Agile Fundamentals: Graeme’s DIY non-MBA, MBA continues…

After a brief interruption of work (required to pay bills), I’m super excited to sign up today for the next component of my non-MBA, MBA.

This is my commitment to my own personal and professional development in 2018.

So far, I’ve dipped into Service Design, Project Management, Shoe School, and an online course called Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life.

I’ll write about these last two soon, but for now, I wanted to highlight what’s next on my agenda:

• Agile Fundamentals by Steven Briggs at the University of Auckland. 

I’ve been interested in Agile and Lean for a long time now. But other than some reading online, I haven’t had much of a chance to learn what Agile is all about.

One of the things I’m hyper-aware of these days is that – for myself at least – not only is all future work is likely to be project work but that much of this project-work is likely to reflect the following parameters:

• Constrained budget. This is pretty much a given these days with any project. Small and lean is the name of the game.
• Vague client needs. This is my experience working with government agencies and any large bureaucracy really. Academics and bureaucrats are masters at hedging their wants and needs so that they are vague enough to mean anything, but specific enough to hold you accountable when you don’t deliver.
• Unclear scope. In other words, they think they know what they want. But they actually don’t. More accurately, they only know what they don’t want and usually after you’ve already built it. And this is despite what they wrote in the scope.
• Fixed resources including timeframes. This means that there’s not enough of anything including time.
• Everything keeps changing. Whether we like it or not,  most work environments are dynamic. Shifting goalposts, political manoeuvring, new data that only emerges once your work is underway, the list goes on…

I’m not expecting that a one-day course will solve all of these issues for me. However, I need all the insights I can get.

Does any of this sound interesting or relevant? If it does, then you might want to join me.

I didn’t really know what would happen when I started with my non-traditional personal and professional development journey this year.

One of the nicest surprises has been that I’ve made friends with the Executive Education team at Auckland University’s Business school.

And they’ve given me a discount code I can share.

Use the code below for 10% off and join me on the upcoming Agile Fundamentals 1-day course at the Auckland Uni Business School.

• GRAEME10

PS the code will actually work on any of the short courses until December 31, 2018.