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Agile, Scrum and Lean Software Development Methods and Practices

In-House, On-Site Course (Duration: 2 to 3 days)

  • Software Products Companies serving Financial Services Organizations
  • IT organizations in financial services companies, and their internal customers and users
  • Financial Services Companies working in collaboration with their solution vendors

Offered by: FSO Knowledge Exchange

Instructor: Dr. Satish Thatte

Contact us at 1-(732)-462-3763


As an IT organization in a financial services company developing in-house solution, or a software product company serving financial services industry, or a financial services company managing its IT outsourcing, you very likely experience perennial problems such as:


  • Failure to meet your users’ real requirements
  • Schedule delays
  • Cost overruns
  • Low quality
  • Low productivity
  • Employee stress and burn-out
  • Ever-increasing competitive pressures
  • High life cycle costs associated with the solution

What you will learn and the benefits: You will learn how to use Agile methods as solutions to these problems; these methods will also help you better manage rapidly changing requirements and priorities, improve alignment with business needs, reduce risks, improve productivity, help increase business agility, etc. In this highly experiential course with several hands-on exercises, you will learn how to properly implement or manage implementation of the Agile/Scrum framework supported by effective practices that comprehensively cover all three roles (Scrum team member, ScrumMaster, Solution Owner) and the entire software solution development life cycle in a scalable way. The course covers the practices of Vision-Releases-Sprints workflow, Solution backlog management, Feature-Driven Development, Time Boxing, Quality First, Transparency and Feedback, Ready-Steady Sprint-Done.


Lean methods complement agile methods very well. You will learn lean framework and methods such as waste reduction and queue management, leveling the work with small work batches, flow and pull management, Kanban visual signaling for agile software projects, Work-in-Process (WIP) control, and Kaizen (continuous improvements).


The course will teach you several agile/Scrum and lean practices with over 25 hands-on exercises and 16 agile-lean templates in real-life practical situations, such as:

  • How to do feature-driven software development
  • How to calculate engineering capacity considering the availability of team members, contingency time, and many other factors
  • How to do coarse-grain and fine-grain effort estimation
  • How to order a sprint backlog based on feature dependencies, risks, value and effort
  • How to conduct daily Scrum meetings most effectively with a very low-overhead
  • How to effectively use various information radiators, such as burn-down and burn-up charts, remaining capacity vs. remaining workload
  • How to prioritize sprint and product backlogs
  • How to do dynamic load balancing across different weeks of a sprint and across Scrum team members
  • How to scale-up agile projects using the Scrum of Scrum and other models

Agile templates demonstration and delivery: You will also learn how to use instrumented templates that support several agile and lean practices in a scalable way. These templates embed agile process elements with examples, ensure consistency across agile projects through standardized (yet customizable) use of agile and lean practices, enable project scalability, improve overall productivity, and help improve your agile practices with measurements. You will receive a set of 16 agile templates based on Microsoft Office and Google Docs, which you may customize and use for your own project needs and integrate with your choice of agile tool. As a concrete example of these agile templates, you will see how several battle-hardened templates are integrated and used with Rally agile project management tool.

  • Engineering capacity calculation template
  • Engineering work (features) templates
  • Coarse-grain and fine-grain effort estimation template
  • Daily availability, capacity and workload calculation template
  • Sprint backlog ordering template
  • Daily Scrum templates
  • Sprint planning, steady workflow and load balancing template
  • Sprint Retrospective template
  • And many more

Who Should Attend?

  • Professionals and managers in a software products company serving the financial services companies. These professionals and managers include software architects and developers, business analysts, QA testers, project managers and ScrumMasters, product owners and product managers, program managers, department/functional managers, etc. Individuals and teams interested in considering agile or lean methods for commercial software products for financial services organizations
  • Professionals and managers in the financial services company defining, procuring and deploying solutions provided by their solution vendor. These professionals and managers are: business analysts, business stakeholders, solution owners, and IT persons responsible for definition, deployment and operations of solution provided by the solution vendor
  • Professionals and managers in the IT organizations of financial services company, such as software architects and developers, QA specialists, technical support, project managers and ScrumMasters, program managers, department/functional managers
  • Internal business units representing customers and users in financial services company, such as business analysts, business stakeholders, and solution owners

Note that for a financial services company outsourcing its IT solutions, the Solution Owner and IT persons responsible for the definition, deployment and operations belong to the financial services company, while the Scrum team members and ScrumMaster belong to the solution vendor side. This distribution of roles across the customer-vendor boundary makes the implementation of agile-lean practices even more challenging. Therefore, it is important that the professionals and managers from both financial services side and solution vendor side attend the course together to get the most benefits.

Program, syllabus and duration (2 or 3 days) is customized for each target segment as per roles and responsibilities of attendees.


PDU Credits : Attendees of a two-day course are eligible to earn 16 PDUs. All attendees will receive a certificate of completion which can be used to claim their PDUs.


Course location : On-site at your company (financial services) location

Course duration: Two or three days depending on your specific needs and preferences

Course fee : Covers course material hard copy binder, agile templates (Microsoft Excel and Google Docs)


Onsite and Virtual coaching is available after the completion of course.


Instructor Biography : Satish Thatte received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has over 30 years of industry experience that covers large, multinational companies (Texas Instruments, Bellcore and LG Electronics), as well entrepreneurial start-ups. He has extensive experience of customizing and adapting agile software development methods and practices in a number of companies to deliver client-specific IT services as well as commercial software products. He is a Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) and a Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO). Dr. Thatte is a Senior Member of the IEEE and a Member of the ACM. He holds 14 patents (13 US and one International). Dr. Thatte offers customized training, workshops and consulting services for software product and project management, and software business strategy development -- drawing upon the strengths of agile and lean methods, and organizational systems thinking. He also teaches "agile-lean methods and practices" public course through Agile University.


Contact Rekha Vatsa at research@FSOkx.com or 1-(732)-462-3763 for further information.