Innolution

This is live instructor-led course that will help your organization better structure for flow at scale by changing the way you think about and deal with dependencies.

The course is taught in two 4-hour sessions on January 27-28, 2022. Each session will run from 9am to 1pm US Mountain Time .

Is this your situation?

• Are you trying to adopt agile at scale and realize that dependencies among teams have made it nearly impossible to reliably and predictably get the work done? 
• Is your flow frequently impeded because one team is waiting on another team? 
• Are your results either failure or unacceptable delay costs because work is taking much longer than it should to complete? 

Then, it's Time to fight back!!!

This course is based on Ken Rubin’s years of experience helping companies of all sizes adopt agile at scale. This isn’t some theoretical course. You'll learn how to model and analyze your dependencies. You'll also learn practical strategies that you can combine to address your organization’s specific dependency issues. 

This also is not a course based on widely accepted dogma. For example, a common belief is that if we just re-organize ourselves “correctly” (say, organize 100% into feature teams) we can eliminate dependencies. This is a myth. Certainly creating feature teams can help, but attempting to eliminate all dependencies with feature teams when trying to do agile at scale is not practical. 

There are many other beliefs that cloud our minds when dealing with dependencies. Some organizations may believe that if they could just identify all of the dependencies upfront, they could manage them. Or if they just had a more detailed dependency-management process with awesome tool support, they could tame their dependencies. Yeah, no.

In this course you will learn:

• What are dependencies and why are they important
• That dependency problems scale exponentially, so solutions that work with small-scale dependency problems may break at larger-scale
• The killer problem is asynchronicity (prioritization problems) that come from trying to coordinate dependencies across multiple teams
• Viewing dependencies in isolation (within a subset of your organization) will fail to address the needs of end-to-end business agility
• Why most companies need to change their unit of focus from projects to something more durable and business-focused like products, business capabilities, value streams, etc.
• Why the common myths surrounding dependency management are just wrong
• The difference between structural dependencies and instantiated dependencies and why this distinction is important
• A specific, proven process for modeling and analyzing structural dependencies
• 7 strategies improving structural dependencies: strive for cross-functional and T-shaped, create feature teams, establish communities of practice, organize into coordinated ecosystems, architect for "build using" (self service), establish team-to-team working agreements, balance system/portfolio WIP
• The instantiated dependency management process
• 5 techniques for identifying instantiated dependencies
• 4 techniques for recording/visualizing instantiated dependencies
• 6 techniques for coordinating instantiated dependencies
• Multiple techniques for managing dependencies that have become blockers
• The nuances of using dependency patterns through real world examples of large organizations applying multiple patterns at an organizational-wide level
• Ways of combining patterns at scale to achieve better end-to-end flow

Who should take this course?

This course is ideal for anyone who wants to actually do something about their organization’s dependency issues. If you are tired of living with the problems caused by dependencies, whether you are on a team or an executive at a company, you will walk away with actionable knowledge to improve your situation.