8 Books + Technique Cards
High Performing Teams
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.
High Performing Teams
Need to understand what goes into creating and maintaining a high performing team? This book bundle gives you access to all the tools and thinking to improve how your team works with your customer and working amongst themselves. Learn the skills that it takes to truly collaborate and deliver products that people love.
Trade-offs
The complete workbook – includes learning objectives, essential education, activities, case studies and references
Learning Outcomes
- Appreciate the importance of decreasing cycle time.
- Comprehend a model regarding flow choices.
- Decide where your organization currently sits within the model.
- See the attraction, and pitfalls of ‘certainty’ in delivery.
- Appreciate the value of throughput and the likely combination of tools which will optimize for it.
- Appreciate the value of flexibility and the likely combination of tools which will optimize for it.
- Appreciate the value of all out speed and the likely combination of tools which will optimize for it.
- Consider when certainty might be the correct choice and the likely combination of tools which will optimize for it.
Communication, Collaboration and Coordination
The complete workbook – includes learning objectives, essential education, activities, case studies and references
Learning Outcomes
- Appreciate the importance of communication, collaboration and coordination in product and software development and examine common failures and their impact.
- Compare the Agile approach and the practices emphasised in key methods such as Scrum, Kanban and XP.
- Appraise the general principles of communication and the appropriateness of differing methods.
- Identify the barriers that block collaboration and evaluate how to enable collaboration.
- Critique differing approaches to coordination and judge where each is most appropriate.
- Understand and apply the most effective tools to assist in improving communication, collaboration and cooperation for your organization. This includes designing, implementing and evaluating a tailored structure and set of practices.
Teams
The complete workbook – includes learning objectives, essential education, activities, case studies and references
Learning Outcomes
- Recognize when a team is the right tool for the job.
- Increase the probability that a team will be effective.
- Examine why the majority of teams aren’t working today.
- Appreciate the attributes a team needs in order to be effective.
- Recognize what stops a team from being effective.
Motivation
The complete workbook – includes learning objectives, essential education, activities, case studies and references
Learning Outcomes
- Critique common current reward-and-punishment style motivations.
- Understand the unintended results of reward-based targets.
- Differentiate between motivation of individuals and groups.
- Establish a motivational culture within the organization.
- Clear ‘demotivating’ blockages within the organization.
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.
Optimizing Flow
The complete workbook – includes learning objectives, essential education, activities, case studies and references
Learning Outcomes
- Appreciate why time is so important to an organization and why the customer’s view of time matters.
- Consider the benefits and limitations of the ‘on time’ delivery approach adopted by most companies.
- Take a broader view of end to end flow.
- Analyze the cost of delay in development projects.
- Appreciate the opportunity offered by flow optimization to eliminate delay and increase delivery speed.
- Judge how to optimize flow at scale.
Delivering Early and Often
The complete workbook – includes learning objectives, essential education, activities, case studies and references
Learning Outcomes
- Understand how increments and iterations are defined.
- Appreciate the benefits of delivering early and often:
- financial, marketing, engineering and other.
- Identify examples of where incremental delivery is used as a successful business model.
- Begin to break projects into increments through:
- developing a mindset to split dependencies and ideas
- using different prisms to split ideas: value, risk, stakeholder, urgency, geography, necessity.
- Know how small to go with your increment.
- Be able to map a customer journey or story strand to create slices or bites of functionality.
- Put in place practices that enable delivering early and often.
- Balance potential drawbacks or limits to delivering early and often including transaction cost and technological break-through.
- Demonstrate the value of incremental delivery.
Why Change
The complete workbook – includes learning objectives, essential education, activities, case studies and references
Learning Outcomes
- Recognize the scale of issues in how we deliver products and services.
- Understand the challenges of using projects as a mechanism for delivering change and meeting customer expectations.
- Identify flaws in focusing on an iron triangle of cost, time and scope.
- Have a brief overview of the history and philosophy behind ‘Agile’ development.
- Understand how people’s intuitive ways of thinking create rules of thumb.
- Appreciate the negative impact of rules of thumb in the way we deliver today.
- Realize how new initiatives can be developed through faster feedback.
- Discover and use three new guiding principles to break the iron triangle.
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
More bundles to explore
