Agile Planning and Estimation

5 days

This course equips students with modern, practical skills to plan, forecast, and deliver with confidence in Agile environments.  They learn how to estimate effectively, create adaptive plans, and inspire the team to embrace agility. It includes handling challenges like remote team planning, distributed Agile, and cross-functional prioritization. It also highlights how to align business stakeholders and technical teams, making planning a collaborative, energizing process.  Participants progress from concept to delivery.

Course Outline

The Business Value of Agile and Scrum

• Understanding the rationale for Agile and Scrum adoption
• Connecting Agile practices to business outcomes and value delivery

Predictive vs. Adaptive Approaches

• Comparison of predictive (waterfall) and adaptive (Scrum) delivery models
• Impacts to risk management, responsiveness, and value realization

Being Agile vs. Doing Agile

• The Agile Manifesto and principles
• How principles guide behaviors, decision-making, and organizational agility

Core Scrum Framework

• Scrum theory, values, events, and artifacts
• Role clarity and accountabilities within Scrum

High-Performing Teams

• Characteristics of high-performing Scrum teams
• Enablers including self-organization, working agreements, leadership behaviors,
• communication effectiveness, listening skills, and facilitation

Stakeholder Engagement

• How stakeholder engagement differs in Agile environments
• Identifying stakeholders
• Improving collaboration and communication

Planning at Multiple Levels

• Why big upfront planning fails
• The Five Levels of Planning: Vision, Roadmap, Quarterly/Release, Sprint, Daily
• Decoupling planning cadences from deployment cadences
• Techniques for articulating vision
• Transitioning from traditional roadmaps to Agile roadmaps
• Quarterly/Release planning beyond a single sprint
• Capacity-based Sprint Planning
• Effective daily planning (Daily Scrum)

Product Backlog Management

• Types of product backlog items across time horizons (features, stories)
• Sources of product backlog items
• Determining and assessing value
• Ordering backlog items
• Progressive refinement
• Acceptance criteria and their importance
• Definition of Done (DoD): how it differs from acceptance criteria, how it ensures transparency and quality, and how it supports increment-level completeness
• Definition of Ready at release and sprint levels
• Introduction to story mapping

Estimation

• Relative estimation and story points
• Methods of estimating in story points
• How story points are used in planning
• Understanding and applying velocity
• Forecasting using velocity and addressing variation

Forecasting

• Traditional versus Agile forecasting approaches
• Working with fixed scope and fixed dates
• Common forecasting challenges

Scrum Events: Deep Dive

• Sprint planning, capacity-based sprint planning, including approaches without established velocity, (detailed capacity-based sprint planning agenda provided)
• Effective Daily Scrums
• Conducting meaningful Sprint Reviews
• Sprint Retrospectives focused on continuous improvement

Tracking Progress

• Tracking progress at the quarterly/release level
• Tracking progress at the sprint level

Project Initiation Activities

• Role accountabilities during project initiation
• Understanding the use of “Sprint Zero” in practice -inflight projects and/or greenfield
• Hybrid patterns combining predictive and Agile approaches, including benefits and challenges

Project Managers in Scrum

• How Scrum views traditional project management activities
• Where and how project managers add value in Scrum environments
• Common patterns, benefits, and trade-offs

Functional or Development Managers

• How managers support self-organizing, self-managing Scrum teams
• Leadership behaviors that enable sustained team performance

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