Digital Leadership
Being an agile leader requires providing direction, support and trust in your team to get the job done.
The biggest challenge to leaders is being able to adapt at the same pace as the ever changing needs of customers. Doing more with less is the norm.
A traditional command and control approach does not address the ever changing needs or enable more to be done with less. The problems we're trying to solve are complex. Leaders have to think, act and be different - literally, they need to be more agile.
Our course gets you thinking about what being an agile leader really means and how to create the right environment for teams to collaborate, innovate and be effective. We look at your responsibility as a leader for providing direction and helping to solve organisational challenges. You'll gain an insight into what you need to do to change the working culture.
The course helps you understand your role in engaging and leading agile teams and how to support teams to ensure the products and services they're developing add value and meet clear business and user needs.
We'll look at the importance of continuously understanding your customers or users needs and how to keep a strategic overview of the products and services that are being delivered by your teams and organisation.
Who's it for?
Our digital leaders course, is suitable for anyone responsible for leading or engaging with one or more teams.
It's for leaders who are new to agile, who need to understand what being agile is about.
It's also suitable for leaders who are attempting to make agile work for them in their organisation, but are struggling to make it work.
If you're directly responsible for delivering a product or service and you work with a delivery team to do so, including a third-party supplier, then our Product Owner course might be more suitable.
Why should I attend?
Our course will engage you, challenging the way you currently work and think, exploring what it means to be an agile leader and how to support your teams and business to thrive in an agile environment.
This course will help you think differently, with an agile mindset to solve problems, work better with others, understand what value means and where to spend your energy. We provide you with case studies to help you understand how the application of agile in different situations works.
It's interactive, full of discussion and exercises to really get you thinking.
What topics does the course cover?
The course starts by exploring the role of leaders, why they are leaders, a leaders expectation of themselves and what others need from leaders.
It's important that leaders have a good understanding of what it means to be agile so the course examines the Manifesto for Agile Software Development and provides a robust understanding of the agile values and principles, and their impact and affect on working culture. This is key to ensuring the right engagement with stakeholders, users and the team.
A significant difference in ways of working from more tradtional approaches is the way in which we understand what products or services we should offer. User Centred Design (UCD) is the typical approach that is used to understand what value means to our customers and users. We look at what UCD is, how it works to uncover and validate users needs, and the tools typically used.
Scrum is most commonly used as the basis for digital delivery so, we provide an overview of scrum to help leaders understand how digital delivery teams work, and how and when leaders need to engage with their teams.
The most important skill that leaders need to have is to provide the right level of alignment to their team(s) as that in turn provides the right level of autonomy for the team(s) to get on and do their job. We explain the importance of the relationship between alignment and autonomy and how leaders need to empower their team(s).
Governance is often seen as a blocker to agile delivery but it is necessary and agile governance can be harnessed to effectively manage and monitor the delivery of services, set and change direction of services as needed, manage resource levels effectively and predict and deal with issues and risks. We explain how using an agile mindset to change traditional governance can be far more effective and save hours in unnecessary meetings.
Leaders are often responsible for the delivery of multiple products or services, or maybe just engage with multiple digital delivery teams. There are a number of approaches that can be taken to scale up the delivery of multiple products or services. We will cover some of the standard approaches, but also look out how taking an agile approach to the problem of scaling can produce an approach that fits your exact needs.
Course delivery details
2 days, in-person, remote
£400 - £510 (excluding VAT) per delegate
We offer our standard public Digital Leadership course, as a 2 day, in-person or fully remote (online) course.
Our in-person course is normally run in Sheffield or London, but we do sometimes run our course in other locations if it suits all of the course delegates - just let us know your preference.
Running the course face-to-face allows us to demonstrate many of the topics we cover using a variety of activities, workshops and games.
Our remote (online) course covers the same topics as our in-person course. We have adapted some of the activities so that we can deliver them remotely, but they are not identical.
Our online course has shorter lessons and activities. Our adapted online face-to-face activities are slightly more directed than when we run them face-to-face. We've also found that online learning tends to feel much more intensive so we build in more, but shorter breakout slots.
The price of our online Digital Leadership course is £400 (excluding VAT) per delegate.
The price of our in-person Digital Leadership course is £510 (excluding VAT) per delegate. The price of our face-to-face courses includes refreshments during the day and a buffet grazing lunch.
We can also run this course privately for your organisation. It requires a minimum of 6 delegates, with a maximum of 12.
The price to run the course privately is £2100 (excluding VAT).
Not sure that this is the course for you?
All our courses are listed on our training page, or fill in the form if you need something a little more bespoke.