 Hi, and welcome to the Agile Expert Certified Course. In this particular course, we're going to discuss a number of different Agile methodologies, talk about how Agile methodologies provide benefits over traditional waterfall models, and then take you through a number of the different Agile methodologies and talk about their relative merits. We'll introduce you to Lean, to Kanban, Scrum and XP, DSDM, Crystal, and FTD, and talk a little bit about how these various methodologies all wrestle with the same fundamental questions, but may then emphasize certain good things over other good things for the purpose of identifying and delivering certain values in particular organizational context. I'm glad that you've chosen to be part of this course. I hope that you enjoy this. It's very important to both listen to the course and read your course handout as you go, because they may emphasize different kinds of things about that particular discipline. You'll want to learn both of those in parallel. Hi, my name is Patrick Von Schlag and I'm going to be serving as the instructor for your Scrum and Agile programs this week. One of the things that's very important about the emergence of Agile practices and Scrum in particular is that it does a very good job of helping to bridge an important gap in our organizations between the goals and objectives of business people and the activities and execution of technical people, both in development teams and operations and support teams. One of the things I've done throughout my career, both in terms of working with Scrum and working with other types of frameworks like Idle or Prince II or COVID or other frameworks, is to really consider the notion of how we do IT business alignment. How do I understand in a meaningful and functional way what my customers' needs are? And how do we do a better job in IT of provisioning and delivering the right size than right approach to be able to deliver and support those solutions effectively? So when you consider the role that Scrum and Agile play, it's very much about creating the appropriate collaborative environment between specific individuals on the customer side and the business side working together with people working in the technology side to be able to produce effective solutions together. So I see Scrum and Agile practices as a very specific way to realize a much bigger promise. How do we integrate IT practices with business practices in a way that drives overall governance and improvement? So we are very grateful that you're deciding to take part in our programs. I hope that you'll look at these programs in the broader context, not only of how you carry out and execute software development projects, but the role that this plays in the larger goal of delivering good business value to your customers. In this lesson, we're going to take a look at the Agile expert course a little bit about the structure of how the program is put together and talk a little bit about getting you ready for the exam, a little bit about what the exam entails, and hopefully how to use your course materials in a way that's the most effective for you. This particular course, Agile expert certified is part of a broader Scrum qualification scheme. The Scrum study organization establishes Scrum developer certified as kind of a core program in this structure, and then the intermediate programs can include Scrum master certified, Scrum product owner certified, or this particular Agile expert certified program. All of these are excellent preparation for the more advanced programs for expert Scrum master as well. One of the benefits associated with taking part in this particular program is access to an exclusive mentoring community where people who are working in Scrum and Agile practices across the world are working together to learn these capabilities and to share the good practices across organizations. To take advantage of this mentoring community, log in to LinkedIn and go and enter the group called myscrumslashagile mentoring community. Take a moment to introduce yourself and please use this community as a vehicle to communicate and ask questions about use of Scrum practices and certainly about preparation for Scrum and Agile certifications. As you work your way through the program, there are a number of very basic questions. I want you to take some time to think about as you work through this. Why exactly is it important that you learn these particular skills in being able to work on your particular Scrum team? Are there certain ways that you learn more effectively, whether it's through reading, through repeating portions of this exercise? And how exactly can your existing experience help you understand the particular techniques and capabilities we're going to introduce in here? In particular, I encourage you to make a specific plan for getting benefits from the course. How exactly is it that you're going to take the knowledge and skills you gain in this program and bring it out into your organization to support your work and the work of your teams in improving your overall capabilities and performance within your organization? When knowledge professionals try to identify a set of skills or capabilities intended from a particular program and training, one skill set or one model that they use is called Bloom's Taxonomy. Bloom's Taxonomy has six levels from raw knowledge up through advanced skills like synthesis and evaluation of capabilities. In this particular course, we're going to operate most of the course at levels one and two, basic knowledge and comprehension, with a little bit of opportunity for you through some of the exercises to consider how to apply certain techniques in a way that's going to help improve the performance of your scrum teams. As you work your way through the course, one of the things you want to be able to ask yourself is what exactly and how exactly can you take advantage of and use the different materials that are here, as well as various third party materials available on the web? What kinds of questions can you ask of your peers or your instructor through the mentoring community? And then specifically to set expectations for yourself to really make these skill sets your own. In order for you to be an effective member of a scrum team, you really have to get a clear understanding of why this matters to your organization, why this is going to help you and your teams to be more productive and more effective, and also give you a lot more control over the work and the outcomes that you deliver. One of the things we encourage you to do is to put together a formalized schedule for your study. Whether you're taking the class one hour at a time or even just a few minutes at a time, you want to be able to try to spend dedicated time when you do your study. To turn off your cell phones, not be checking email, and to spend your energy focusing on the things that we're talking about and giving yourself the freedom, for example, to listen to different sections of the course again and again, as you feel you need to. As you work through your study plan, you want to establish as with any other project certain milestones, create opportunities for you to review material that you've studied in the past and to be able to revise your understanding of things as you gain more knowledge and skills. One of the key tools you'll have at your disposal in this particular program is to be able to print a copy of your courseware to work along with us as you're working through the course. The courseware uses a set of consistent conventions throughout, including chapter learning objectives, key terms and concepts to know, and certain iconography that we use to call out certain examples as we work our way through the text. So as you're going through the course online, we encourage you to print out a copy of the courseware and to follow along with that as well. Along the way, we're going to put in place a series of examples and quizzes to allow you to confirm your knowledge of the learning objectives and to be able to reinforce certain key knowledge and skills that we help you build through each one of the sections. One of the things that will help you in understanding your readiness for the certification exam is how comfortable you are answering these questions and your underlying knowledge of the key concepts that we're testing. There are a number of different scrum certification exams available. The scrum certification exams are objective tests that test your ability to utilize and adopt the scrum practices. The scrum examinations are multiple choice examinations and there are a differing number of questions for the different tests. From 75 for the scrum developer certified exam, up through 140 questions for the scrum product owner certified exam. On each of the examinations, each question is worth one mark and there's no guessing penalty. So take your best guess on every single one of the questions. Your exam will be proctored online and the duration of the examination differs depending upon which of the exams you're taking from 90 minutes for scrum developer certified to 120 minutes for scrum master or agile expert, up through 180 minutes for the scrum product owner certified exam. So a few things for you to think about as you're getting started with your learning program here. The first one, of course, is that you have your own particular learning preferences. Take the time to make a detailed study plan and stick to it. Make sure that that is something that you're doing every day or every couple of days so you're keeping the information current in your mind. Take the time to understand the core concepts within each one of the chapters, the learning objectives and the terms and concepts to know a great deal of what they test you on the exam is do you have a detailed understanding of what you're supposed to be doing during a sprint review, what you're supposed to be doing during a retrospect and so forth. And so you may see some deltas between how scrum is practiced in your organization and what we teach in this particular course. For the purpose of the certification exam, the exam is about how scrum is described in the scrum body of knowledge, not necessarily whether you choose to deploy all those capabilities. So make sure that you answer the questions in the context of how the scrum practices are defined. Where appropriate, use all the available resources you have from the mentoring community to your courseware, to this program, to internet resources that you may have available to you as well. Take the time to do practice exams where appropriate and use the quizzes and exercises at the end of each one of the sections to test your knowledge and skills to make sure that you're on track. There you go.