10 Books + Technique Cards
Building Better Products
Books & Techniques
VFQ books cover the entire idea-to-market lifecycle, bringing together insights and guidance from thousands of articles, books, case studies and models – providing a solid foundation for practitioners and experts in Agile and Product Management.
Building Better Products
This book bundle gives you all of the tools and knowledge to successfully take your idea to market, from capturing the idea to prioritizing and successfully working with your team. Each book gives you access to case studies and activities to put your learning into practice.
Adapting Agile
The complete workbook – includes learning objectives, essential education, activities, case studies and references
Learning Outcomes
- Identify the common compromises made with Agile implementation.
- Understand the likely impact of compromise on expected benefits.
- Recognize the potential to adapt elements of Agile methods.
- Examine whether adaptation is truly necessary.
- Recognize the common ground between different Agile methods.
- Appreciate the underlying practices and principles that should remain constant.
- Differentiate which elements of Agile are more superficial and can be modified.
- Recognize the challenges and obstacles likely to arise when implementing the principles.
- Understand the feedback cycle of implementation: select, do, learn, adapt.
- Choose the most appropriate practices to begin with, depending upon your business need.
Kanban
The complete workbook – includes learning objectives, essential education, activities, case studies and references
Learning Outcomes
- Understand the practices and principles of the Kanban Method.
- Visualize your work.
- Decide how you might limit your WIP.
- Take measurements of the workflow and manage the results.
- Communicate work standards using explicit process policies.
- Understand how to implement feedback loops.
- Attempt to improve collaboratively using models.
- Recognize improvement opportunities using models.
- Understand how to use classes of service.
- Differentiate between input and delivery cadence.
- Distinguish where and how to implement Queue Replenishment Meetings, Improvement Katas and Operations Review Meetings.
- Experiment with the ideas of evolutionary change and how to overlay the principles with existing processes.
- Analyze your progress of improvement.
Scrum
The complete workbook – includes learning objectives, essential education, activities, case studies and references
Learning Outcomes
- Appreciate the key principles, practices and roles within Scrum.
- Understand the key advantages and benefits the framework is intended to enable.
- Identify common points of failure or difficulty and prepare your organisation for a successful implementation of Scrum.
- Deal with problems that often arise.
Attacking Your Queues
The complete workbook – includes learning objectives, essential education, activities, case studies and references
Learning Outcomes
- Understand what a queue is.
- Appreciate why queues are invisible.
- Appreciate what causes queues.
- Recognize where queues are found in IT and software development.
- Understand methods of controlling queues.
- Quantify a queue.
- Distinguish when action on queues is necessary.
Prioritization
The complete workbook – includes learning objectives, essential education, activities, case studies and references
Learning Outcomes
- Appreciate that where there is a mismatch between supply and demand, prioritization is a necessity:
- Understand strategies devoted to managing demand
- Understand strategies devoted to managing supply
- Recognize the problems with focusing on ‘right decision’ not ‘right outcome’.
- Unpick ‘business value’ into value, cost, risk and new knowledge.
- Differentiate between ordering, selection and prioritization.
- Understand when to use numbers or approximate ‘labels’.
- Evaluate common prioritization techniques, their advantages and disadvantages, when to use them and the type of flow process they suit best:
- MoSCoW
- Classes of service
- Equity
- HiPPO decisions (HiPPOQ)
- Value divided by effort
- Cost benefit analysis
- Incremental Funding Model
- Weighted look ahead approach
- Weighted shortest job first (CD3)
- Appreciate the non-rational decisions that affect prioritization.
Estimating and Forecasting
The complete workbook – includes learning objectives, essential education, activities, case studies and references
Learning Outcomes
- Describe why and where estimations and forecasts are useful.
- Understand and appreciate the strengths and weaknesses of different estimating techniques.
- Explain why using crowds (groups) and data is useful in improving estimates.
- Design an approach to improve your ability to forecast future value throughput.
- Create strategies for collecting, identifying and providing key value and effort information in to the planning and execution processes.
Planning
The complete workbook – includes learning objectives, essential education, activities, case studies and references
Learning Outcomes
- Appreciate why people naturally plan when they care about an outcome.
- Recognize the impossibility of controlling uncertainty, the cost of planning and the impact of these on how we plan.
- Understand and apply a planning model to evaluate which types of planning are valuable and how to combine them.
- Appreciate the goals and limitations of multi-level planning.
Building Plans
The complete workbook – includes learning objectives, essential education, activities, case studies and references
Learning Outcomes
- Understand the multiple levels of planning in business.
- Learn to apply planning tools and techniques.
- Develop existing theories to manage risk and investment through portfolio planning techniques.
- Formulate a strategy to deal with the issues of planning at scale with high dependencies.
Requirements
The complete workbook – includes learning objectives, essential education, activities, case studies and references
Learning Outcomes
- Identify how the term requirement is used in projects today.
- Explore problems caused by the conventional approach to requirements, particularly the impact of separating design from delivery.
- Appreciate the consequences of seeing requirements as information.
- Judge how Agile practices differ in their conception of a requirement.
- Understand and apply differing techniques for working with requirements. Select when each is most appropriate and appraise their advantages and disadvantages:
- User stories
- Decomposition
- Feature injection
- Critical requirements
- Elaboration
- Story mapping
- Confirmation including acceptance criteria and specification by example
- Supplementary tools including Agile modelling and use cases
- Recognize the importance of non-functional requirements. Discriminate when they are used improperly and distinguish how to use them better in the context of your project.
Understanding Your Customer
The complete workbook – includes learning objectives, essential education, activities, case studies and references
Learning Outcomes
- Identify the four types of stakeholders in a company.
- Understand how zero-sum thinking could affect a company.
- Know why the customer is important.
- Have a clear definition of who the customer is.
- Use a set of techniques to ensure the customer is kept at the heart of solutions provided by IT.
Technique Library
The complete workbook – includes learning objectives, essential education, activities, case studies and references
The VFQ Technique Library consists of more than 30 quick-glance cards covering the most important Agile practices. Each technique card features step-by-step guidance, practical tips, and information on additional resources.
The library includes:
- Measuring Lead Time
- 5 Whys
- Acceptance Criteria
- Build-Measure-Learn
- Burndown Charts
- Classes of Service
- Cost of Delay
- Velocity
- User Stories
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