Course Details
A 2-day course, 6 hours per day (12 hours in total), delivered as lectures with group workshops throughout. Beginner to Intermediate level. Learners take home a ready-to-use template set covering user stories, definition of done, sprint planning and retrospectives, plus the workshop output their own team produced. The course follows the latest Scrum Guide and is not tied to any particular tool.
Day 1: Agile Foundations and the Scrum Framework
Section 1: Agile Thinking and Its Origins
- Why long up-front plans with a single delivery at the end break down
- The Agile Manifesto values and principles and what they mean in practice
- Common misconceptions: Agile is neither the absence of planning nor simply working faster
- An overview of the Agile frameworks in real use and where Scrum sits among them
Section 2: The Structure of Scrum
- Every element of Scrum: the accountabilities, the events and the artifacts
- Working in short sprints and why something usable must ship each round
- Transparency, inspection and adaptation as the heart of Scrum
- How each event connects into one complete sprint cycle
Section 3: Roles and Responsibilities
- Product owner: deciding on value and the order of the work
- Scrum master: helping the team flow and removing impediments
- Developers: shared accountability for what the sprint delivers
- How roles map onto real organizations and the traps of overlapping responsibilities
Section 4: Product Backlog and User Stories
- Building and maintaining a product backlog that is always ready to work from
- Writing user stories that convey value with clear acceptance criteria
- Splitting large work down small enough to finish inside one sprint
- Workshop: write user stories from your own real work and review them together
Section 5: Prioritization and Sprint Planning
- Prioritization techniques you can justify to management and users
- Setting a sprint goal that points the whole team in one direction
- Sprint planning: selecting the work and agreeing a definition of done
- Workshop: order your backlog and plan your team first sprint
Day 2: Estimation, Ceremonies and Real Adoption
Section 6: Estimating with Story Points
- The difference between estimating in hours and estimating in story points
- Using planning poker to get the team aligned on size
- Handling work that cannot be estimated and using spikes to reduce uncertainty
- Workshop: estimate your backlog with planning poker
Section 7: Daily Scrum and Working Through the Sprint
- Running a daily scrum that stays short, useful and never becomes a status report
- Using the board so the team sees real status and blocked work
- Handling interruptions and change during a sprint
- Removing impediments and escalating problems at the right moment
Section 8: Sprint Review and Retrospective
- Running a sprint review that produces feedback the team can actually act on
- Running a retrospective where people speak honestly and one real change comes out
- Retrospective formats that work and how to vary them so the team stays engaged
- Workshop: run a simulated retrospective and list the changes you will make
Section 9: Measurement and Visibility
- Velocity: what it really means and using it to plan, not to rate people
- Reading burndown and burnup charts to see the trend of a sprint
- Other metrics worth watching, such as cycle time and accumulated work in progress
- Measurement traps that push teams to game the numbers instead of creating value
Section 10: Common Problems in Early Adoption
- What to fix first when the team misses its plan every sprint
- What to do when management still wants a long-term plan and a fixed date
- What to do when team members are split across several projects
- Adapting Scrum to your organization without losing the principles that matter
Section 11: Capstone and Adoption Plan
- Capstone: plan and simulate one full sprint from planning to retrospective
- Present your sprint goal, backlog and definition of done
- A first-30-days plan for starting Scrum in your organization and what to avoid
- Workshop: present your adoption plan and get feedback from the instructor