up essentials
  • Agendashift framework

Skills

  • Understand and interpret Agile concepts
  • Practice servant leadership 
  • Facilitate sprint planning, daily, review and retrospective events
  • Apply Scrum principles
  • Formulation of a basic strategy and transformation into operational goals;
  • Design and improve visualization of workflow and work items
  • Design and evolve policies  for workflow management
  • Understand the essential workflow metrics
  • Achieve smooth workflow in project context
  • Model the risks in workflow
  • Apply business experimentations
  • Lead outcome-oriented change and continuous transformation using Agendashift framework

Delivery

Ivaylo Gueorguiev developed the course. He teaches it in English as a part of Executive MBA Programs with the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Sofia University.