Managers and directors who lead, govern or depend on delivery teams, and senior individual contributors stepping into their first leadership role.
A leader does not need to run a delivery system, but does need to understand the one their teams run on — well enough to set expectations, read what the team reports, and know which requests are reasonable. This course traces how work management arrived where it is, gives participants a way to tell which problems will yield to planning and which only reveal themselves once you step into them, and covers the three operating models that matter: Lean, Kanban and Scrum.
Managers, directors, executives and aspiring leaders. First-line managers and senior executives are taught in the same cohort.
Leading people who are solving complex problems means giving up the thing that made you effective on complicated ones. The method can no longer be specified, because it has to emerge; what a leader can do is shape the conditions it emerges in. This course is about those conditions — how a group makes a decision it will act on, how conflict gets used rather than avoided, what a constraint is that guides without dictating, and how to ask a question instead of giving an instruction. Participants leave with an assessment of their own organization and a working plan for it.
Anyone stepping into the role that connects the business to the delivery team — business analysts, project managers, programme leads and Product Owners. Directors and managers who own an outcome rather than a team.
This course provides the foundational skills to step into the role that connects the business and the delivery team — the role that sets a team up for success and decides how early value arrives. It takes a leader from a stated ambition to a defensible direction, a pragmatic case for investment, and a prioritized sequence of work, then to the transparency instruments that let them govern against outcomes rather than activity reports. The whole course runs on one simulated initiative: participants build every artefact by hand as it goes — personas, vision, story map, backlog, the analyses and the forecast — so each technique is practised on work that already carries its own context rather than on a fresh example.
Managers and directors accountable for a programme or a portfolio rather than a single team.
The hardest question a delivery team gets asked is when it will be finished, and “done when we’re done” is not an answer a steering committee will accept twice. This course gives a defensible way to forecast from actual data, present a range rather than a date, and adjust it in public as the evidence changes. It then works outward from a single team to what appears once there are five or fifty: debt that has to be paid down without stopping, teams that drift apart, and delivery that has to interlock with a conventional programme next door.