Agile Skills Map Courses

During Agile 20 Reflect Festival, iLEARN held a workshop with about skills for agile management practices. One of the first results of it is a map of agile skills . Many skills are included in the map together with personal values (not veritable skills but still important characteristics of agile roles) and transferrable skills needed in an agile management context. Here below is a short introduction to the skills categories included in the map. The topics are not introduced in priority or importance order. 

Agile values

Agile Values are “desirable goals that motivate people’s actions and serve as guiding principles in their operating context". Everyone has values, but each person has a different value set. 

Transferrable skills

These are skills that are useful and can be applied to almost any task. They may be classified in “hard” (teachable and measurable) and “soft”. However, we do not make this distinction in our context.

Knowledge about Agile Roles & Responsibilities

This is the knowledge about the roles and responsibilities operating in an agile management context. They derive from practice and are usually defined in the adopted management framework.

Knowledge about Agile Values and Principles

The knowledge about the Agile values and principles. Knowing about them does not necessarily mean adopting them.

Knowledge about Continual Improvement

Continual improvement is a key focus and aspect of agile management. This knowledge is about the relevance, the approach and techniques to embed and perform continual improvement,

Knolwedge about Culture and Mindset Management

Cultural and mindset change is at the basis of agile management success and is generally one of the key failure reasons. This knowledge is about approaches and  techniques to manage cultural and mindset change to drive behavioural change.

Knowledge about Flow Management

Flow is a key aspect of agile management. Activities shall seamlessly flow without interruptions and bottlenecks. This knowledge is about how to achieve this.

Knowledge about Product Governance

Product governance is about defining the right things to be done, the priorities and providing requirements. This is a key aspect of agile approaches (e.g. defining what to include in a development cycle).

Knowledge about Structured Governance & Control

Agile management does not mean having no governance, although some frameworks may provide more guidance and focus on the aspect. This knowledge is about the approaches and technique to ensure governance and control in agile management environments.

Knowledge about Agile Frameworks

There are many practice frameworks that are classified under the “agile” umbrella. This is the knowledge about each of them (e.g. structure, principles, roles, processes, implementation, etc.).

The Agile Skills Map

Here below is the map for the above mentioned categories of knowledge.