FLSA: Powering Agile Transformations with Enterprise Kanban -July 8-11,2024

Class Information

• Training Class Day 1: Monday, 08 July 2024
• Training Class Day 2: Tuesday, 09 July 2024
• Training Class Day 3: Wednesday, 10 July 2024
• Training Class Day 4: Thursday, 11 July 2024

TIME: 1:00 PM to 4:00 PM (main session) and 4:00 PM to 5:00 PM (intersession for participants) Eastern Standard Time

4 days * 4 hours per day from 1pm-5pm EST

Class Description

How can we begin our Agile transformation? Where should we get started? How many Agile systems do we need and at which levels? Which stakeholders should be involved and how frequently? Where are the critical fault lines where we can introduce a small change with outsized impact? How big is the problem, anyway? How can we get our arms around the situation and see where the opportunity zones and danger zones are? What is the smallest set of changes we can make that can move the needle for the entire organization? Could we achieve a measurable and meaningful business outcome by making relatively few moves?

Welcome to Flight Levels System Architecture! In this class we will learn how to model your entire organization as an interconnected system of systems. In true Agile fashion, we will learn how to create a “good enough” model in a fraction of the time and leverage it to guide our efforts. While a Kanban board tracks the flow of valuable work between activities in a work system, the flight levels topology tracks the interactions between work systems within an organization. Just as a Kanban system evolves over time, the work systems topology evolves as we consolidate levels, split out others, and “light up” new areas of the organization. Creating a taxonomy that works well combines multiple skills and disciplines such as value stream identification, service discovery, change management, operating rhythm design, and lean portfolio design.

Many organizations seek to make dramatic improvements in their customer responsiveness, their ability to bring new products to market quickly, and to respond rapidly to competitive threats and new opportunities. The problem? Installing Agility only at the operational team level is not sufficient. Instead, we need to apply Agility at the team level, coordination level and the strategy level in order to prevent local optimizations, bottlenecks, and misalignment. Designing and managing systems at all three levels is what the flight levels thinking model is all about. The flight levels system architecture helps us put it all together and figure out which systems at which levels are needed and how they can fit together.

Business Agility involves the entire organization. However, most agile implementations focus on only team-level agility. Flight Levels take agility beyond the team beyond the portfolio and into strategy. Flight Levels Systems Architecture will help you:

• Establish business agility beyond team boundaries
• See how your organization's strategy is progressing
• Know why any piece of work is important to your organization's strategy
• Operationalize business strategy.
• Effectively manage dependencies between teams and services/products
• Know whether your organization has the capacity to start a piece of work

Why Take This Class?

Flight Levels is an exciting new Agile framework that is elegantly simple, yet comprehensive enough to address the entire enterprise. Using the flight levels framework, organizations can reduce their time to market, identify and capitalize on new business opportunities, understand their capacity to take on new work, measure the possible impact of new initiatives, and identify the places where adding new resources will give them the highest leverage.

How can it do all this? By helping us visualize the way work flows throughout the enterprise using three lenses. The flight level model recognizes that we need three “viewpoints” for managing our work:

• Flight level three, or the strategy level,
• Flight level two, or the coordination level, and
• Flight level one, or the team level

Target Audience

This is intermediate-level training aimed at those working in the following roles:

• Leadership
• Middle and Senior Managers
• Transformation Leaders
• Enterprise Agile Coaches
• Organizational Designers
• Agile team-level coaches and trainers

Prerequisites

• Successful Completion of Flight Levels Introduction (FLIN) e-learning course.
• Experience of agile working methods (Kanban, Scrum, SAFe, etc) and modern management systems.

Certification

This workshop is certified by Flight Levels Academy. After completing the workshop, participants receive a “Certificate of Completion” from the Flight Levels Academy.

The knowledge imparted in the Flight Level Two Design Workshop (FL2D) is a basic requirement if you want to become a certified Flight Levels Coach (FLC).

About the Trainers

Craeg Strong - Flight Levels Guide & CTO of Ariel Partners

Craeg Strong is the CTO of Ariel Partners, a small IT consulting company based in Times Square. He teaches public classes in Kanban and Human Centered Design and coaches teams to adopt and mature Agile/Kanban practices in the NYC area. He has 25 years of experience in information technology, starting at Project Athena during his undergraduate studies at MIT. Mr. Strong has successfully instituted Agile and DevOps practices on large and complex commercial and government software projects, helping them to obtain new capabilities and realize significant cost efficiencies. Mr. Strong leverages his experience as a hands-on software architect, trainer, and agile coach to help remove the barriers that prevent organizations from adopting new technologies-- such as cloud. Mr. Strong led a successful transformation of a major FBI Criminal justice program from a traditional waterfall lifecycle and manual intensive processes to lighter weight agile processes and full DevOps automation.