People wearing running shoes

Introduction to Agile

SDS have been introducing agile ways of working to Project Managers across Ashford Borough Council.

We have delivered four live and interactive sessions. Each one with 6 to 12 project managers all participating via MS teams.

The sessions start by exploring the principles of working in an agile way. Then move on to introduce SCRUM, one of the most used agile methodologies.

SCRUM framework diagram

During the session we tackled the specific problem of customers having difficulties renewing their membership online.

Together we designed our scrum team and developed our product vision. We identified user needs from an interview with a customer and developed user stories. Then we used these user stories to create our product backlog.

We went on to prioritise our user stories with lively MoSCoW discussions. Then we estimated the amount of effort each one would involve by playing planning poker – holding up our cards to our cameras so we could all see them!

Having done this, we were able to hold a sprint planning meeting and create our sprint/task wall for our initial sprint.

Finally we explored what to do during and at the end of each sprint. We discussed how virtual daily scrum/stand-ups could work when we are all working from home and what to do in a sprint review and sprint retrospective meeting.

Everyone got involved and played their part in the scrum team. We really enjoyed delivering the sessions and have had lots of great feedback:

This has to be one of the best short courses I have had to pleasure to attend. Lots of really useful, easy to implement ideas, for all projects large and small. By learning to focus on the needs of the situation/customer rather than a predefined end goal gives you a totally different perspective. Thoroughly enjoyed the session, and will definitely be utilizing my new sprint and scrum techniques….. Fantastic :)’

If you are interested in this introduction to Agile course, or any of our training courses, please do get in touch.