Professional Agile Leadership - Essentials

The Professional Agile Leadership Essentials™ (PAL-E) is a 2-day hands-on course that uses a combination of instruction and hands-on exercises to help managers and other leaders who work directly with agile teams understand how to best support, guide, and coach their teams to improve their agile capabilities.

The course provides a foundation for the role that leaders play in creating the conditions for a successful agile transformation. Leaders and managers are critical enablers in helping their organisations be successful, yet the role of leaders and managers in an agile organisation can be quite different from what they are used to.

This course uses a combination of instruction and team-based exercises to help participants learn how to form and support agile teams to achieve better results, and how to lead the cultural and behavioural changes that organisations must make to reap the benefits of an agile product delivery approach.

Learning outcomes

To succeed in a changing world, organisations need to become more agile, more responsive to customer needs and market changes. This course will equip leaders and managers to help their organisations change by providing participants with:

• An understanding of how agility can help you improve your organisation’s performance
• An understanding of how you, as a manager or leader, can help your organisation achieve the benefits of agility
• An understanding of how culture and values influence your organisation’s ability to reap the benefits of agility
• Practical skills for helping to guide and coach agile teams, and to help them remove impediments
• An understanding of how to measure the benefits and impacts of agility in your organisation

You will understand where and how agility can help your organisation improve, by addressing challenges you can solve in no other way. You will also understand how agile teams work and what you, as a manager or leader, can do to help them to improve. You will also be able to quantify the benefits of improving the agility of your organisation through concrete measures.

Who should attend

The Professional Agile Leadership Essentials course is designed for managers and those in leadership roles who are responsible for the introduction and establishment of Agile methods and techniques in an IT organisation/division. It is targeted at leaders at ALL levels of the organisation, from mid-to-senior management all the way to CEO.

In addition, the course is ideally suited for Agile Coaches and Chapter Leads. All these roles are responsible in various ways for providing the tools, boundaries, guidelines, strategy and vision for the success and engagement of people and teams. This course is designed to help them understand how they can best embody agile leadership to lead their people and teams to success. Agile leadership is not about hierarchy but rather a way of leading that exists in all levels of the organisation.

Course contents

The course covers the following key topics:

1.  Why Agile Matters

An overview of what “Agile” is and why organisations need it to thrive in a changing world.

2.  Challenges of an Agile Leader – Improving Value Delivery

The means to identify the potential opportunities, challenges and impacts of Agile in terms of business value and why this is so important to the next generation organisation.

3.  Leaders Grow Agility – the “What”

An understanding of techniques to support teams to sustain long-term agility including the role that leaders play, shifts in thinking, and the relationship between complexity and empiricism.

4.  Developing People – the “Who”

Ways to continue the development of the people to help them grow and prosper in an agile way of working.

5.  Measuring Agility – the “How”

Guidance of how to measure and guide agile product delivery. 

6.  Scaling

Ways to scale agility across several teams within the organisation while keeping them working together to deliver on a common vision.