Agile is a methodology for efficient project management. It is akin to Lean, the popular system for improved efficiency. Agile began as a set of principles for software development but today it is widely used by knowledge companies in marketing, advertising, construction, architecture, new product development and finance. The goal of Agile is to reveal production problems long before they lead to serious consequences and the costs for their removal grow large.

 

Research shows that 70% of projects are managed most successfully through a process of continuous improvement and finding the best solution in the course of execution. Agile solutions give freedom to the people, who actually do the work, to show their talent and creativity within short cycles and demonstrate progress. Agile execution is faster, cheaper, and closest to what the client wants, even when requirements change in the course of implementation.

 

Agile allows itself full transparency which is an incredible source of improvements. It also brings into the open the non-transparent tricks which managers play on their subordinates to maintain power. It is not surprising that Agile is not popular with the command-and-control gang.

 

In addition to the philosophy and principles of Agile, the course lays out the artifacts, events, and process of Scrum, the principal framework and method for agile implementation. The popular auxiliary methods of Kanban and Crystal Clear also get a fair treatment.

 

An added advantage of the course is that it does not cover Agile and Scrum solely from a rosy and uncritical perspective but gets down to the nitty-gritty of their share of failures and the reasons for those, objectively analyses the major reservations of those who have tried the method and failed, and shows the errors of implementation and how to avoid them with an illustrative success story of a business services company which applied the full Agile and Scrum.