Agile Bootcamp for Project Sponsors, Product Owners, and Business Analysts

Agile methods are growing in popularity, and recent industry studies show that nearly 2/3 of organizations are already using agile methods for some projects, and most of the remaining companies have plans in place to pilot the agile methods in the near future.  With this growing acceptance of agile in business, more and more projects are being kicked off using agile methods such as Scrum.  In Scrum, one of the key roles is that of the Product Owner (a.k.a. "project sponsor") who has specific responsibilities to help define the project scope and vision, to set project priorities through the maintenance of the Product Backlog, and to actively work with the team to resolve issues, provide guidance, and engage business stakeholders as necessary to keep the project moving.

With the widespread adoption of agile methods such as Scrum, Extreme Programming, Feature-Driven Development and OpenUp throughout the business world, more and more non-IT people are being drawn in to these new agile processes.  For non-IT folk, the terminology, roles, and expectations are new and often confusing.  What exactly is expected of a project sponsor, business analyst, or business subject matter expert in the agile paradigm?

This session will teach non-IT project participants how their role changes in an agile world.  Special emphasis is given to developing schedules, financial baselines, and various governance mechanisms for agile projects, always focusing on the needs of the business over those of the IT development organization. 

Agenda:

• How agile approaches such as Scrum differ from traditional project approaches including both roles and processes
• The benefits and risks of an agile approach
• The techniques of agile requirements gathering and prioritization, including "backlog" building and maintenance
• The proper role of use cases and user stories in documenting requirements, business context, and business rules
• How to capture non-functional requirements, documentary deliverables, and design constraints such as support for enterprise architecture or SOA standards
• Creating product, project, and iteration goals/visions
• Agile scheduling (at 3 levels)
• Agile monitoring (metrics) and project governance
• Agile planning in fixed-price environments