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Accurate Agile Planning

Live Online In Person Private One Day

This course helps you determine how much can be delivered by when. It covers fixed-date, fixed-scope, and fixed-everything projects and will give you the skills to create accurate plans 3, 6, or 12 months into the future.

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Plan complex projects including those that require deliverables by specific dates

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Confidently communicate plans to stakeholders including the need for accuracy rather than precision

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Better manage backlog items that have the greatest uncertainty to reduce project risk.

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Upcoming Live Online Training

with Lance Dacy $800 Register
All courses include:
Money-back guarantee
Training recording provided
12 months access to Mountain Goat Essentials with AI

Our Instructor

Mountain Goat has handpicked instructors that share our training values. These are people with deep experience, who are leading teams with agile today and can give you real-world answers about what does and doesn’t work.

Lance Dacy

As a Certified Scrum Trainer, Lance has trained and coached teams through many successful Scrum implementations since 2011, from Fortune 20 companies to small start-ups. Lance is also experienced in showing agile coaches and managers how to help cross functional, self-organizing teams deliver high value for customers as early as possible by using Scrum. 

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Team Home

Team Home is a collaboration platform that we designed for our courses. It is optimized for live, online training. Participants benefit by collaborating in ways beyond what is possible with generic whiteboard software such as Mural or Miro. Instructors can observe activity across all rooms, improving the effectiveness and efficiency of exercise debriefs.

 

Click below to see samples of the 100+ exercises instructors use in our courses.

In this CSPO exercise, participants take on roles in a movie studio and spend virtual currency to prioritize what will make them a successful movie.

Participants experience the benefits of collaborating and working as a cross-functional team in this exercise from Working on a Scrum Team.

During the CSM exercise, participants discuss how managers should interact with Scrum teams. Also shown is the custom debrief view used by instructors so they know which items need the most discussion after the exercise.

Exercises have custom debrief views for instructors, which help them know which topics warrant the most discussion after the exercise.


Certificate

6 PDUs within the PMI.
6 SEUs towards your CSP designation within the Scrum Alliance.

Course Outline

1. What Is Agile Planning?

  • Good Plans Lead to the Right Decisions
  • Why Estimating in Person-Days Does Not Work

2. Estimating with Story Points

  • What Story Points Are
  • Using an Appropriate Scale
  • Five Types of Estimates and Which Works
  • Planning Poker and Affinity Estimating

3. Milestone (Release) Planning

  • Fixed-Date Plans
  • Fixed-Scope Plans
  • Fixed-Everything Plans
  • Estimating Velocity
  • Estimating Velocity Without Data (or Even a Team)

4. Planning for What You Don’t Know

  • Why Your Product Backlog Is Bigger than You Think
  • Estimating the Unknown Backlog

5. Buffering Critical Plans

  • Don’t Pad a Plan but Buffer What Matters
  • Why Two Estimates Are Better (and Faster) than One
  • Measuring Risk
  • Creating the Buffered Plan

6. Getting Faster and Better at Estimating

  • Seven Things to Do to Get Better, Faster Estimates
  • Four Things to Stop Doing

7. Communicating about Estimates and Plans

  • Explaining Story Points
  • Explaining What Makes a Good Estimate or Plan
  • Answering Questions about the Plan