Agile Antipatterns virtual course

Through Comic Agilé, we’ve depicted more than 300 agile antipatterns. Now, we want to teach you how to spot, articulate and fix your agile antipatterns through this highly interactive and fun one-day virtual course.

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By articulating and removing agile pains (i.e., misunderstandings, conflicts and antipatterns born out of implementing agile ways of working), organisations can get more out of their investment in working agile. Agile antipatterns are sub-par solutions to challenges that arise when the intentions of working agile meet the limitations of the organisational reality. It’s the “pragmatic” shortcuts that, on the surface, seem appropriate and sensible, but in the long run can decrease the benefits of working agile.

Examples of agile antipatterns:

• #1: Product Owners only prioritise business features and not technical enablers and process improvement initiatives.
  Consequence: Reduced quality of the product and no team culture of continuous improvement.
• #2: Scrum Masters “do” instead of enabling the team to do.
  Consequence: The team is ineffective because it doesn’t learn self-management and to grow as a team, but keeps being dependant on the Scrum Master.
• #3: Dependencies are not broken, but instead coordinated through a scaling framework.
  Consequence: The organisation spends a lot on events, roles and artifacts, and the value delivery of each team slows down because of the need for cross-team dependency management.

In this virtual course, the writer of Comic Agilé and independent Agile Coach, Luxshan Ratnaravi, will take the participants through a visual and provocative journey of agile anti-patterns and misunderstandings, told through his tragicomic strips in a highly entertaining fashion, and teach how to identify and avoid agile antipatterns. The presented content, points and lessons will be relatable to agile practitioners and Management roles, as they’ll center around the real-life challenges of working with Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, “Spotify” and Product Ownership.

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• spot the biggest agile antipatterns of their organisation, inspired by the creative Comic Agilé way of thinking
• identify the root causes of agile antipatterns
• come up with realistic solutions to remove the root causes
• create their own agile comic strip based on their chosen agile antipatterns
• communicate agile antipatterns to decision-makers using the format of comic strips

Also, we’ll focus on how:

• not to drown teams in meetings when going agile
• the organisation needs seasoned Scrum Masters, but end up hiring babies, and firing them again
• avoid imprisoning our Product Owners and, instead, empower them
• prevent that Agile Coaches become preaching evangelists
• see scaling agile like treating the symptoms when we should, instead, remove the dependencies that cause the need for coordinating between our teams.
• manage that Managers, on one hand, are expected to be in full control and, at the same time, expected to empower their teams to be self-managing
• realise that we cannot be agile if the architecture doesn’t support it
• …